In every business venture, ensuring high customer satisfaction is the key to a lasting empire. The general idea is that when you put more effort and resources into maintaining a good customer service track record, more customers will patronize your products. However, the customer landscape is changing so fast, it’s just not that simple anymore.
That is why software and systems are being created and improved to drive excellence around customers satisfaction.
The main dilemma when it comes to fulfilling high customer experience is streamlining systems with which customer service is being carried out so that customers receive the service a lot faster, or are able to get an immediate response through the service.
The question becomes, how can service providers position themselves to be two-steps ahead of the customer? First, let’s dive into why this is such a big issue.
Wait Times and Its Impact
There are a number of reasons why wait times are typically longer than the customer expects them to last.
With the business of internet services, long waiting times occur commonly because call volume is unpredictable and the supply of representatives is exceeded by the demand of customers calling.
Another common reason for longer wait times includes not having the right software and systems to process customer requests at scale. Some time this is from others being reluctant to the digitalization of systems and in improving the technology being used to cater to customers, but mostly it’s because the right software and systems aren’t being leveraged. This particular issue should be put on the vendor of the service providers. It’s a great case and point about why it’s important to partner with the right vendors.
Why Long Waiting Times Are Bad For Customers
For better or worse, in this fast-paced world, it’s important to realize that your customers are always in a hurry. But contrary to popular belief, what customers want most is to be in the know.
When customers are experiencing an internet outage, they just want to know what is going on. Most of the time, customers end up troubleshooting their machine and can’t understand why it is going on. The wasted time associated with trying to gain specific information about the problem is costly and frustrating. During these times customers just want answers.
This impact to customers' experience caused a second and third order of consequence that hurt your brand, your revenue and overall customer satisfaction.
Employing today’s advanced technology to improve customer satisfaction is the next step to eradicating these threats.
Free Download: Want to learn more about how to drive operational excellence? Watch our free Operations Webinar featuring Jim Ludington, former EVP of Time Warner Cable.
What You Can Do To Improve Waiting Times
Lead with Data
The best place to start your improvement process is to know the root cause of the dilemma. Why are there long waiting times in your business in the first place?
By getting into the reasons why your business has long lines, you are able to distinguish the following details: What events happened before a major call volume spike? What processes take the most time? What processes are manual? When customers get through, what is the most common question they ask first?
Once you understand the problem, coming up with the solution is the easy part.
For instance, in the case of assisting customers through calls, there may be certain topics and inquiries that your customers commonly call about, and as more customers inquire about the same thing, long waiting times ensues for other customers.
In order to optimize the calling process for the same inquiry, you can employ automatic messaging or chatbots to improve systems with this technology.
When all these are measured, your business is now able to look for optimization opportunities and decrease the waiting time gradually.
Distribute Customer Services Throughout Channels
What we see time and time again is that channels become congested and slow down the entire process. The fastest fix for this issue is to create more channel
A way to reduce wait times and the high volume of calls in your business is to produce and branch out the information needed by your customers throughout different channels.
Here are some of the channels you can utilize:
My App
Leveraging My App notifications is the best way to give your customers answers quickly and easily. The hard part of this channel is getting customers to download the app and turn on notifications.
AI Knowledge-Base
One way to avoid your customers calling for the same inquiry is to provide enough information or content published on your website. This helps your customers view resources which can be in the form of FAQs, videos, or blogs.
When enough information about your business, services, and products is published on the website, it lessens the number of people calling to inquire or ask for support.
Self-Service Portal or A Chatbot
The advancement of technology helps in creating a self-service portal that personalizes the assistance process of your customer. This is done through data collected from previous inquiries or those coded in the portal itself.
Chatbots are also programmed to give out the answers to common questions so that they are answered automatically for the customer.
Of course, there are questions and concerns that only a customer service representative can address. When an issue is not solved through these automated systems, the customer will then be connected to a representative.
Team Training and Knowledge Sharing
Training your manpower is also the key to distributing customer concerns across channels. When your team is equipped with the know-how of the business, the service, or the product, they are able to easily and immediately solve concerns. This is much easier said than done.
Advanced IVR Systems
Nearly every service provider uses IVR Systems to route callers to automated responses. However, many IVRs aren’t dynamic in nature. For instance, some of our customers utilize our outage intelligence to filter and group callers by events. We de
Improve Services Through Technology
Express Lanes
Optimize the time to be used when calling a customer. For whatever purpose, you can set the maximum amount of time that calls can last. This functions much like an express lane at the grocery store.
When this is set, and your agents are trained enough to implement this, you are able to cater to more customers.
Outage Correlation
Customers can use the outage intelligence algorithm to detect which customers are calling because of outages and then an automated system then delivers the outage intelligence to the customer such as information on estimated restoration times.
Why Your Business Should Optimize its Services
Employing the use of technology to improve business operations is the first step in ensuring high customer satisfaction. As we move into a more developed, digitalized world, we make use of advanced systems to carry out everyday tasks efficiently and easily.
When the customer is being serviced correctly and immediately with the help of these strategies, there is a higher probability that the customer will continuously avail of your product or service.
Reducing customers’ waiting time is a major hurdle businesses should overcome to ensure customer satisfaction. An increase in sales will continue when more and more customers are satisfied with your service.
