These days, it’s easier than ever to communicate with your customers. You have phone calls, emails, texts, online chats and messaging through social media. While that should make it easier to serve customers and help them get an issue solved, it also creates many channels to make a mistake and anger a customer as well. Because as many as 70% of buying experiences are based on how a customer feels he or she is being treated, it’s important to get things right in your customer service efforts.
Many people still feel more comfortable interacting with your company over the phone, so, depending on how big your organization is, that may mean that they wind up talking to someone in a customer service call center. Interactions at this level are important, because they can be a first impression for a customer. Running a customer call center is a big task, and if you don’t have the staff and expertise to do it properly, then you may want to look into customer support outsourcing services.
Customer support outsourcing services can provide you options that may not be realistic for you to do yourself. For example, if you have a business that needs call support 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it’s not realistic for you to do it yourself, especially if you have a small staff. You also may not have the expertise on staff to handle calls and may not have the time or budget to train people for the roles. Having a third party do the work for you can save time and money.
Beyond inbound call centers, there are other ways you can interact with customers. During business hours, you might use virtual office assistants to do chats. You can also take comments and complaints and interact with customers through social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other programs.
However you choose to deal with customers, you need to make sure you are doing it right and doing a good job. It’s estimated that just a 5% increase in your customer retention rates can lead to at least a 25% boost in your business profits. And if you think the expense involved with trying to retain customers is high, consider this: It can cause 25 times as much to try to acquire new customers as it does to retain existing customers. That makes the efforts well worthwhile.
