We all love to be rewarded. One of the best ways to attract, nurture and retain your customers is to surprise and delight. This involves paying attention to customer interactions, offering tailored solutions and most importantly, tracking and increasing customer satisfaction.
A satisfied customer can make or break your revenue targets. It’s common knowledge that it costs more to acquire a customer than it does to retain your existing ones. But according to Forbes, companies with a customer experience mindset drive up to 8% more revenue and 96% of customers say that customer service is important in their choice of brand loyalty.
Your agents are perfectly positioned to enhance customer satisfaction. They are the face, and the voice, of your business. In the blog, we’ll discuss how you can improve customer satisfaction through your call centres, enabling you to better understand needs and drive more revenue from your existing customer base.
What does customer satisfaction in call centres mean?
Customer satisfaction is one of the most important performance metrics that businesses should be tracking. It can provide insight into things such as customer loyalty, churn and retention rates, and can help you pinpoint potential issues with products or services.
So, how exactly do you track customer satisfaction? In a call centre, successfully measuring customer satisfaction usually involves tracking key metrics such as abandonment rate, average handling time and contact quality scoring.
What are the three Cs of customer satisfaction?
According to McKinsey, the three Cs of customer satisfaction are simple. It’s all about consistency, consistency, and consistency. But what does this look like in practice? To satisfy the three Cs of customer satisfaction you should focus on:
- Customer journey consistency – This involves creating consistency across each customer interaction, whether they’re browsing your website or picking up the phone. Customer journey consistency is an important indicator of your overall customer experience and loyalty, which means you need to be getting it right from day one.
- Emotional consistency – After the last few years, more and more consumers want to feel they can trust brands. Positive customer experiences, and trust, are two of the biggest drivers of customer satisfaction and loyalty across a wide range of industries.
- Communication consistency – A promise means nothing if you fail to deliver on it. Brands make many promises to customers about what they can expect, but if you want to increase satisfaction levels, you need to deliver on that promise across all levels of your business. This requires a consistent approach from end-to-end for your customers.
Easy ways to boost customer satisfaction in your call centre
Increasing customer satisfaction doesn’t require endless time and resources, it just needs a strategic approach. Here are five easy ways to boost customer satisfaction!
1. Understand your customers
The first step to surprising, delighting, and retaining your customers is to understand them. This may seem like an impossible task given your agents are likely to be handling hundreds, if not thousands, of calls every week. But according to Microsoft, 72% of customers expect you to know why they are and also have visibility about past interactions.
With the right tools in your call centre tech stack, you can enhance your customer understanding without increasing workloads. Call monitoring provides customer-centric data that allows your entire call centre to become better aligned with customer needs. With customer data at your fingertips, including keyword data and visibility over where calls are coming from, you can boost customer satisfaction effortlessly.
2. Map the customer journey
What if every single time you received a call from your customers, you could improve the overall customer experience (CX)? Customer journey mapping taps into customer data to accurately record each step of their journey, from the moment they become aware of their need, through research and consideration, to making a purchase and beyond.
The benefits of customer journey mapping for customer satisfaction includes identifying where they came from, queries they might have, and can improve your overall strategy based on real consumer insight. Mapping the journey allows you to deliver smoother and more efficient experiences, designed to delight your customers.
3. Reduce average handling times
A contact centre call queue is a fundamental cog in the customer processing machine. It has a significant impact on customer satisfaction, revenue targets, and even complaint resolutions. By tracking and improving your average handling times (AHT), you can start to optimise call centre operations and ensure your customers are being assisted in a timely manner.
This is where call tracking can be incredibly useful For example, Ontrack used call intelligence to improve the quality of their calls from paid activity, leading to longer conversations from more qualified customers. At the same time, they were able to reduce missed calls by 93% by driving callers to specific webpages that could answer common queries before they made the call.
4. Focus on first call resolution
Fast customer service is all well and good, but if you’re not able to resolve queries quickly and easily, customer satisfaction is not going to improve. An excellent metric for contact centre leaders to focus on is first call resolution (FCR). First call resolution reflects your ability to resolve customer queries or issues the first time they speak to you, with no extra calls or follow-ups required.
67% of customers say poor customer service is their primary reason for churning and research has shown that poor customer service is also responsible for around $62 billion of lost revenue. That’s right, failing to satisfy your customers costs dearly. Use Conversation Analytics software to understand the common queries or complaints coming through your contact centres and adapt your agent scripts to address them quickly and easily.
5. Provide top notch training
Speaking of adapting your scripts, nothing boosts customer satisfaction like a well-informed, well-prepared agent on the other end of the phone. But one-size-fits-all training no longer counts. If you want to provide top notch training that boosts customer satisfaction, you need to understand what makes your high-flyers fly high.
Collecting data on how to influence more successful call outcomes is the perfect way to train agents faster. With tools like Agent ID, you can evaluate how engaging the calls coming in, and going out, of your contact centre are. Uncover the best calls to use for training and rapidly upskill your teams. With a team of high-performing agents that can anticipate needs and resolve queries effortlessly, you’re much more likely to surprise and delight customers.
How Conversation Analytics can improve customer satisfaction
The most important question of all, how to improve customer satisfaction? With Infinity’s Speech analytics suite, Conversation Analytics, you can evolve your tactics based on real data from your customers.
Being able to identify the finer points of conversation quickly and easily using call categorisation gives you the context and nuance that can be difficult to track when you’re handling high volumes of calls. Conversation Analytics can tell you things such as:
- Why people are getting in touch, by monitoring and logging the topics of conversation, including any associated keywords and phrases.
- The outcome of each call, so you can surface trends from calls that delivered positive or successful outcomes.
- How customer sentiment is changing throughout the call, so you can pinpoint exactly what makes the phone call experience positive or negative and improve from there.
When you put Conversation Analytics and Agent ID together, things get even more interesting. You can gain actionable insights in to how well individual agents are handling the calls coming in, and going out, of your contact centre are. You can uncover the best calls to use for training, rapidly upskill your teams and decrease average handling time, all while increasing conversion rates and ensuring that your customers are truly satisfied.
Plus, Conversation Analytics integrates seamlessly with many contact centre technologies and CRM systems, including Vocalcom. This allows you to harness rich data automatically and draw links between marketing data and customer data.
Want to find out more about how to take your contact centre to the next level? Start a conversation with us today about Agent ID and Conversation Analytics.
