Customer experience matters. Not just the core elements of good service and not just answering the phone and keeping your promises. But giving your customers a seamless, efficient, easy, and even enjoyable, experience when they deal with your contact centre.
Most of us already know that an outstanding customer experience can help build a company's reputation, attracting sales, and drive better levels of customer retention. However, a poor experience has a severe impact on your bottom line. If you’re not meeting and exceeding customer expectations, you could be wasting money every single day.
In a multi-channel contact centre, it’s harder than ever to maintain the best customer experience across every single channel – but with the right underlying technology, delighting your customers is surprisingly easy.
Bad customer experiences kill sales and lose customers
A bad customer service experience with your contact centre will quickly send your potential or existing customers to a competitor. This severely affects your sales targets and revenue – particularly when you consider that your highest-value prospects are the ones most likely to demand the highest levels of service.
In the majority of cases, poor experiences begin with waiting in endless call queues or not being able to get hold of an agent at all.
A multi-channel contact centre resolves this issue quickly. From SMS, web chat or email to social media, you put your customers in control. Giving them more ways to contact you lets them do so how they choose. As a result, you can deal with calls and messages faster, and begin every communication on a positive note.
Bad customer experiences add to administrative costs
The fact that poor customer service makes life harder for your customers is hardly surprising. But it’s also crucial to remember that handling complaints and playing catch-up to satisfy frustrated customers comes with a big cost in both time and money.
Just think of all the hours your agents could be handling calls and messages, speaking to prospects and customers, and delivering exceptional experiences. Instead, they’re struggling to make the best of a bad situation which is, in many cases, beyond hope.
With the right multi-channel contact centre service, you can give your agents a connected, integrated platform across every communication method. Then, by integrating your hosted dialler, multi-channel platform, and your CRM system, your agents will have the right information available to resolve customer issues faster.
Ideally, your customers would never have a bad experience. But the right technology can help you resolve any that do occur, quicker.
Bad customer experiences will damage your reputation
Poor experiences also come with a real financial cost. When annoyed and frustrated customers share their opinions, other customers will think twice about doing business with you and choose a competitor. According to the Harvard Business Review, a negative reputation could even increase the average cost of hiring by at least 10% a year.
Protecting your financial position means protecting your reputation. And that means managing and mitigating the damage of social media posts across Facebook and Twitter in particular.
With a multi-channel contact centre solution, you can make social media an interwoven part of your system and your agents’ daily routines. One consolidated dashboard can show automated notifications for certain keywords, allow agents to respond quickly, and deploy instant pre-written responses where appropriate.
As a result, you can turn negative social media posts into an opportunity to show how well you resolve complaints and the quality experience that your customers can expect.
Reduce your financial and reputational risk with the best customer experience across every channel. Call Hostcomm today on 0808 168 4400 to find out more about our multi-channel contact centre solution.