A great customer experience starts with great customer service. A recent American Express study revealed that many small businesses are beginning to understand that focusing on caring for their customers is one of the smartest business decisions they’ll ever make.
Customer service extends from before purchase all the way through a repeat purchase or continuing relationship with loyal customers—the building blocks for business success over time. To get loyal customers, you need:
- A customer-centric team
- Streamlined communication between employees and customers
- A focus on the customer journey
- The ability to anticipate needs and exceed expectations
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Want to know how to elevate your customer service strategy to offer a better customer experience? We’ve got you covered. Just follow these simple steps:
1. Simplify employee and customer communications
If you want a job done right, you have to use the right tools. Give your employees the tools they need to communicate effectively with customers. Look for a communications solution that can help you:
- Engage with employees and customers across phone, business SMS, videoconferencing, and messaging on one unified cloud platform.
- Separate business from personal with the option to keep your current number or get your own local, global, or toll-free numbers and stay connected wherever work takes you. Even send professional SMS and MMS from your business number.
- Reduce staff burden with customizable, self-service Interactive Voice Response (IVR) that helps customers do simple, straightforward tasks independently and conveniently. This is a huge opportunity given that 79% of customers would rather self-serve than use human-assisted support channels.
- Route customer calls to the right person with automated call routing. Currently, 83% of customers expect to engage with someone immediately when contacting a company.
If you’re struggling with poor internal team collaboration and customer experience, then it’s time to reevaluate your communications solution. A modern communications system can make all the difference: customers can quickly reach the right employees and employees can collaborate with one another or customers easily.
2. Strengthen customer service and staff efficiency
When it comes to customer service, it’s crucial to maximize productivity. One way to do so is through reporting tools, so you can easily track the real-time performance of your customer service, sales, and telemarketing staff.
Below are a few things to keep an eye out for in a communications system if you want to increase operational agility and leverage insights to improve employee productivity and customer satisfaction.
- Track customer engagement across the entire customer experience by seeing when customers come into a queue, how long they waited, who they were routed to, how long they’ve been engaged, and what the outcome was.
- Improve customer service quality by identifying calls that indicate a need for coaching. Monitor on-hold calls, agent availability, missed calls, and overall service levels to improve performance.
- Ensure proper staffing levels by analyzing queues and spotting emerging patterns in call traffic to prevent queue overload. Drill down into each location to adjust resources to support heavy call volumes.
- Get real-time and historical insights by monitoring call queues, using a line of business analytics, and viewing dashboards that track the performance of customer service representatives, as well as the overall customer experience.
With 83% of consumers citing good customer service as the most important factor when deciding what to buy, it’d be wise to strengthen your customer service strategy and staff operations through powerful data and insights.
3. Scale your operations affordably
Let’s be real—if you own a small business, cost is one of the most important factors you have to consider with anything you try to do. It costs money to provide great customer service, for sure, and that cost can grow as your customer base grows.
That’s why you need customer service tools that can scale with you. Think of ways you can grow your customer service and sales communications using one secure app from one vendor to improve your Return on Investment (ROI). Ditch the expensive price tags that come with using multiple tools from a long list of different vendors.
There are communications systems that can grow with your business to give you the best bang for your buck in the long run. When looking for a system that can grow with you, look for the following:
- Set up new lines and team members instantly with easy-to-use configuration tools. Supervisors can easily use out-of-the-box templates as well as customizable dashboards to track KPIs, trends, and more without the need for technical expertise.
- Stay connected, always. Look for 99.999% uptime availability so that your carrier-grade infrastructure works day and night to keep you online, anytime. Easily manage your remote teams from anywhere—even on your mobile device.
- Get one bill from one vendor for all your business communications and manage all your customer communications with a dedicated support team.
- Simplify workflows by connecting your phone to your business’s most popular apps, like Salesforce, Google, Zendesk, and Hubspot, to name a few. Here’s a fun fact: 42% of customer service agents are unable to efficiently resolve issues due to disconnected systems. Start tightening the connection between your systems by taking advantage of integrations.
With scalable communications, you can constantly evaluate your customer service strategies and make adjustments on the fly. Implement the features you need now and have the freedom to upgrade later.
Make every customer conversation count
Your customer service is only as good as the people who are providing it. By investing in your team and giving them the tools they need to be successful, you can ensure that your customers have a positive experience every time they interact with your business.
Many small businesses are not yet ready to make the investment in a fully-featured call center solution. You need an affordable solution that meets the needs of your small business, both now and in the future.
Start creating a better customer experience from beginning to end with the advanced functionality of combining RingCentral MVP™ and Live Reports.
With RingCentral’s Customer Service Essentials bundle, your business can use unified communications and real-time analytics to simplify employee and customer communications, and strengthen customer service and staff efficiency. Unlike other solutions in the market, Customer Service Essentials provides a simple yet market-leading global solution from one vendor with high reliability and an affordable price that businesses can use to scale their operations.
🌟 Get the ideal customer experience with RingCentral’s Customer Services Essentials, starting at just $52.99. Take advantage of a complete phone system that delivers value with customer service capabilities.
Why wait to provide the best customer experience possible? Learn more about RingCentral’s Customer Services Essentials offering today!
Originally published Jul 14, 2022, updated Dec 30, 2022
