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Is “quality” just an afterthought when it comes to your customer service or are your representatives truly providing the best service possible? To succeed in any industry, it is critical to deliver the best customer service possible to meet and satisfy your customers’ expectations and needs.
There are thousands of companies that provide customer service, yet it’s the ones with high-quality customer service (Zappos is a great example) that stand out the most. Think of this strategy as a way to beget greater sales while subsequently enjoying a satisfied, loyal audience base.
To ensure high-quality customer service or keep existing quality in check, here’s what you can do.
Gather customer feedback
One way to analyze the quality of your customer service is to ask customers if they are happy with the agents/representatives. This can be done via email or customers can simply be asked to come into your establishment.
Follow-up phone calls about the last visit or product query can also give you answers. But if you want to make the process formal, you can create surveys and ask customers to answer questions about different aspects of your business before returning them to you.
Monitor real-time performance of your team
Options like call recording software can be used to monitor the performance of your customer service agents while gaining valuable insight into how they deal with customers. You can record outbound calls to see how your company is functioning with customer service, along with seeking areas of improvement when engaging with the consumer.
Also, if your business has a VoIP phone system, then you can use phone recording solutions to find out how the staff is handling customer requests and then train them to be on their best behavior as they’ll be representing your brand. Training given to customer service agents in the past can also be used by new hires as quality training material.
Look at the competition
Knowing the quality of customer service being provided by your competitors can be used as a metric to check your service quality; it can help you keep your own service level on the track. You can ask an employee to talk to a representative of your competitor’s brand to find out how they’re treated.
You can also talk to customers who’ve done business with your competitors and ask them what they like or dislike about the level of customer service they received. Perhaps the customer love the fact that they had to wait little for assistance, or they are satisfied because the customer agent offered to personally handle the request.
Check the abandonment rate
For support channels that require live representatives, the abandonment rate and hold time can give indications about service quality. A high abandonment rate implies that agents are not attending phone calls quality, which is upsetting for the customer. A low abandonment rate on the other hand means agents are working with the customer in getting to the root of their query.
Apart from abandonment rate, you can measure other metrics such as bounce rates and on-page time. If most of the customers are immediately leaving customer service chats, or leaving negative reviews on sites like Trustpilot, there’s definitely something wrong.
With these measures, you can find out the current quality of your customer service and then work towards improving it.
