How To Reduce Your Customer Service Costs In 5 Easy Ways?

A customer’s relationship with a company starts after a sale is made. The after-sales service, aka customer service, determines the state of this relationship. Thus, it is no myth that world-class customer service comes with a hefty price tag, and every contact center is grinding itself to reduce the customer service cost without affecting the quality of service.

Now, this can be a pretty tough job. One small mistake can potentially damage the brand’s reputation. In 2018, Forbes released a report stating how businesses lost $75 billion due to poor customer service. Significant organizations, regardless of their size or industry type, have come to recognize the influence of customer satisfaction over the years. Recurring issues and inefficient processes often drain the company’s resources making it a cost center rather than the revenue hub that it could be.

In order to reduce the costs made to a company due to customer service, one needs to equip their agents wisely. With the advent of great CRMs and other customer management solutions, it must not be much of a challenge in this day and age. Here's a list of few solutions which we deem to be fit for all kinds of organizations who are determined to reduce customer service cost.

 

 

Interactive Voice Response is an ideal tool for almost all customer service contact centers. The first advantage of IVR is that it replaces a receptionist and automatically greets the customer while segmenting them based on their issues. The IVR will automatically route the call to the most suitable agent for the particular problem, hence ensuring a seamless customer service experience. IVR reduces a considerable amount of time-loss and manual effort, especially for businesses that cater to a large pool of people. 

However, contact centers can be even more proactive with Visual IVR. It enables self-service for the customers who are tired of pressing '0' and waiting for the right department to answer. Visual IVR integrates easily with your website and reduces the utilization of a live-agent for most cases, thus reducing customer service costs. IVR containment rate is 2 to 3 times more in case of Visual IVR compared to DTMF IVRs.

Visual IVR also tends to gather information more accurately than regular IVR. If ever the agent is fielded in, they already have all the information needed in regards to the customer's problem, resulting in a minimum interaction time. 

Often customers hesitate from calling or emailing a company but since, the introduction of chatbots, that has changed. Chatbots have elevated the customer's level of satisfaction. They encourage a consistent service quality with less room for human error while aiding in effortless transactions, as well.
Chatbots are a cheaper alternative to hiring reps for a work that requires 24-hour availability for 365 days. This ‘always available’ servicing capacity makes chatbots an ideal component for the customer care contact center. Bots will be actively documenting all the customer interactions, providing you with accurate insights and metrics to aid you, improve your product further.

Chatbots can be integrated with different channels, sanctioning new methods to reach out to customers. Whatsapp Chatbots and Messenger Chatbots are an active part of almost every consumer out there. Companies are using these automated services as a part of their contact center solution to inform their audience about updates, new offers, and even providing active customer service on their preferred platform. 

Chatbots contain the potential to reduce high contact center costs by automating several complex tasks, and the best part is, they don't even request leaves.

Did you know that, on an average, an agent spends approximately 75 minutes a day looking for answers to the customer's queries? And while he or she is doing this, the customer waits on hold, probably getting delayed for their work and repelled by the customer service. As per Salesforce, 66% of customer service teams use knowledge bases, compared to 82% of customers who use knowledge bases.
A well-developed Knowledge base binds the customer service contact center together. Customers can also access the knowledge base through the FAQs and other options available on the website for a quick solution. 

Having a Knowledge base may seem like an insignificant factor, but it can have a tremendous impact on the business. Businesses are losing billions every year due to poor customer service, even after spending millions on the onboarding and training process. Thus, an administrative system that categorizes all product-related information is imperative. 

Knowledge Guide comes with a smart filter that allows you to segment access. This way, customers can also have precise control to self-serve through the provided FAQs on the website, further reducing agent-related costs. Furthermore, the Guide can be integrated with Chatbot and Live Chat to fuel a seamless customer service with minimal human interaction unless it is imperative.

The ingress of AI in the corporate world has opened up multiple possibilities, especially for customer service contact centers.Intelligent Virtual Assistants are becoming a conventional asset to every major customer-centric business. This versatile platform uses NLP and NLU to replicate almost accurate humanlike interaction. 

Virtual Assistants utilize neural network based system to mature gradually. This gives them the capacity for decision-making while managing more complicated tasks. Virtual Assistants truly harness the potential to replace human-agents someday unless the situation demands human assistance. Over the years, virtual assistants can be seen as an efficient way of cutting contact center costs while ensuring a stagnant quality of customer support.

Conclusion: 

As technology advances, it is of the essence that the businesses keep up with it. Outdated support systems will heavily drain out money with recurring shortcomings, and will eventually hurt the business in its revenue points. Losing out customers in this economy can do long-lasting damage. Customer support software is around every corner, aiming to diminish human-error, which reduces unwanted expenses while ensuring consistent first-class customer service.
We do not disregard human-to-human interaction. However, it can be encouraged only when needed, resulting in the strategic use of funds.
For more ideas on an all-encompassing customer service support system, feel free to visit our product page.