Service Excellence Central: Elevating Customer Experiences

Whenever we think of a call center, what comes to our mind can be the image of a warehouse-sized room packed with desks and air conditioners where you can hear phones ringing continuously and agents working tirelessly answering queries. However, such visuals are rare these days.

A contact center is an essential part of a company as it provides customer support and generates leads, and the latest call center innovative ideas have made them economical and scalable for companies. If you are planning to start one for your company, below is everything you need to know about innovations and best practices for a call center which are essential for its effectiveness. But before exploring, we first need to understand a few foundational ideas about call centers.

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The major obsession of companies using social media in the past was to make every customer or visitor fall in love with their company or their products. Because of this, companies used to panic whenever they received any negative reviews on their social media pages and did not know how to respond to them. Some of these reviews were genuine, and some were fabricated by their competitors. It is easy to fake a review to malign a company's reputation, thanks to the anonymity provided by the Internet. People these days conveniently post a negative review without hesitation, remorse, and without even thinking how much damage a casual negative review can do to a company's position if a company does not know how to respond to a negative review.

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Have you noticed people seem to be angrier these days? It is more than a coincidence. Polling company, Gallup, surveyed 160,000 people in 116 countries during 2020 and early 2021. The results, shared via Forbes, show that anger, stress, and sadness are at all-time highs. Interestingly enough, it is not solely due to the global pandemic - which has certainly raised tensions. These statistics have been trending in the wrong direction for many years now. Uncertainty seems to be the biggest contributor to people feeling down or upset. As is highlighted in the survey, 4 in 10 adults have experienced some form of stress or worry in recent times. 

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Excellent customer service starts with empathy, patience, and understanding your customers' needs. To deliver this, it is critical for a service representative to understand how consumers think and react to a conversation. One major factor that determines the course and outcome of a conversation is the generational difference when dealing with a customer. This may be the first time in history that customer service representatives are tasked with dealing with customers from five generations. Because of this, it is not possible to have one approach for all customers. Rather, a service representative needs to deploy different strategies and special forms of communication to deliver exceptional customer service across all five generations. For that, a service representative needs to be aware of the differences in the mindset of each generation and must be able to meet the expectations of each group accordingly.

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From the right tools to adequate staffing, customer service can turn out to be an expensive venture for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Most of the expenses incurred come from in-house teams, usually those working in a call-center. If customers get off of the phone with your in-house team and still don't have a resolution to their issue, that can also be seen as both time and money wasted. This is especially true if the customer decides to forego your business thanks to that particular experience.

According to Hannah Steiman of Peak Support, there are a few ways in which in-house customer service can become costly:

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With continued growth in computer and hand-held device use in the lives of many brings increasing technical questions and problems that arise. And so, the field of supporting these systems grows along with it, which brings business opportunities for entrepreneurs, and employment opportunities for support personnel.

But there are different types of support needs accompanied by varying required responsibilities and skills. The following are the differences between, and skills required for, three common areas of support: Help Desk, Technical Support, and Desktop/Deskside Support.

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The way customers interact with businesses has changed rapidly in the last several years. This means that organizations have had to pivot their business and marketing strategies. Customers are becoming increasingly diligent about researching products and services before buying. The most powerful source of product understanding is customer feedback, which has become even more accessible now as online reviews are growing in power and number.

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There is a good chance that if patients have chosen to engage in telehealth services, they have done so due to its overall convenience. Though the level of patient care is most important, customer service plays an integral role in patient retention. This is a key metric to consider when looking at the continued growth of telehealth services across North America.

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No matter how hard you may try, delivering great customer service all the time may simply not be possible. Even if you take your job seriously, slip ups will inevitably occur. Significantly, providing perfect customer service is not what makes your organization great, rather it is the way in which you handle bad situations with customers. Here are a few tips on how to remedy a bad customer service situation:

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