From the first “How may I help you?”, your call center can make or break your business. When you ensure your call center utilizes KPIs that align with your company culture, you can start to make a difference in how your customers view you.
You can transform your call center into one that promotes loyalty and turns avid customers into brand promoters. To do so, you must ensure that your employees are managed under KPIs that support better business performance and not simply the bottom line.
This transformation also means ensuring your employees are trained to ask the right questions and empowered to make choices promoting brand positivity.
When you do, you can turn customers who came to your call center with problems into promoters, which is better advertising than you can buy. Consider this: consumers find referrals from a brand’s customers to be two to 10 times more trustworthy than paid ads. When customers voluntarily promote brands they love, other consumers listen.
Has that staggering statistic encouraged you to start turning your customers into promoters with a loyalty center? If so, here’s how to go about it:
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Align KPIs with Culture
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics you can track to monitor how your call center (or business in general) is doing.
There are KPIs for almost everything, including customer churn and retention rates. But just because you can track virtually every aspect of your call center doesn’t mean you should — paying too much attention to the wrong KPIs can lead to information overload and cause you to lose sight of the metrics that matter.
If you want your KPIs to work for you, they must align with your company culture. Let’s say one of your company’s core goals is to provide exemplary customer service. You must track KPIs like first-call resolution rates and customer satisfaction instead of average call handling times to deliver on this promise.
Empower Call Centers to Provide Proactive Service
Once you’ve aligned your KPIs with your culture and company values, it’s time to empower your service center agents. Specifically, you want to allow them to provide proactive service to your customers. Proactive customer service means letting a customer know in advance about a problem and sharing the solution you’re putting in place to relieve the inconvenience. This inevitably leads to better customer retention and improved loyalty.
Train Agents to Ask the Right Questions
Resolving problems on the first call will go a long way toward boosting loyalty and helping you turn clients into promoters. However, agents must first learn to ask the right questions if they want to resolve calls efficiently.
Every question your call center agents ask should define the scope of the client’s issues, and not every question is part of a script.
Asking the right questions and taking the time to listen to a customer’s response will make them feel valued and understood. Additionally, the information the agent gathers by asking these questions will enable them to resolve the issue more thoroughly.
Ultimately, more effective communication will reduce the need for follow-up calls and decrease the workload on your support agents.
Starting Your Transformation
Ready to reshape your call center into a loyalty hub that makes customers eager to promote your brand? If so, the first step is tapping into the right data.
Before you can overhaul your service center, you need to know where your brand currently stands with its customer base. Conducting extensive data analytics on customer satisfaction, churn rate, and other relevant metrics will help you pinpoint which areas are causing friction among clients.
Once you know where you’re falling short, you can proactively remedy these issues and turn your call center into a loyalty-nurturing machine. After you’ve leveled up your call center and support agents, you can convert quietly loyal customers into fervent promoters of your brand.
