Bring a Human Touch to Your Business with a Contact Centre

One of the biggest challenges of being a small business owner is giving every customer the personal attention he or she deserves. If things get busy or your customer support team is short-staffed, a caller may be put on a long hold, sent to voicemail or routed to the wrong person — potentially costing you business. Texts and emails from customers may also get neglected.

A consumer survey found that 94% of customers want to support small, local businesses. However, that doesn’t mean they will put up with poor customer service.

• Two-thirds of consumers say the most frustrating aspect of contacting customer service is waiting on hold or having to explain the same information to multiple representatives.
• 76% of consumers  say they expect to engage with someone immediately when contacting a company.
• 36% of consumers say they will share their customer service experience with others, whether good or bad – including posting on social media.

In a competitive business environment, it pays to focus on making every customer interaction smooth and successful. One way to do that is to subscribe to a cloud-based contact centre. This SaaS service, layered over VoIP technology, gives small businesses access to enterprise-grade tools that optimize their customer service staff so callers get the answers they need quickly.

Here are four ways Cloudli’s Contact Centre adds a human touch to your business through enhanced customer service:

1. Meets Customer Expectations During Labor Shortages

Human-touch factor: Reducing disruptions in customer service.

Cloudli’s Contact Centre helps businesses meet customer expectations at times when they are short on personnel through features like call queue, call waiting, and smart call routing. Calls can be routed virtually and automatically based on settings like agent status (busy or available, on a break, etc.) and caller/agent language. By using these strategies along with Cloudli’s virtual receptionist, you can optimize your resources to maintain operations and provide customers with a satisfactory level of service.

2. Improves Recruitment of Agents Through Work-from-Anywhere Capabilities

Human-touch factor: Maintaining adequate staffing so customers get efficient service.

Cloudli’s Contact Centre is fully virtual, which allows businesses to recruit agents from anywhere in the world. Not only do you expand your pool of talent, but you tap into the growing preference of workers to work remotely, giving you an edge in a competitive hiring market.

3. Enhances Agent Training and Oversight

Human-touch factor: Equipping customer service representatives so they can provide exceptional service to every customer.

Getting your customers to the right person is step one; step two is making sure the agent who takes the call is equipped to help. A survey found 59% of customers say businesses need to improve the training of their customer service agents.

With Cloudli’s Contact Centre, you get a suite of tools that help with that effort, whether your agents are located in one site or dispersed across the globe. A self-evaluation feature allows agents to review and refine their own customer interactions. Supervisors can access listening and whispering capabilities to coach agents in the moment of a customer interaction or record a conversation to discuss later.

A cloud-based contact centre also provides managers with reporting on a wide range of KPI customer services metrics and displays performance against the Service Level Agreement in real-time. You’ll be able to see how your agents are performing and judge where they need more training to better serve your customers.

4. Scales Easily to Adjust for High and Low Call Volumes

Human-touch factor: Providing customers the most personalized service and efficient response time possible even during high-volume moments or after business hours.

Cloudli’s Contact Centre can be scaled according to your needs, adding or removing agents from the system based on anticipated call volumes, or as the company grows.

During especially busy times, Contact Centre provides solutions to optimize call quality and reduce wait times, such as setting up call queues and using hold times to share recorded information your customers will find helpful.

You can also give customers the option to leave a voicemail, with the assurance their call will be returned in the next 24 hours. Or, you can offer automatic callback, which allows the customer to hang up and receive a return call when the agent becomes available, in the order their call was received.

Retaining Customers on a Small Business Budget

Small business leaders care about customer service because they typically know their customers well and want to keep each one for the long run. Yet, they also have practical considerations like staffing costs and office space constraints. That requires making smart use of resources and getting the most customer service “bang” for the buck.

Cloudli’s Contact Centre uses affordable SaaS solutions, layered over UCaaS technology, to give small businesses the tools they need. It helps you provide exceptional service with a human touch even if your customer service team is small and your agents work off-site. Ready to see how it can enhance your business with easy, plug-and-play integration? Reach out for a demo today.