Improving your customer experience over the phone can be a massive game-changer for your business. If phone interaction through your company can be an aggravating experience for your customers, it’s very likely that they may turn to a different organization instead. Keep in mind that a poor customer experience could have you losing a large degree of your customers and 67% of customers have hung up the phone as a result of a poor customer calling experience.
If you’ve never addressed your calling experience it’s important to consider that this is a crucial aspect of your overall customer experience. Here are some of the top ways that you can see improvement for customer calls.
Limit Your Missed Calls
If you have outbound or inbound call teams, you need to make sure that you’re checking in on the number of missed calls. Checking in on the stats will improve your team’s ability to get back your customers and ensure that you are able to establish a better calling system that will lead to more answered calls. Missed calls can cause a huge gap in your calling services and they can lead to many customers avoiding calling in for fear their call will not be returned.
Make Sure You’ve Got Enough Staff
Being able to meet the demand of the calls your business receives is important. If you have inbound and outbound call teams make sure that you’re using the right tools and that you have enough people on staff to handle the demand. If you find that people are regularly overloaded with calls, it’s important to consider how many people are answering calls and the average length of a wait time for your customers.
Find Ways To Reduce Hold Times
Customers hate being on hold and almost 60% of customers that call in are unwilling to wait for more than 1 minute. If you’re in the habit of regularly placing customers on hold, make sure that there is a way they can speak to an operator regularly. Introducing features like hold music can make the hold appear shorter and having departments that you can redirect customer service calls to in times of peak need can be important as well.
Consider the top ideas if you are interested in improving your customer experiences over the phone.
This blog was written by Ingrid Lindberg, a customer experience speaker and founder of Chief Customer. Her work has spanned the Fortune 500 – including Finance, Healthcare, CPG, Telco and Retail, working with companies to create differentiating customer experience strategies and cultures.