How to create consistent customer service.
Maybe it’s happened to you: you call customer support, with the sinking feeling that your issue could take a while, only to find yourself, mere minutes later, wanting to high-five the agent for the spectacular service and quick turnaround! All it took was that quick call to create the ultimate win/win situation: the brand gets to know more about you, a now loyal customer, and you feel like your issue and your time were prioritized. Cue the lovefest!
Consistency is an underrated virtue and a powerful interface. Visually speaking, brand consistency has become commonplace: in order to stand out from the crowd, brands need to accurately represent from every vantage point. Visual marketing channels reflect and amplify a brand’s persona to put them in front of the mind and, hopefully, in front of the competition. However, once the dust has settled and the customer’s transaction has been won, what happens when that brand’s persona doesn’t deliver past the sale? If there’s a disconnect in customer experience between what your customer expects and what your team is delivering, it could undermine even the strongest brand reputation, sending your customers running to your competitors.
So, what is the best way to build consistent service quality? Here are four approaches that your contact center team should consider in order to create the kind of consistency that builds lasting customer relationships. Let’s take a look.
1. Standardize your contact center’s training programs
Your brand’s persona and impact are unique, and your team training programs should reflect it! Establishing standards for training is one of the best ways to “bake in” a consistent service standard with your team from day one. Establishing your brand’s own set of agent standards gives them a surer sense of how the brand approaches all aspects of the customer relationship so that they can focus on prioritizing the customer at the moment. Just as the strength and consistency of a brand’s visual persona helped capture your customer, it’s this consistent service quality coupled with the brand persona they already love that keeps the relationship going.
How to get started: With your brand’s business goals as your North Star, take a good look at how your current training initiatives are working to achieve those goals. By creating your brand’s own approach to contact center training, you can develop standard operating procedures that clarify variables and expectations, ensure regulatory compliance, and reduce miscommunication, making it easier and more efficient for your agents to deliver on-brand service.
2. Pay attention to the right performance metrics
While developing your contact center’s unique approach to agent training, you will likely have to assess the KPIs, metrics and data that support them in their jobs. Ensuring access to accurate, timed measurements and reports gives your team the perspective they need to see their progress towards service and business goals while highlighting weaknesses and areas needing development.
How to get started: Determine the ideal vision of what your brand’s contact center care should look like, from ideal wait times to scripting prompts to service follow-ups, and determine what key metrics are needed to measure progress towards achieving it. Assess your contact center’s current metrics, staffing needs and operating procedures to ensure they are aligned with that ideal vision. Monitor progress consistently and transparently so that the entire team is kept up to date on both performance and progress.
3. Prioritize customer quality assurance
In short, customer quality assurance is evidence of your contact center’s improved training and accurate metrics. Considered a best practice for creating consistent CX, customer quality assurance combines customer feedback and the brand’s data and priorities into a precise view of how current operations are truly serving customers. Using the voice of the customer (VoC) data for feedback and training highlights areas of improvement from the customer’s perspective, which can strengthen agents’ emotional intelligence and rapport-building skills.
Customer quality assurance improves overall customer service as well as the ability to anticipate customer needs, enabling the brand to better assess and adjust its CX approach.
How to get started: Effective customer quality assurance should track and measure the same qualities and metrics that training and performance metrics focus on, along with ongoing VoC feedback to improve customer care, information accuracy, and industry-specific compliance. Ensure that agent training is consistently offered and that it supports the values and metrics being measured. Training can happen in many different ways: by using the contact center’s software to review recorded calls and agent responses; through personalized, one-on-one coaching with management and senior staff; via regular performance reports and rewards, scheduled group training and mutual feedback sessions.
4. Offer ongoing coaching and feedback
Without a doubt, a contact center’s agents are key to delivering consistent, high-quality customer service. Their skills, experience and personality help your brand create a consistently reliable and relatable experience that keeps customers coming back. Ongoing coaching and feedback improves agent motivation by identifying and developing skills that could best benefit specific roles, and help them further succeed in their career. Supported agents feel more engaged with and invested in developing their brand’s customer relationships while helping their contact center team achieve its goals.
How to get started: Consistency starts from within! Offer your contact center team regular training sessions to build individual skills and team rapport, and provide ample opportunities to discuss progress, challenges, tips and feedback with senior and high-performing team members. Also, be sure to share progress reports and specific instances of positive customer feedback that prove just how agents are truly helping their customers by creating better customer experiences.
When a brand serves up an amazing contact center experience alongside notable products and services, it creates the perfect conditions to grow customer trust, enthusiasm, and loyalty.
With consistent customer service that reflects what they loved about the brand in the first place, customers feel that they can trust the company because it acts with their best interest at heart – even while navigating a negative issue or experience. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: your brand’s relationships with its customers are its greatest asset. Designing and delivering a consistent customer experience across all points of contact is the best way to maximize that asset, and make your customers feel like a million.
bespokeCX gives contact center teams the framework, tools and perspective to deliver better customer experience while supporting stronger workplace culture. By maximizing operational alignment and transparency, bespokeCX can help your contact center create the consistent, elevated customer experience and unbreakable customer relationships that your brand should be known for. Visit www.bespokecx.com to learn more.