[5 Tips]: How To Improve Customer Interaction To Make Contact Center Business More Profitable

Customer interactions are the building blocks of a business. Every conversation either drives a sale, tries to retain, or nurtures a customer. This means every conversation has the potential to improve your business, increase your revenue and elevate your reputation. Preserving customer loyalty is important for every enterprise. Hence, the entire organization should focus on how to improve the quality of conversations and engage them better. 

Contact Center Solution runners know that there is value in every conversation. They know conversations cannot be planned and that agents need to pick up the pace spontaneously. In fact, every interaction also reveals a lot of essential data. This information can reveal a lot about the performance of the company. 

Even when a new customer contacts your brand, the first conversation will decide their opinion of your business. It will influence their decisions on whether or not to choose your business. This is why customer interactions can make or break a brand. In this blog, we will discuss what improvements in customer interaction will lead to more acquisition and success. 

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According to the Qualtrics XM Institute, almost 80% of customers will forgive or let go of faulty products or services, if they had a nice interaction with the service team. On the other hand, if the service is poor and so is the interaction, the customer is very less likely to come back. That is exactly how powerful and effective communication can be:

Now, just as bad news travels fast, good news does too, especially when we have the internet now. These days positive feedback goes viral as much as poor ones. It is important that you take benefit of this and encourage fruitful conversations between the customer and your service team. 

1. First Impressions are Important:

New or potential customers are always on their toes. They will view your products with peak scepticism before purchasing or investing. This is where your agent or salesperson has to sit and listen to the customer. They have to identify the customer’s needs, circumstances, and financial capacity. Based on this, they can rightfully pitch a product that will appeal to them. 

Moreover, in the first interaction, the customers do not seek sales information. They seek assurance whether they can trust your brand or not. Hence, educate your customer and build trust. Once this step is completed, the customer will freely and positively make a decision that is in your favour. 

2. Retention is Cheaper than Acquisition:

You can never really retain a customer if you do not know what the problem is. Customer interactions reveal how your customers want to be treated. They educate you about your product problems, service lag and agent behavior. It gives you detailed insights like if your service is wrongly priced, or if you are treating the wrong audience. A good service CRM Helpdesk should be used to capture the data. All these data can help your team to learn, and innovate. Your business leaders can make informed decisions and remove all friction. This helps your agents to retain customers much more easily or remove any setbacks altogether. 

3. First Call Resolution leads to Customer Satisfaction:

Customer interactions also pave the path for first call resolution. During the entire customer journey, all the choices the customer made becomes important information for the agent. When an agent receives a call from a customer for the first time, he or she can go through previous interaction notes such as purchase information, plan chosen, billing address, and more. With this information at hand, the agent can familiarize himself with the customer even before responding. This also improves your telephony containment rate, reducing resources wasted on other channels. With call barging or call whispering capability, contact center leaders can coach the agents in resolving customer issues and leading to better FCR (first call resolution). 

4. Customers Need to be Engaged:

Modern customers have a strong need to be engaged or else your brand will be lost in a sea of choices. Every interaction ensures that the customer is reminded of your business, your offerings, and your capabilities. When a business is continuously engaging its audience on social media, email, SMS, or voice, they are actually building relationships. They are sharing brand knowledge like product updates, holiday discounts, troubleshooting tips, and more. These in return make the customer experience premium and valuable. It ensures the customer that the brand is transparent, accessible, and reliable. Such successful marketing efforts keep you afloat in any crowded industry.

5. Agents Learn Better from Recordings:

Nobody knows how a customer will react in a situation. You prepare them for the worst but it is still a gamble. That is why most Cloud Contact Center Solution record calls or conversations. They retrieve them during training sessions. The most unique customer interactions get used as examples to train the agents. Such real-life examples help them gauge the situation better and allow them to learn new skills. 

For example, an angry customer called in previously and an agent did not have the required knowledge at the moment to resolve the issue. He started using foghorns and delaying his responses while maniacally looking for help.  Such situations are bad for business. Your customer gets frustrated and eventually walks away. Recordings of such previous incidents which were well-handled can offer essential emotional and social insights to the agents. 

This helps in preparing your agents, especially the freshers for different kinds of customers who might call in. These training programs ensure that your agents do not get cold feet and perform better at their job. 

It is clear that customer conversations are an essential source of information. They are much like direct customer feedback that can reveal a lot about any organization. From sentiment analysis to training your agents, these interactions can assist a lot. With a little bit of vision, you can leverage these for preparing an ideal customer support department that will suit your business.

In fact, with better tools, you can collect data in real-time and have a positive impact on your customers. Over time, these historical data will reveal more customer contexts and help you to personalize even further. Hence, invest in the right tools to reap the benefits of customer interactions and offer an excellent experience.