How to properly manage customers in a call center?

Call center agents can be the first and only point of contact with prospects and therefore often represent the face of customers. Each positive interaction between a prospect and a telephone advisor can turn them into a potential customer. The quality of customer relationship management in a call center is based on a good understanding of the target company's offering, and the prospect's journey through the conversion cycle, the pillar of a structured commercial approach. This last point brings together the history of information collected from multi-channel media (telephone, e-mail, chat).

Assign customer typologies per team to personalize the experience

Having a good knowledge of your different personas allows call center agents to gain the trust of their interlocutor and to better meet expectations.

For the experience to be optimal, it is essential that sales teams maintain a high level of interpersonal skills throughout the conversation. They represent the image of the call center. To guarantee the quality of the experience experienced by the prospect throughout the sales process, it is very often necessary to provide sales training for the teams in place, andbrief on the argumentsof sales to use and the correct telephone posture to adopt. All conversations must respect the values ​​and objectives of the call center.

Qualify the user's request with a chatbot or callbot

Conversational agents, chatbots and callbots, allow sales forces to focus on high value-added calls. Their roles and operations are still distinct. On one side we find the chatbot which responds in writing to the sound of the voice and keyboard input of the interlocutor. Then on the other, the callbot which provides an oral response using its voice recognition system.

These agents will pre-qualify incoming calls using keywords while providing a precise response. They also record any type of request (making a commercial or technical appointment, sending documents, etc.) and transmit the requests to the competent and available sales teams.

When you manage and optimize customer relations in your call center, make sure to analyze and improve the performance of the chatbot and callbot using key KPIs.

Remain polite and make a good impression on the prospect

All customers must be treated with respect. So, throughout every interaction, agents must remain calm, act rationally, and treat each customer equally. The notion of mutual respect also makes it easier to understand the prospect's needs and thus provide the best response. Telephone advisors must try to understand the causes of their need, realize how it affects their daily life and find solutions together, in peace.

Practicing active listening allows you to improve and clarify the request of the person you have on the phone. It’s also a way to show your interest. In addition to recognizing that there is a need, you must show that you have clearly identified and understood it. To do this, rephrase the question. You don’t want to launch into a monologue only to find out that that’s absolutely not what it’s about… that would be annoying for both parties. By clarifying things, you ensure you are on the right track and show your users your sincere desire to help.

Provide a self-service knowledge base

By providing a knowledge base bringing together articles related to your company's activity, you allow your advisors to access it very easily so that they can consult them in self-service at any time in order to best respond to the prospect/customer's request (for example: a list of questions frequently asked during incoming calls, product characteristics or even payment conditions, delivery, after-sales service, etc.).

A FAQ dedicated to prospects and customers can also be created to facilitate answers to questions they may ask, thus easing obstacles to the transaction.

Keep up to date with customer history

Transforming information relating to prospects and customers into a consolidated knowledge base, CRM brings together all multi-channel data within a single platform. Each call made or each marketing and/or commercial action corresponds to a prospect or customer file bringing together all of the contact's information, accessible and modifiable at any time by the advisors.

In addition, if your CRM is well connected to your company's other business software, you have access to a unified view of all prospect and customer data from the different departments, and can thus offer each employee a complete 360° view of interactions.

Answer the customer's query on the first call

In order to optimize the prospect-customer experience as much as possible, it is essential to avoid unnecessary reminders and improve waiting times. As a result, the rate of resolution of requests from the first call is conditioned by the ongoing training of advisors on the use of the self-service knowledge base, as well as by the identification of the most common requests with their appropriate responses in this base.

Don't make your prospects or customers wait any longer, even the most difficult ones! Responsiveness is one of the success factors in the experience lived by your interlocutors. Also, adapt to their impatience, their behavior, and continually improve the quality of your service to guarantee the proper management of incoming calls. This will allow you to convert more prospects into customers and optimize yourtelephone acquisition device.

At hipto, we train your telephone representatives so that they use the right sales pitches and adopt the best posture on the telephone. Interested?Contact us:

• contact@hipto.com

• +33 1 76 39 06 68

Sources:

• Phingoo

• Sales force

• Evolutis