Telecom industries with customers numbering in millions, find it hard put to keep each one happy. However, you can try and improve efforts at delivering great customer experience with the right contact center software to handle inbound customer calls.
Do not leave it to outsourced customer service center
Customers are fickle. If they have a grievance and if it is not addressed promptly they will shift loyalties in a wink. Do not leave it to an outsourced customer service center. Such call centers may have heavy loads and insufficient number of agents. It affects quality of service. Get your own contact center software or subscribe to one and let your employees take care of customer service. It is tempting to outsource since the cost per seat of outsourced services is less than half but it is not without pitfalls. Deliver superior customer experience with your own contact center software.
Easy to categorize
The inbound call center software makes it easy for you to categorize customers:
Prospective and existing customers calling to inquire about services
Calls about billing related complaints
Calls about technical issues
With your own in-house software you can configure it and arrange routing of calls to appropriate sections.
Self-service IVR to handle inquiries about services
IVR plus agent configuration to route calls to agents if customers so desire it or if it is necessary.
Training, skills, routing
Quality of customer experience depends on quality of service. With your in-house trained agents who are fully knowledgeable about telecom operations you can expect better services and first call resolution. Configure the automatic call distributor and skill based routing to let only knowledgeable, capable and decision takers handle calls. As employees they are more committed to the company and its growth.
For example, an irate caller may wish to know why the bill amount is so large and dials into the IVR, thereafter transferred to a live agent who can check with accounts, consult his superior officer if necessary and resolve the issue to the caller’s satisfaction. Likewise, if it is a call about a technical glitch, your engineers are at hand to provide information and assistance.
Are they doing it right? You may not be able to monitor outsourced agents but with in-house employees it is a different matter. The call center software’s analytics and recording feature lets you keep tabs and make improvements. It is well worth the extra cost of in-house call center operations in telecom.
With the information you derive from analytics you can use the call center software’s conferencing facility to conduct training sessions, live or recorded, for in-house and remote agents.
Work is pleasure
For outsourced service providers it is all about tickets and resolution. In-house operation makes work a pleasure as employees take pride in performance and actually enjoy work. The omnichannel experience addresses current way of communications through chat, SMS and social media, unified into a single dashboard. Your employees will love to interact and when they like doing something, it will be done better of that you can be sure. That naturally means a happy customer experience. Besides, when you have the same employee serving the same set of customers they get to build relationships. Employees become familiar with customer behaviors and expectations as well as issues that can be referred to on screen through the CRM.
Conduct campaigns and surveys
Owning your software gives you freedom to conduct outbound sales campaigns, send out SMS broadcasts for reminders or to up sell and carry out IVR surveys to know levels of customer satisfaction. Design your campaigns, feed it into the CRM, select numbers and launch campaigns as frequently as you wish. You will capture more leads and retain more customers when they perceive this much attention from your side.
All employees stay connected and can collaborate
One of the greatest benefits of your own in-house call center solution is that the software use is not limited only to employees attending customers. It also becomes a platform for communication and collaboration between teams that ultimately has a bearing on employees handling customers. It could be a two way street. For instance, if technical side experiences problems then the customer service side quickly takes it up and informs customers through SMS broadcast about possible outage. Likewise, if there are too many complaints about billing or a specific issue then teams can collaborate to find out pain points and iron out the kinks. Importantly, they can do this while in office or when they are at home or as part of a remote workforce.
It is no easy task to handle hundreds of calls per hour and resolve each one satisfactorily. With a full-featured contact center solution you are halfway there. The rest depends on employee engagement, skills and streamlining service operations to retain existing customers and increase customer base.