Why You Need Empathy in Your Customer Service Team

Empathy should not be confused with sympathy which is the recognition of other person’s problem, even showing concern but remain entirely unaffected from within. Empathy is connecting with others on an emotional level. Wikipedia defines Empathy as the capacity to feel or understand what the other person is experiencing from within another person’s frame of reference.

We often see empathy in connection with friends, family members or even neighbours but rarely one gives a second thought about empathy when it comes to customer service. The reason often being the lack of emotional understanding with the other person on phone in any way. If confronted, a customer service provider might ask, “is it really necessary? I mean apart from the problem-solving skills and 24-hour availability of our executives, do I have to teach them to be empathetic as well let alone sympathetic. And how will it help me in return?”

Imagine you are trying to purchase a product from an online portal and the card keeps declining, frustrated you call the customer service operator and narrates him the issue. Now how this service operator will behave will determine the future of your company.

Here are the two scenarios

First case scenario, our service representative informs her in an even tone that our website is working perfectly fine and maybe you aren’t filling the details properly or making some other mistake and even hinting at having insufficient funds, in the end informing that he cannot help you. What will you do? You will immediately vow never to purchase from this site and even tell your contacts not to use it either.

Reverse case scenario, you call the customer service about the same problem but this service representative not only listens to you attentively but also urging you to calm down and even telling you to take a sip of water, he’s constantly referring you by name and showing genuine concern about your problem and trying his best to solve it. Whether he actually solves it or not is another issue but let’s suppose he is unable to, what will be your reaction this time? You will walk away with satisfaction knowing that he did everything he could to help you, after all, that’s what we all want, to feel important, and having a stranger taking our problems seriously and trying his best to help us is the best customer support any service provider could give. Don’t forget the positive reviews and recommendations this company will receive.

By now you all have understood the importance of empathy in call centre services. Only one question remains, how to introduce empathy effectively. Though research shows that certain people are born empathetic, it can also be cultivated through time.

Some effective ways to train your team are –

Always greet customers by their name. There is no better way of forming a bond than by acknowledging others as human beings and remembering names for future references.

Understand the customer’s needs. The key point here is to not only listen but truly understand the other person’s needs only then we will be able to help them.

Maintain a calm posture. A lot of calls comes from angry or frustrated customers and it takes a great deal of patience to handle those, maintaining calm posture during your conversation will help in calming the other person down.

Promote the use of emojis for expression. Emojis are a great way to express feelings and emotions in an online conversation which is essential if your goal is to connect on a more humane level.

Providing support should be given priority. As a service provider, your primary focus should be solving the customer’s issue in his best interests as soon as possible.

Call center services have always worked as the backbone of any industry and by introducing empathy into profession it has provided much-needed care and support, thus helped in strengthening the bond between companies and customers.

Original Source: http://www.theoctopustech.com/2017/12/need-empathy-customer-service-team/

Why Digital Transformation is Crucial for Contact Center’s Survival

If you are from the contact center industry, then you must have noticed many modernizations in this sector in the past few years. The industry is moving ahead with customer’s and client’s expectations to provide them a truly advanced service and solution that helps streamline their business processes. With the rising number of contact centers in the world, the real survivors will be those contact centers that are able to adapt digital transformation and take it a step further in the coming year.

Call centers have always been an industry that has utilized cutting-edge technology for themselves and their clients. In fact, in a country like India, call center companies are offering their employees and clients access to the kind of technology that at one point was only available to large-scale IT companies. That is also the reason that businesses outsource their various processes to these companies because they have the required technology and businesses do not want to spend their budget on.

Factors Making Digital Transformation Crucial

The below factors are the reason why fast adoption of new digital technologies and strategies has become necessary for contact centers around the world.

• Social Media

Social media has become a part of every consumer’s life and it has also become a part of business as well. The way companies are interacting with their customers has really changed due to the exponential rise of social media. Young customers expect their brands to be active on every single social media platform they use especially the more popular ones.

When businesses outsource their customer support processes to call centers these days, they are expecting those call centers to provide support on social media too. Handling customer queries and complaints about social media lead to better customer engagement and satisfaction which is the ultimate goal of companies today, as it should be.

• Rising Competition

The BPO sector is a highly competitive sector where every company is looking to gain a competitive edge over the other. Technology plays a big role in this competition as it can be the deciding factor when clients have to choose between two call center services providers. Adapting modern technology and latest digital trends will make your contact center stand out from the rest.

Competition is a huge motivating factor for BPO companies to take a long hard look at their existing digital strategies and compare them with others to see exactly where they stand. This comparison further leads to corrective action and a change in digital strategy.

• Demand for Omni-Channel

One of the major shifts in the call center trends is that of omnichannel demand being on the rise. As we have already discussed above, the changing behavior of the customers has caused a ripple effect in the industry, causing major shifts. Customers want their brands to be engaged with them on various channels and expect support on all of them.

There is a need for unification of the information among all these various channels like voice, email, chat and social media. A proper omnichannel support helps customers in such a way that if they communicate an issue over the phone with your service representatives, the next time they are chatting with an agent on your live chat, the records of their telephonic conversation would be present with the agent.

This way, customers do not need to repeat their issues to each new agent they communicate with on each different support channel. That is the real omnichannel support that is needed from contact centers today.

Moving Ahead:

The future as we at Octopus Tech see it will have all the top contact centers of the world racing towards the adoption and implementation of new digital technologies to meet the changing demands of their clients as well as their customers. It will not just be about who can adopt it faster but who can actually implement it better.

Original Source: http://www.theoctopustech.com/2017/12/digital-transformation-crucial-contact-centers-survival/

Why Analytics Has A Significant Role in Call Centers in the U.K

The call center industry in the U.K is going through a transformation. It is no longer just about answering phone calls or making calls to customers. Call centers have become a hub for customer engagement and customer satisfaction. The importance of excellent customer service is being realized by organizations of various industries across the country. A big role in customer delight is being played but customer data and analytics. Not just customer analytics but analytics regarding the performance of the call center itself to know where it is headed and what improvements can be made.

The Increasing Importance of Call Center Analytics

As stated above, analytics are extremely important for any call center company. It lets the management get an important insight into the performance of the center to see if the organization’s goals are being met. Not just the organization’s goals but the client’s goals that are crucial need to be met and analytics can help track that.

This data can then be used to take corrective actions if the performance is found to be deviating from the targets set by management. There are several tools used in BPO companies that also help measure performance like customer satisfaction (CSAT), number of calls per agent, number of inquiries resolved etc. This data is crucial for analyzing any call center’s performance.

Analytics Help Improve Customer Interactions

Analytics does not just help call centers manage their internal operations better but also plays a big role in changing the way customers interact with them and vice versa. One of the reasons people hate calling customer care of any company is the long hold time. No one has the patience to stay on hold, listening to terrible hold music waiting for someone to attend to their issues. Another major problem is that customers have to provide the same information several times regarding their case history. This sort of redundancy leads to customer dissatisfaction.

With the help of analytics, call centers can check call volume trends to know which the busiest time of the day for them is so that they can manage their workforce accordingly. The breaks, shift timings and off days can be managed in such a way that appropriate amount of manpower is available to handle the high call volumes when needed the most. User analytics can help agents map and record customer information in a centralized database so that whoever gets the call from the same customer again are well aware of their issue, hence reducing redundancy of information sharing.

Better Analytics Leads to Better Process Management

Analytics helps streamline every process at a call center while increasing customer satisfaction for your client’s customers. The ultimate goal has to be customer engagement and customer delight as that is what keeps both a call center and its clients in business. By partnering with a company like Octopus Tech that combines call center services with data analytics to provide customer experience solutions that raise the level of operations and customer interaction.

To know more about how our solutions can help your business, contact us today.

Original Source: http://theoctopustech.co.uk/2017/12/why-analytics-has-a-significant-role-in-call-centers/

How Call Center Services Can Help in Customer Lifecycle Management

Every business function revolves around its customers. Everything from the very first contact with them to keeping them engaged with the brand needs to be carefully managed to provide them the best experience needed. There is an entire funnel that of customers and the different stages at which a company has to engage with them that is referred to customer lifecycle management. In this post, we will discuss how businesses can utilize call center services to help improve their customer lifecycle management.

Before we can go into the ways that call center services can, we must understand what exactly is customer lifecycle management and the various stages that are involved in it.

Stages of Customer Lifecycle Management

There are mainly four stages of CLM (Customer Lifecycle Management). These stages can differ based on each organization and its business goals. In this post, we will discuss the four stages that will be recognized by most of the companies out there.

Stage 1 – Customer Acquisition

As it is clear from the name, this activity refers to acquiring new customers for the business. This is the primary stage where your business establishes contact with a new customer for the first time with the hopes of converting them from a prospect to a paying customer or client.  This activity is necessary for the growth of any business. You need to grow your customer base in order to maintain a constant growth of the organization.

Stage 2- Customer Engagement

The second stage of CLM is customer engagement. When you acquire a customer and they have been with the brand for a while but now their usage of your product or service has declined, you need to increase their engagement with your brand. It could be in the form of using your app more or visiting your website more often. Customer engagement ensures a customer’s loyalty to the brand and puts the business at ease about whether customers will stay with the brand or not.

Stage 3 – Customer Retention

Retaining your existing customers is an extremely import part of customer lifecycle management. If you lose your customers, it will have a negative impact on your business’s bottom line. It will also lead to the increase in marketing costs and customer acquisition costs. A good customer retention strategy can not only save costs but lead to stronger brand profile overall.

Stage 4 – Customer Feedback

This stage lets a business understand how loyal a customer is to their brand. You get to know what they feel about your product or services, what they like, what they dislike and most importantly, the changes they would like to see. It helps a business become better by implementing the changes that customers want and it makes the customers feel appreciated when they see their opinions have been valued.

Call Center Services and Customer Lifecycle Management

All the above four stages or the entire CLM process requires a company to have dedicated teams of professionals that have experience dealing with each and every such stage. Outsourcing call center services help a business handle these complex stages using experienced staff and techniques.

A right outsourcing company can provide a business with customer acquisition services using outbound and inbound telemarketing and lead generation services that help a business increase its customer base thus increasing overall revenues. Similarly, that same company can handle customer engagement by reaching out to customers and informing them of new features as well as offers related to a business’s services.

Customer retention processes are also carried out by call center service providers. Customers that wish to leave your services will be contacted by the call center team to understand the root cause of them leaving and provide those customers with the required incentives to stick by the brand. The fourth stage of CLM, getting feedback from the customers is also handled by call centers through their customer survey process where customers are contacted to conduct a quick survey to know the overall level of satisfaction they have with the services.

Conclusion:

In the end, what really matters is finding the right call center partner that can deploy a team that can get your customers through all entire customer lifecycle management process efficiently thus helping businesses reduce their costs and boost profits. Octopus Tech can be the perfect partner to help your business achieve this. To know more about our CLM services, contact us today.

Original Source: http://www.theoctopustech.com/2017/12/call-center-services-can-help-customer-lifecycle-management/