When customers call your small business with a problem or question, do they receive the kind of service that leaves you proud? Do they get directed to the right employee who can address their issue, rather than passed from one person to the next? Do they feel satisfied after the call and eager to do business with your company again?
If you can’t answer a confident “yes” to one or more of those questions, it may be time to invest in customer service training.
Don’t worry, it’s not necessary to hire a professional trainer or invest in expensive training and monitoring software to get the tools you need. Those features may already be available through yourVoIP service provider’s cloud-based Contact Centre.
Here are four Contact Centre tools you’ll find useful in developing a top-notch customer service program.
To adequately evaluate and train agents, supervisors must be able to listen to customer service calls as needed. One type of agent supervision tool allows managers to remain unknown to the customer or agent for the duration of the call, while a “whisper” feature allows the manager to coach the agent without the customer knowing. The communications from the supervisor come through whispered verbal cues or visual messages sent through the phone or computer.
The main benefit is the lack of disruption to the caller, who cannot hear the whisper, and the ability to coach agents in the moment, so they can put their learnings into practice in real time.
Another helpful tool known as “barge-in” enables the supervisor to join the call or take over when a customer is especially irate or has a complicated issue. It provides the agent with moral support and helps the supervisor contribute to a satisfactory resolution.
Call recording allows you to digitally capture a customer service conversation so you can review it later. This can be very helpful as a reference tool, to provide quality control, to refine messaging across all agents, or to review with an agent moments in the call that could be handled differently.
With a cloud-based Contact Centre, customer service managers can access history and detailed performance reports that help evaluate call centre resources and monitor customer satisfaction. They can check performance against the SLA (Service Level Agreement) in real-time, and view a wide range of KPI metrics that monitor agent activity, agent status and more.
Busy customer service departments have to manage many staffers serving various roles during multiple shifts. Your call centre should help you manage that task, with tools to track the availability and assignment of agents and allow team members to arrange for replacements between them, without managers having to intervene.
More than ever, service matters in a customer’s decision to support small business or choose other options. Make sure your agents stand out (positively!) in their handling of every customer interaction. Reach out today to schedule a demo and see if our cloud-based Contact Centre services support that goal.