If you’ve played telephone tag recently, you know it’s not just aggravating, it’s impacting your bottom line. It may be time to scale up your customer service. With the U.S. economy on the uptick, you don’t want to miss out on the coming economic rebound.
Here are three ways to prepare for the coming influx of new business accounts:
- Take a new look at your actual ROI. It’s a crucial indicator for customer service. Robust customer satisfaction tracking is a must. Choose several metrics to measure customer satisfaction. Don’t just go on hearsay and word-of-mouth opinions from your busy staff. Do the number crunching first. Then analyze the data to pinpoint those areas where customer service failures occur.
- Calculate the cost of dropped calls. If the data show lengthy waits on hold, consider that those cost a business in more ways than one. Abandoned calls, dissatisfaction and reputation issues often dog a company for some time. Monitor your abandonment rate. It may be time to outsource inbound calls. Apply technology to the task. With social media playing such a prominent role today, disgruntled customers can have a major impact on a company’s reputation.
- Lower the risk of accounts falling through the cracks. Telephone tag has a deleterious impact on customer perception, and it’s annoying, too. Customers overwhelmingly prefer a live operator. From at-home chefs panicking over internal meat tips, to questions over returning merchandise, live, on-call operators are the customer-pleasing solution.