Admit Your Service Faults Instead of Blaming the Pandemic

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D.

Different countries around the world and various areas within have had differing responses to the covid pandemic. For some it is but a memory—albeit a painful one. Others, however, are only now beginning to emerge from its grip, with its influence lingering on. Regardless, it’s impacted our call centers and how we do business. Many are quick to blame it for their staffing shortfalls and service failures. I call this the covid excuse.

Citing the covid excuse for low staffing levels, reduced hours of support, and delayed response times may be truthful, but it’s wearing thin. Some businesses have successfully responded to the pandemic and rebounded appropriately, returning to their prior levels of service, or even surpassing them.

Yet others continue to struggle. They blame covid for their ongoing issues. And, for the most part, using the covid excuse to justify their shortcomings reached a receptive audience. But don’t expect the public’s acceptance of covid as the explanation for continued ongoing service problems to last much longer.

Initially, virtually every company was quick to use the covid excuse as justification for everything that went wrong. But as we inched forward, many companies have moved away from blaming the pandemic. And wisely so.

The purpose of call centers is to serve customers and react to prospects. If there’s a service shortfall, regardless of the reason, that’s a bad reflection on the call center and poor customer service. It must be corrected, covid or not.

Provide Excellence

Many call centers initially struggled as they attempted to deal with lockdown restrictions, work-at-home mandates, and employee concerns. Yet they adjusted and adapted. They persisted in holding high their ideals of providing excellent customer service.

And despite having glitches along the way, they soon stopped using the covid excuse and simply assumed responsibility for their service shortfalls. Not having enough agents working or seeing key performance indicator slip didn’t matter if it was pandemic related or not. Instead, it was something to fix, and they fixed it.

They focused on providing service excellence, pandemic or not.

Use the Covid Excuse

Other operations, however, took the opposite approach. They used the covid excuse whenever they could, and they continue to do so—even when it’s not true. This occurs for understaffing, offering poor customer service, and failing to meet caller needs.

While the pandemic may have initially caused these problems to surface, it’s disingenuous to continue to use the explanation—even if there remains an element of truth to it. The covid excuse is blamed for price increases, service delays, and supply chain issues.

The public is tired of hearing it; they don’t care. They expect service and expect companies to deliver. It’s that simple.

Moving Forward

Every person and every company had to navigate the covid pandemic. While we may never forget it and the long-ranging effects it produced, it is time to move beyond it. It’s time to focus on serving our clients and not blame circumstances when we failed to deliver.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Connections Magazine. He’s a passionate wordsmith whose goal is to change the world one word at a time.  Read more of his articles at PeterDeHaanPublishing.com.

By Renaud Charvet

Fans of Friends may recall the episode in which Phoebe works as a call center agent for Empire Office Supplies, desperately trying to sell as much toner as possible. Luckily, the time of isolating cubicles and reams of contact lists are over and contact centers are the way forward, where data-driven contact centers elevate customer experiences.

The US remains a global competitor in the call center market. In fact, Statista reports that over one hundred call centers opened across the nation in 2021, more than any other region worldwide.

Call centers’ primary industries include financial services, technology, media, and telecommunications. The South is particularly significant for call and contact center operations, as Texas has the highest employment in telemarketing with approximately 22,500 employees, followed by Florida with 15,000 workers. But times are changing for many of these facilities. We’re seeing a move from what’s traditionally considered to be a call center, and towards the notion of a contact center.

Instead of relying on just one communication channel—the telephone—contact centers are multi-channel facilities that use several forms of communication to talk to their customers. They rely on advanced analytics to learn more about the people they’re contacting and dig deeper into data to inform their decisions.

So how can a call center become a contact center?

The Relationship Hub

Call centers have long been considered as a means of making sales and dealing with customer problems. The general strategy has been to react to the needs of the customers, rather than adapt. A contact center goes beyond the immediate goals of making sales and managing complaints. It is instead positioned as a hub for all forms of customer relationships.

A contact center is where all critical communication from customers comes in, and everything customers tell agents inform a business of what their customers are like, how they’re feeling, and what is and isn’t working. This doesn’t mean contact centers aren’t making sales calls and dealing with customers. The key difference is that they’re capturing data from customer interactions and using it to benefit all areas of the business.

Data-Driven

In a contact center, data is king. A customer relationship management (CRM) infrastructure is an essential piece of contact center technology that’s used to track, compile, and analyze all areas of communication. A CRM stores information such as who has been contacted, how many times they’ve spoken to an agent, and whether they’ve made a purchase—all in a single system.

A data-driven contact center gathers relevant data from multiple channels, be it via the phone, email, webchat, or any other platform. This data lets contact center agents gain insights on their target audiences, allowing them to offer personalized services.

Typically, a contact center team will have an overview of not just who they have contacted but other data including what stage a sale may be at, who their direct contact person is, how this person prefers to be contacted, what language they speak and what information was already provided. This data, and having easy access to it, sits at the heart of any successful contact center.

Rise of the Super-Agent

If a bot can do it, why should a human? The super-agent is the idea that using technology and automation can move every agent in the contact center up a notch, elevating their level of expertise. The process of creating super-agents involves automating administrative tasks that take up valuable employee time and gives agents time to focus on more advanced responsibilities.

A good CRM system that’s linked to the contact center’s calling system also helps create super-agents. Aligning a center’s CRM with its cloud-calling system provides the ability to update customer data in an instant, without manually adding in details. Some CRMs even have automated features that listen in to phone calls and make transcripts for the contact agent to review later.

Implementing an advanced call routing software solution can further enhance better business relationships. Having call routing software connects callers with qualified agents who have the skillset required to best assist the customer, without needing to pass them between agents before reaching the right person.

Contact centers continue to play a crucial role in building better relationships. But there is no need to opt for yesterday’s lines of desks and endless printed contact lists à la Friends’ Empire Office Supplies. Embracing the contact center allows employees and customers to have simpler, more meaningful conversations.

Renaud Charvet is CEO of business phone system software provider Ringover, a leader in cloud communications. Ringover combines unlimited calling, group messaging and video conferencing into one easy-to-use app.

---

Offer Call Backs and Customer Service Options

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D.

In thinking about going beyond the call, you may assume this is an article about offering web chat, text messaging, and email response in addition to handling phone calls. Though I’m an advocate of these options, thereby turning your call center into a contact center, these are not my focus this time.

Instead, I’m addressing what you can do with the telephone to go beyond the call. Here are some considerations:

Call Backs

Offering to call back the caller instead of having them wait on hold—in queue—is an option call centers can offer. Some callers like this flexibility and others don’t. Some are skeptical they’ll receive a call back, while a few have tried it and never got the promised call—or it came hours later instead of the few minutes they were led to believe. Yet many delight in this option.

The benefits of a call back for the customer is not having to wait on hold, being able to attend to other activities, and a feeling of greater control.

Benefits to the call center are fewer callers on hold, lower toll-free costs, and agents who have a chance to prepare to engage with the caller before placing the call. Even something as simple as bringing up the customer’s account in advance saves agent time and reduces customer angst.

Abandoned Calls

What do you do with callers who hang up in frustration while on hold? Hope they’ll call back? It might not happen. Be glad for one less call to handle? This is a short-sighted response that misses the reason for the call center in the first place.

What if you took the initiative and called the customer back? “We see that you called us earlier today, but we couldn’t get to your call in time. Is there anything we can help you with now?”

Yes, some customers will have given up, figured it out on their own, or decide to vent their frustrations. But many will be impressed you called to check with them and have heartfelt gratitude you made the effort. In doing so you can turn around a negative experience and correct it. As you do so, you’ll forge a stronger relationship between your organization and your customers.

Surveys

Some organizations do follow up surveys, either at the conclusion of a call or afterward. If you conduct surveys, what are your goals in doing so?

Is it merely to amass a statistical database of C-Sat (customer satisfaction) scores? There’s nothing wrong with this, but too often the end-of-call surveys try to learn about the effectiveness of the call before the caller knows if the advice they received is correct.

A better reason for follow up surveys is to determine customer service failures, providing a chance to correct your call center’s shortcoming. Then you can work to turn a negative customer experience into a positive one.

Going Beyond the Call

These are ways you can go beyond the call to better serve your customers. And that’s the reason your call center exists.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Connections Magazine. He’s a passionate wordsmith whose goal is to change the world one word at a time.  Read more of his articles at PeterDeHaanPublishing.com.

Make Customer Service a Distinguishing Factor for Your Organization

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D.

Companies are increasingly offering chat services as a way for their customers and prospects to reach them. Not only is this an option that more and more people want to use, but many businesses find it’s a cost-effective customer service solution. As such, you’d think that customer-focused enterprises would make chat availability a priority. Yet in my experience as a customer, too many do not.

Avoid Turning Chat On and Off

I’ve experienced multiple companies that turn their chat option on and off throughout the day. Though their posted schedule says they’re available during business hours, their practice runs counter to that.

One site indicated that their chat was online. Excited, I begin typing my message, but before I could press enter, the chat availability indication turned from online to offline. Hopeful it was a momentary glitch, I stared at the screen for the next several minutes, poised to press enter as soon as the chat availability changed back to online. I got tired of waiting and went on to my next project. This was most frustrating because I needed to reach them, and chat was their only option.

I’ve seen this occur on other websites as well, with chat toggling between online and offline throughout the day. This is no way to serve customers. But it is a way to frustrate them.

Have a Schedule and Follow It

A retail operation would never open and close throughout the day; no self-respecting business would ever do that. When a customer shows up during regular business hours, they expect to come in and make a purchase. The same mentality should apply to chat service.

Make a schedule and staff accordingly to meet that schedule. Yes, when it’s difficult to hire and keep staff, meeting a desired schedule is problematic. Yet it should be a priority for any company that cares about its customers. And every business that wants to stay in business must put their customers first.

If staffing levels drop too low to support chat in a reasonable time frame, don’t shut it down. Instead note what delay customers may encounter, apologize for the inconvenience, and offer an alternate solution.

One company I deal with boasted 24/7 chat availability. That didn’t last long. They soon scaled back to business hours availability. And a few months after that, they reconfigured their chat window to be a front end to email. You type in your question is normal, and they tell you they’ll get back with you in a couple of hours. The answer comes by email, even if you leave the chat window open.

Offer Alternatives

In addition to chat, other common customer service options include the telephone and email. Presumably if a company can’t staff their chat service, they can’t operate their call center either, which carries an even more time-critical expectation than chat. But many companies have cut their telephone support altogether.

That leaves email. Of the three communication options, it’s the most frustrating, with lengthy delays lasting days—or being ignored altogether. With email, back-and-forth interaction, which happens with ease on chat and phone interaction, is difficult and time consuming. Imagine waiting two days for an email response and receiving a message that says, “What is your account number?”

Yes, there are also self-service options, with many companies offering FAQs, blog posts, and customer forums where users help each other. FAQs and blog posts seldom address the more specific questions I have. And I try to avoid forums because I have no way of knowing if the help they’re offering is reliable or not. And too often no one ever responds to the questions I post.

Chat Solutions

Offering accessible and prompt customer service is even more critical today than ever before, where a business can lose a customer at the click of a button. Offering chat service is a common and cost-effective way to do this.

But to be successful, do it wisely. This means no turning on and off chat throughout the day, posting and adhering to a realistic schedule of chat availability, and offering customer service alternatives.

And if your staffing levels don’t allow for this to occur, look for a contact center you can outsource this to, either to back you up as needed, according to a set schedule, or around the clock. This is the perfect solution to providing consistent chat availability to your customers.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Connections Magazine. He’s a passionate wordsmith whose goal is to change the world one word at a time.  Read more of his articles at PeterDeHaanPublishing.com.

By Megan Hottman

We all know that providing an excellent customer experience is vital for business success. Customers expect interactions with your company to be fluid and singular, referred to as an omnichannel experience. 

HubSpot defines omnichannel as a lead nurturing and user engagement approach in which a company gives access to its products, offers, and support services to customers or prospects on all channels, platforms, and devices. Omnichannel starts with being present everywhere your customers are so that they have no trouble interacting with you through a convenient means. 

Why Is an Omnichannel Experience Important to Your Customers?

The point of an omnichannel strategy is to provide customers with seamless interactions across all channels, which will make them feel like there’s no disconnection when interacting with your brand—no matter where or how they reach out.

I remember this past summer when I was buying a ticket from an airline. My preference is to purchase tickets online, which I usually do. However, for some unknown reason to this day, their “system” would not allow me to apply a previous unused credit towards the cost of the new ticket. I’ve used credits on my own before without incident.

I immediately clicked around to find their online chat function, only to discover that it was out of commission, along with their email option. Frustrating.

As a result, I had to call the airline. After holding for 3 hours and 52 minutes (yes, that’s right, holding because their call back function was inoperable at this time), an agent finally answered my call. 

No one has that kind of time to spend waiting on hold. The ability to engage with the airline in the way I preferred and expected to, wasn’t available. We’ve all been there. We’ve all had the same experience. Think of your customers’ experience with your brand. 

Omnichannel Experience Provides Choices and Drives Loyalty

Customers should be able to engage with a business through their preferred channel and when they want. Providing options like text, in-app chat, email, phone, live chat, or social media enables customers to access whatever they want or need whenever they want or need it. Let customers choose how they’d prefer to engage. Give them options. 

A fluid experience gives customers a deeper connection with the brand, boosting customer loyalty. But, of course, everyone knows that keeping existing customers is always easier and less expensive than attracting new customers.

Increase Customer Satisfaction and Builds Relationships

An omnichannel experience targets making consumers’ lives easier from start to finish, ironing out any friction they may face while engaging with a brand.

Providing a quality experience is vital and can make or break customer relationships. All it takes is one terrible experience or a few small repeat bad interactions for a customer to stop using your services or buying your products. 

Omnichannel communication strategies ensure a consistent experience that helps customers understand what to expect with your brand. As a result, customer satisfaction increases as they come to know the quality of service your brand delivers.

It’s Convenient

Consumers want convenience, and many companies have found ways to meet their wants by providing an omnichannel experience.

We can order coffee on an app and pick it up in person, skipping any potential lines. Consumers can do the same with groceries, clothes, and more. These examples illustrate the convenience an omnichannel experience provides today.

An omnichannel experience can be the secret sauce to earning your customer’s loyalty, whether a start-up or a market leader. 

Give Your Customers an Omnichannel Experience

A fluid omnichannel experience is critical to satisfying customers, driving loyalty, and building long-term relationships. Customers want their experience to be seamless, convenient, and personalized, and they’re willing to go out of their way to find it.

Megan Hottmanis the copywriter and editor for Quality Contact Solutions. Megan’s experience includes working as an outbound telemarketing manager for a Fortune 100 company for many years. Megan has been both a client and an employee of QCS, so she knows first-hand the quality, productivity, and passion the team brings to work each day. Reach Megan at megan@qualitycontactsolutions.com or 516-656-5120.

By Bob Grohs 

Chatbots are becoming increasingly responsible for assisting with customer service queries. Most customers have already used chatbots, whether they are aware of it or not. In a 2021 survey of over 1,000 chatbot users, some 47 percent of respondents said it’s possible they have mistaken a chatbot for a live service agent and another 11 percent said they weren’t sure. Of these users, 69 percent said they would often or always use a chatbot if it could resolve their issue more quickly. Yet, there were still holdouts, showing that even consumers with positive chatbot experiences harbor biases. 

Just because consumers have hesitations doesn’t mean businesses should. As the importance of customer support continues to rise, it’s time to dispel any reservations you have about investing in chatbot technology for your business. Here, we will address common chatbot biases, consider misguided perceptions, and discuss why the pros outweigh any cons. 

Bias 1: Chatbots Try to Come Off as Real Human Agents

For this first point, we need to delve into the debate surrounding chatbot disclosure. A 2019 study produced evidence of a phenomenon known as the “negative disclosure effect.” When companies disclosed to customers that they were interacting with a chatbot rather than a human, results showed a 79.7 percent reduction in sales. This is due to customers perceiving bots as less knowledgeable and less empathetic. 

However, consumers unknowingly interact with chatbots all the time. The same study found undisclosed bots to be just as effective sales agents as proficient human agents. And they were four times as effective as inexperienced agents. 

So, what’s the best way forward? 

Across-the-board disclosure of bots. Through mass exposure, customers will become accustomed to working with chatbots, and their bias will dissipate. They will learn that positive interactions with chatbots are the new norm. Openly disclosing chatbots will help build trust with your consumer base and ensure ethical chatbot use in sales. Companies should consider naming and depicting their bots in a way that makes it clear to the consumer that they are interacting with artificial intelligence (AI). 

Bias 2: Chatbots Don’t Understand Natural Language

This is a common misconception. Leading AI chatbots have built-in intelligence and understand what people mean—what their intent is—regardless of how it’s phrased. This is known as natural language understanding (NLU). In addition, AI chatbots can continue to learn and improve their accuracy in understanding customers over time with their built-in machine learning capabilities.

Chatbots can learn from every chat or email attached to a successful ticket or case resolution. The bots can also pull information from external sources to create optimized answers. These sources are often public knowledge content, such as help centers, FAQs, and manuals. 

NLU is already a powerful technology that will only become more sophisticated in the future. Chatbots can learn how to understand misspelled words, and the best ones can even understand poorly phrased questions. 

As NLU develops, customers will soon overcome the bias that chatbots can’t understand varied human language.

Bias 3: Chatbots Don’t Provide Relevant Customer Insights 

Many businesses use chatbots to answer quick and simple questions, leaving more complex problems to the humans in customer service. As chatbot technology advances and can process more sophisticated cases, you can tap into the data and insights gathered much more efficiently. 

Chatbots are a first line of defense in your customer support stack. They can quickly pinpoint issues, gaps in your knowledge base, and product defects. Immediate customer feedback from a chatbot dashboard helps support and customer experience management (CX) leaders understand what their customers are doing in real time and react more quickly and effectively. 

Today’s chatbots can identify frequently used words or recurring topics in support tickets and attach search labels or tags to them. This process makes it simpler to categorize queries and issues for easier prioritization and actioning.

Bias 4: Chatbots are Expensive to Install

Installation may seem costly, but only if you are thinking in the short term. In just a few months, the benefits will more than cover the up-front costs. 

Integrating chatbots with customer relationship management (CRM) software and other forum software platforms will result in a huge reduction in ticket volume. This can eliminate the need for adding contact center staff or outsourced solutions, even as you grow. 

In addition, customers want quick answers. The speedy, accurate responses generated by chatbots mean an increase in satisfied customers who are more loyal and valuable to your brand over the long run.

Fully integrating bots with other platforms and making them available 24/7 will ensure that any small problems will find efficient, easy solutions. This frees up human customer support to respond to more complex, time-consuming issues and to better address spikes in requests during traffic peaks. 

It’s Time to Overcome Biases and Invest for the Future

It is understandable to have reservations about how chatbots might impact customer service. But many of the biases we hold toward chatbots are misinformed. In reality, next gen chatbots can be powerful customer service tools that hugely improve the customer experience. Chatbots can hold valuable insight that only AI has the capacity to produce. In addition, with NLU development, their role in customer service is only going to grow. 

The installation and integration costs are worth it. Boost customer service with chatbots, and reduce unresolved tickets and customer turnover. Your return on investment will speak for itself.

Bob Grohs is the director of marketing at Solvvy, a next gen chatbot and automation platform. Bob has been in marketing and product management roles at top technology and SaaS companies for twenty years.

By Donna Fluss

The pressure is on for enterprises to improve their customer experience (CX). Executives are trying, and many have spent more to enhance their CX in the last couple of years than ever before, displaying their willingness to invest in improving their performance, perception and brand. This is particularly important now that service quality is one of the primary—and sometimes only—differentiator between what most consumers consider to be commoditized products and services. But the investments are not fully resolving their service problems, based on the rising level of complaints about customer service in the market, as contact centers are only one of the many departments within companies that participate in the customer journey. 

Investing to enhance contact centers is an excellent and overdue first step. Whether it’s an evolution, transformation or a combination of both, the new direction will benefit companies, employees, and their customers. This underscores the growing importance and contributions of contact centers in enterprises, and these investments and changes couldn’t come soon enough, as the quality of customer service seems to continue to degrade with each passing year. What’s ironic is at the same time executives are recognizing that they have a service issue, many are claiming to receive higher and higher Net Promoter Scores. Something is clearly out of sync and needs to be fixed, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why service quality keeps getting worse. 

Some people are blaming the pandemic or the work-at-home situation, but these recent events are not the cause. There were major service issues long before COVID-19. Other industry thought leaders have identified the explosion of digital channels as a reason why the quality of service seems to be falling like a rock. While this is a contributing factor for enterprises that previously handled only calls and are now scrambling to support digital interactions, it’s not the primary cause of poor service quality. 

One of the most significant drivers of the increasingly inadequate service experience delivered by many companies is rapid growth. Companies scaled up and added new customers at a much faster rate than they built out their service organizations and contact centers. Their hope (or bet) was that fewer customers would want service, but it seems that the opposite is happening. With each passing year, customers are demanding more and a higher touch service. This a reality that companies need to accept and address. 

C-level executives in many companies hoped to fill the contact center resource gap by increasing agent productivity and providing self-service solutions. The technology vendors are doing their part and, during the past two years, have delivered a new generation of smart and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled contact center systems and applications that are more productive, but it’s not enough. Consumers’ appetite for help and information is outpacing the productivity improvements. So, other changes need to be made if companies want to put an end to their rapidly deteriorating service experience. 

Getting Service Back on Course

It’s great that executives are investing in their contact centers at a rate never before seen, and that they are making commitments to improve the agent experience. But this is just a necessary first step in righting the servicing and CX ship. 

Companies that want to create lasting improvements that position them to deliver a consistently outstanding customer experience need to identify the reasons why customers are unhappy and reaching out for assistance at an increasing rate. This means that enterprises must find a way to track and measure all aspects of the customer journey—what happens throughout the customer lifecycle, from their first touch at the website through product retirement or replacement. 

An ideal way to address this issue is to roll out contact center applications throughout their organization. By design these solutions give them the visibility and insights they need to identify and resolve service issues and bottlenecks across the enterprise. Contact center applications should become standard productivity tools for most, if not all, enterprise employees. 

The AI-enabled omni-channel routing and queuing engine should replace unified communications (UC)/unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) solutions. Workforce optimization (WFO)/workforce engagement management (WEM) capabilities, including recording, quality management, interaction analytics, workforce management, robotic process automation and customer journey analytics, need to be put in place to give managers better employee oversight and clearer understanding of customer needs and wants. 

Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions need to be available to all employees so that they have the information they need to make the right decisions up front, instead of leaving it to the contact center and customer service departments to fix after the fact. 

Final Thoughts

It’s time for enterprises to transform their perspective about customer service. For this to occur, companies need to alter their culture. Instead of saying that they care about CX and put customers first, they must demonstrate their commitment in every department in their company. The tools and know-how are available to deliver an outstanding CX cost effectively; the unknown factor is how long it will take executives to accept the inevitable and put in motion the changes necessary to convert to a customer-centric mindset, one dedicated to great service across the enterprise. 

Donna Fluss is president of DMG Consulting LLC. For more than two decades she has helped emerging and established companies develop and deliver outstanding customer experiences. A recognized visionary, author, and speaker, Donna drives strategic transformation and innovation throughout the services industry. She provides strategic and practical counsel for enterprises, solution providers, and the investment community.

By Kelly Doyle

Did you know that retaining existing customers is far more cost-effective than acquiring new ones? It’s true. Substantial research shows that focused efforts on retaining customers are more profitable. 

So, the question is, why do many businesses often focus more on acquisition efforts than to keep their customers happy and loyal? If customer retention is not at the forefront of your business’s strategic plan, it should be. Here’s why.

Customer acquisition costs are five times that of retention costs. According to Invesp, 44 percent of companies focus on customer acquisition compared to only 18 percent on retention. So why are most businesses hyper-focused on new customer acquisition? We have it backward. 

According to customer acquisition and retention marketing stats, the success rate of selling to an existing customer is between 60–70 percent. In comparison, the success rate of selling to a new customer is typically less than 20 percent. Furthermore, a study cited by Harvard Business School found that increasing customer retention by just 5 percent could yield profit increases between 25–95 percent. 

Through taking care of your biggest asset—your existing customers—you will develop a loyal customer base that becomes your prime source of new business. 

Here are five simple ways to retain existing customers. 

1. Proactive Renewals 

The best way to retain customers is by reaching out to them before their current contract expires to offer a renewal. Proactive calling keeps more customers, and most customers appreciate the reminder. 

Many companies offer special benefits to existing customers, so a pre-expiration call is an excellent time to remind them of these essential benefits, which might be the reason they signed up in the first place. In addition, calling current customers creates a personal connection, which they will appreciate. 

2. Reinstate Lapsed Customers 

Frequently, customers allow their contract to expire without realizing it. How many times have you called a former customer only to discover they didn’t know their contract lapsed? This is a perfect time to offer a special promotion to them. 

Convenience is essential. Always make the renewal process easy by allowing payment directly over the phone. 

Of course, this all sounds great, but what if you don’t have the time to make these calls? Consider bringing in call center professionals. Time is money, and outsourcing calls is an ideal way to make the most of both. 

3. Win Back Former Customers 

When you have dormant customers or former customers not currently using your services, the personal interaction of a courtesy call may be the key to win them back. 

According to LearnSmart, the main reason your customers leave is they no longer perceive value in what you offer. As a result, they stop service—or even worse—begin to look to your competitors. However, frequently the cause of customer abandonment is well within a company’s control. It often comes down to effective communication and successfully highlighting products and services that set you apart from others.

Perhaps your company has new offerings. A touchback call is a perfect time to let dormant customers know about what’s new. Strategically reach out to them, let them know you value them, and remind them of the benefits of continuing a relationship with your company. 

Do not be disparaging, but make sure they know the differences between you and your competitors. Then, finally, seal the deal with a special offer for coming back. 

Last, if you dropped the ball in the past, admit it. Own your mistakes and be sincere. Your former customers may want you back as much as you want them back, but there may be some hard feelings. Nothing breaks down the walls like an apology, taking ownership, and a sincere promise to make it right.

4. Effective Account Management 

Account management is about retaining your customers’ business and helping them grow with your products and services. Take the time to learn about the customers you support, identify their goals, and the role you play in helping them meet and exceed these goals. 

Sometimes this requires out-of-the-box thinking, but the key is to identify why they choose you over your competitors. What value do you bring that others cannot? 

Answering these questions requires you to reach out to your customers often, by phone, to learn their needs, wants, goals, and objectives. In doing so, you become an increasingly valuable business partner, resulting in a more mutually beneficial relationship. 

5. Promotions and Blitz Campaigns 

Is there currently a sale or promotion running on products or services your previous customers bought? Of course, we all receive promotion emails. However, have you thought about the personal impact of a phone call? 

During special promotions, call centers can contact customers, knowing your current promotion and sales offerings. Phone calls may significantly increase sales because they are more personal and create a sense of urgency and excitement about the promotion. 

Conclusion

Retaining customers is not always on the mind of business owners. Companies frequently take their customers and the business they generate for granted. By using one or more of these five simple ways to retain customers, you can start to increase your retention rate significantly, enjoy higher profits, and drive brand loyalty.

Customers have a choice of where to do business, and in today’s increasingly competitive environment, it’s more important than ever to make customer retention a top priority.

Kelly Doyle writes for Quality Contact Solutions (QCS), a certified woman-owned business enterprise and an industry leader in call center and telemarketing services solutions, including B2B and B2C programs. QCS offers many telemarketing services and turnkey outsourced call center services that augment sales and marketing programs. 

By Daniel Fallmann

As the demands and expectations of customers continue to rise, their tolerance level for poor service is dropping. Offering customers impeccable support in response to requests is a core differentiator, particularly in highly competitive markets. But delivering the best possible customer service is fast becoming a challenge, especially given the steadily escalating number of products and services, along with the surge of hybrid work structures. 

The digitalization boom and, most notably, the adoption of new digital communication channels has triggered a change in expectations at the customer level. They’ve come to expect faster and more personalized service, primarily through digital channels. Meeting these demands requires reimagining and redefining both the workflows and the provision of required information.

In particular, the way in which data is managed, processed, and extracted must be adapted to the new circumstances so that it can be processed qualitatively and applied effectively in business processes. As a result, the ability to evaluate and link data intelligently and to make it available holistically now stands as a crucial factor for the success of a business.

Infodemic: A Challenge in Hybrid Workplace Models 

State-of-the-art customer service means 24/7 availability, always staying current, and delivering a speedy, friendly, and accurate response to incoming requests. 

To satisfy these customer demands consistently, employees need instant access to the correct facts, the latest data, and up-to-the-minute customer information, as well as the most recent valid product, price, and approval lists. If this information is only available in piecemeal form—in multiple documents—then searching for details and essential information just to get specific tasks done is every bit as much of a problem as not having the information at all.

On top of this, the increasing demand and popularity of working from home and on-the-go has given rise to a remote, decentralized workforce in which some of the staff work from home or on the road, while other co-workers hold down the fort in the office. That kind of hybrid work environment can make it difficult to maintain a smooth flow of communication and information, leading to heightened stress levels. 

Holistic Views: A Magic Bullet for Customer Service Reps

This boils down to the fact that customer service staff need simple and reliable access to information to gain a comprehensive overview of pertinent data from multiple disparate sources and departments. Use that holistic view of customer data with an analysis of the information from the various sources to identify trends and generate actionable insights to answer specific questions. Applied correctly, this knowledge will enhance the customer experience, drive customer loyalty, and enable companies to utilize their time and resources more efficiently.

Similarly, customer service representatives also need a tangible 360-degree view of the customer and the customer’s activities so that they can respond appropriately.

Instead, companies tend to have several different tools for data storage (business applications, cloud storage, and so on), yet often lack a tool that analyzes and intelligently links all the data stored there.

Four Steps to Prepare Intelligent Information for a Hybrid Work Environment

Step 1: Define the Use Case: To start with, you need to determine “where.” That is, in which department or—even better—in which specific use case your employees need the most support. 

One way to approach this is to specifically involve your staff in this process. Ask them questions, analyze their problems, and identify workable solutions. A useful starting point can usually be quickly established this way. 

Step 2: Evaluate the Available Systems: The number of innovative technologies and systems is virtually endless. Making the right choice is a daunting task. Different vendors with different approaches—from simple knowledge management systems to AI-supported solutions—all promise a swift solution to the problem. 

At this point, it’s about a lot more than just choosing the right application; it’s also about how to implement that application. Many systems are available both on-premises and as cloud services or even as hybrid models. Which option is the right one for your business hinges on several factors. For example:

• The existing data sources, which ones, such as SharePoint Online or Microsoft 365, are available?
• The desired level of data security. Is the data considered sensitive? Is this data allowed to leave your company?

The best practice is when companies choose a system that corresponds to the use case defined beforehand and solves the existing problems efficiently. 

Step 3: Conduct a Test Phase with Your Own Data and Experts: When it comes to implementing a suitable system, the proof of concept (PoC) is an important milestone because it helps companies separate the wheat from the chaff. When conducting a PoC, it’s wise to test the solution based on your own data to see if the requirements you’ve identified can be implemented with the solution. At the same time, a PoC using a company’s own data makes it possible to identify problems at an early stage. 

Once the system has proved its merits from a technical point of view, the next step is to involve the real experts—the users from the corresponding departments. They understand the processes and can pinpoint potential areas for optimization. Their feedback is instrumental in ensuring a successful roll-out and full acceptance of the solution. 

Step 4: Go Live: With the successful conclusion of all tests, the transition to real operation can begin. Ideally at this point, all the settings can be migrated seamlessly from the test setup to the production system. Once the go live phase is successfully underway, roll out the system to other departments or business areas, transforming all processes along the way.

Conclusion

These four steps highlight how simple it is today—thanks to existing solutions—to support your workforce sustainably in their day-to-day work. Customers expect companies to handle their concerns quickly and effectively. High quality and superior performance, backed by targeted big-picture data, are the KPIs that drive a company’s success. 

Daniel Fallmann founded Mindbreeze in 2005 at the age of 23 after completing his studies in computer science. With many years of experience in the computer and information technology sector and as the CEO of Mindbreeze, Daniel is a living example of high innovation and quality standards. From the company’s outset, Fallmann, together with his team, laid the foundation for the highly scalable and intelligent Mindbreeze InSpire appliance. His passion for enterprise search and machine learning in a big data environment inspires Mindbreeze employees and Mindbreeze customers alike.