Did you know that you can either lose or keep your customers even before their initial call to your customer service hotline?
The first call from the customer will determine how well you have impressed them. If they first contact your call center to complain, then it means you might have created a negative effect to begin with. On the other end, a customer calling to ask more about your products and services may spell out a successful sale for your business.
So how do you draw out the latter outcome from your target market? In this post, we will help you nail that first impression with a potential customer, which eventually will make them your loyal patrons. transcosmos understands that making your customers a captured audience should start when they first encounter your brand—and that is before they even reach for their phones to contact you.
To guide you in creating a good first impression to a customer even before a call, we have listed the following recommendations:
1. Simplify your automated IVR.
We understand that you want to make sure callers are properly routed to the correct departments when you installed that interactive voice recording (IVR). But when it becomes too long and dragging, asking customers to press this button and enter this number will definitely lose the customer at the onset.
Create a simple menu option for the callers and limit it to not more than three and try to narrow down options for sub-categories.
For example:
1. General inquiries — may include product details, support hours, service offers;
2. Report a complaint — mainly for reporting product, service or customer service issues;
3. Shop locator and support hours — if you have more than one branch, this option can be helpful especially if the customer wants to speak with someone face to face or to buy the product immediately.
We suggest for the first two options to have your customers be connected to customers support agent right away as this will eliminate any frustration that your caller might have just by waiting for someone to pick up the phone. You will definitely make an impression by how fast you can get your customer to the proper person about their concern.
2. Create an efficient support re-route.
We understand that on peak days, the call queue can get long. However, it should not be an excuse to make your customers hold for more than 2 minutes. Hearing the automated recording apologizing for the wait so many times can be annoying.
Instead, upon the automated recording’s call queue advice, do direct customers to other support channels available like text customer service or live chat with an agent. In line with this thought, creating more support channels for your customers will boost your customer service because you can cater better to your clients’ needs.
Re-routing them to the next available support channel is a more proactive way to serve your customers and ensure that they will not walk away without being assisted. Should the customer still choose to talk on the phone then request that they enter their contact number via the IVR and offer a call back within 15 minutes. After which, DO call the customer back within the given time and assist customer’s concern.
3. Firm up your online presence.
Nowadays, a company has to have a reputable online presence since most customers search about a business first before they buy. Creating a company website that is well-designed, user-friendly and complete with the important details will impress any online visitor (customer or not) who may come across it.
Also providing a positive customer experience via social media can boost your image. This Forbes article nailed it, “you must focus on building your online brand to create a personable impression for first-time users, while continuing to engage and reward long-time customers.”
When customers experience how your company reaches its customer online through real-time responses and easy information navigation, then you may definitely win those people over even before they get to phone a person from your company. How you respond to customers online also will reflect how you would connect with them over the phone or when in a retail store. Let your online presence be a good customer engagement avenue to keep your customers coming back.
4. Treat all your customers well.
You may have the best business in the world and offer excellent products or services, but if your customer service is bad, you will fail and will lose all your customers. This article showed how a positive experience of one customer helped the company win another person to be a customer.
You can’t shake the fact that “62% of customers all over the world switched service providers because they’ve had a poor customer experience.” (Accenture Global Consumer Pulse Survey). While customers tend to voice out more their poor customer service experience to warn others, their well-meaning recommendation is more valuable when they do share the stellar customer service your company has provided for them.
When you think of your customer as your main goal, making a good first impression will come easy. Providing them a superb customer service prior to call will leave a mark on every person who will encounter your business and brand. And we can be sure that when you finally get that call from these customers, all you will hear are raves about how valued they felt and positive feedbacks that will result to more customers coming in.
