Five Simple Strategies to Enhance Your Phone-Based Customer Service

A happy, positive call experience might seem like an oxymoron. We all have had experiences dialing into a company’s automated phone line only to be left on hold, transferred multiple times to the wrong agents, forced to give basic information about ourselves over and over again, and other unpleasant tales.

The good news, however, is that, with the right planning, many of these common frustrations can be easily alleviated and avoided. Today’s organizations have access to flexible, user-friendly tools that are designed not only to help you provide quality support to customers at a low cost but also give you the ability to realize a substantial return on your investment in technology

Here are five simple strategies any organization should consider to cost-effectively increase the level of their phone-based service lines.

Strategy #1: Design with Your Customer in Mind

Building a base of happy, loyal customers is the goal of every part of your business- from sales to marketing to human resources to customer support. When a customer is happy, they are more likely to stay and more likely to promote your products to others. When they have a bad experience, there’s a good chance that they will take their business elsewhere. Your phone service is not exempt from this rule.

One of the best ways to make sure you are delivering a high-quality customer experience is to design a phone solution with your caller in mind. Anticipating caller issues will help you build a solution that more effectively addresses their needs and will help resolve them quickly. If your support line is built around a true understanding of your customers, your customer service line, and your bottom line, will see the results.

Certain automated solutions can be customized to help easily create a customer-oriented caller experience. These solutions include interactive voice response (IVR)options and other intelligent design features that help a customer easily navigate the system, and help the system recognize the caller. For example, the system can recognize the caller based on caller ID and respond in a personalized manner. It is less successful, however, if once transferred to a live agent, the agent asks for the same information all over again.

Borland Software is an organization that took a proactive approach to delivering world-class customer service in their support center. Borland relies on its customer support line to provide effective technical support to its global customer base. However, the company had cause for concern when the support center call abandonment rate reached nearly 20% and the average on-hold time increased into the 50 second range.

Borland implemented a solution from Angel.com. Gary Janos, Technical Support Manager, Borland Software, reorganized the support process by implementing a Tier 1/Tier 2 approach that better supported and anticipated customer inquiries. All customer calls now route through Tier 1; if a customer calls in with a technical problem, they are manually transferred to a Tier 2 agent who is also logged into the system.

Through this, Janos and Borland put their call center metrics back on track. The call abandonment rate has dropped by 67%, and Borland’s average speed of answer has improved by 44%.

Strategy #2: Don’t Be Afraid To Automate

You hear it all the time: when calling into an organization’s help line, callers would rather speak to a live person. What the caller really wants, however, is to get the information they need- quickly, easily and efficiently- regardless of whether they are talking to a live person or an automated system. By supplementing automation with your live agent support center, you can actually help increase the satisfaction of your callers by enabling your support personnel to more effectively address customer inquiries or concerns.

Today’s phone-based service solutions integrate automated, interactive options that help you more effectively identify customer questions or issues; insure they are routed to the correct person, if needed; and reduce the amount of data collection required by the agent once the call reaches them by collecting that data up front, among other benefits. All of this ultimately results in a streamlined and positive customer experience.

After deciding that a system of live agents conducting outbound calls would be too costly and require a lengthy set-up, National Vision implemented a hosted outbound survey solution to gather immediate feedback from customers on their service experience.

“We determined that our ideal solution would be easy and fast to implement, offer plenty of flexibility for changing survey content and increasing call volume,” said Louann Seguin, Customer Satisfaction Manager.

National Vision has steadily increased its number of outbound surveys to nearly 13,000 a week. With a completion rate of 14%, the company is capturing about 1,100 customer comments each week – large enough sample sizes to draw meaningful conclusions

Strategy #3: Be Flexible

So, you’ve invested in the hardware and software to build your IVR or call center. You’ve invested in IT and technical support needed to make sure your system is configured based on your customer service needs. Now, you need a new option in the system to direct callers. A seemingly simple issue, but if you are using premise-based or other complex solutions, a simple change can be extremely costly and time-consuming.

Issues such as this are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Today’s hosted solutions make it possible for any organization to easily build phone-based applications based on their own unique needs. They also provide the flexibility to modify or update options in the call flow at any time. Advanced speech recognition, intelligent call routing, IVR front-ends, and advanced call screening, are all features that can be selected and integrated into an automated solution at the click of a mouse, without requiring additional costs or IT support. They enable you to take the money you would previously spend on hardware, software, maintenance, and upgrades and allocate those funds to creative ways to deliver results to customers.

Hosted solutions are all about flexibility. They allow you to change the call flow at a moments notice. They allow you to immediately scale to meet peak call volume levels. They allow you to quickly react to ever-changing customer needs and demands. And they allow you to easily test new call flow designs to see which works best for your customers. All of these things were not previously possible with inflexible, on-premise solutions.

When Borland Software implemented a solution from Angel.com, they had a number of unique requirements. Those included: five different agent locations across the U.S., two different tiers of agents, product-specific skills-based routing to Tier 2 support agents, call screening based on dialed number (DNIS) to announce the call topic to the agent, and an after-hours routing system for “Premium” customers to reach on-call agents. The intuitive web-based solution made it easy to support their multiple and changing requirements. Borland also appreciates the fact that Customer Service can own and maintain the solution, as well as update it at any time.

“I am in complete control, which means that changes that used to cost me thousands of dollars and weeks to implement now happen in real-time and without incurring any additional costs,” said Janos.

Strategy # 4: Build a “Smart” Solution

The best way to serve your customers is to have the information they need, when they need it. To maximize the benefits of your automated call center, it is important that your customer data is readily available to move the call forward effectively and resolve customer issues or inquiries. It is also a huge benefit to tie your own customer information into your call center solution to enable information to be easily extracted and utilized on the call to quickly identify and resolve customer questions or issues.

Today’s technology enables IVR applications to integrate fully with customer databases or even CRM systems. When a call comes in, these solutions are able to access your company’s database to retrieve related details, such as customer records, purchase history, or billing information, to facilitate the call. Your customer service personnel can then use this information to verify account status, identify problems with the online transaction, and more efficiently troubleshoot whichever issue prompted the customer to call.

This information can also be used in an automated fashion to provide the caller with personalized information at the start of the call. Automated voice systems can be set to read data such as whether the caller is a VIP customer, or may have recently ordered one of your products, upfront and respond accordingly. By doing this you accomplish increased customer satisfaction in two ways: 1) VIP customers can be addressed as such, sent into a special queue with more succinct IVR options and shorter on hold times, making them feel that they are appreciated as customers; 2) a customer who has recently purchased your product or submitted a help desk ticket can be identified by caller ID, and given the information they are likely looking for – such as order status or ticket status – immediately without having to wait on hold to speak with an agent or other live person

As an on-demand solutions provider with a full complement of consulting and software products, it was mission critical at Lyris to ensure every customer would reach the right expert at the right time. In addition, Lyris sought real-time access to key support data so the company could respond to customer service call volume in real time – to make sure wait times remain low and company resource management is cost-effective and efficient. 

To enhance customer self-service and improve its overall level of support, Lyris took advantage of Angel.com’s integration capabilities by tying its IVR solution to its CRM application through. Lyris customers can indicate the case they are calling about, and information from the case is automatically presented to the technical support engineer – enhancing the data and information provided to the support team while reducing the time required to resolve the customer issue or request.

Strategy #5: Measure and Evaluate Your Efforts

As with any corporate function, monitoring and measuring the process of your call center is critical to the success of your customer service efforts. Reporting has emerged as a key area where technology brings significant value for call centers pressed to achieve and prove their results in supporting customers.

With new capabilities available in the software, companies can analyze call activity, agent activity and other key metrics on an ongoing basis. The availability of web-based, real-time reporting empowers management to adjust efforts on the fly to make adjustments to their customer service operations as often as they like and, ultimately, improve results and enhance customer satisfaction.

Conclusion

Satisfied customers are key to any organization’s success. When your customers are sitting in a call queue, your organization is losing valuable time and risking alienating important customers. By taking advantage of the range and flexibility of automated voice solutions like those from Angel.com, you can dramatically increase the productivity of your customer service personnel, reduce costs to your organization, and increase your customer’s satisfaction.