So, you got a business and people are calling you....now what? Well you need to start thinking about how those calls are going to be handled and the cusomer experience or journey they go on to becoming and staying a customer. Something that most big businesses seem to forget!. Well, lets assume that you make and receive a lots of calls each day which means you should be looking at investing in some kind of communications platform. The first or most natural place to start is with a telephone system. Phone systems in a black box as they used to be are now very different and come in many shapes and sizes. For the purposes of this article we shall leave the "Black box" out of the equation and concentrate on how the business operates and how your customers act. So, how do you provide a service when you are not there ? With modern telephone systems it is possible to have an attendant that takes calls when a human operator is not available or if the office is closed. It can provide the caller with some information or allow them to leave a message. EXAMPLE: The other week I remember calling a company 5 times to try and give them a piece of business. For the life of me I couldn't give it away. The phone just kept ringing, and I didn't know if they were on holiday, not there, closed down or what. So I spent my money with somebody else, who later I found out, backed the work off to the first company I called ' How do you identify your top/priority customers as they call in and greet them accordingly ? Modern systems can now identify a caller as the call arrives. This information can be displayed on a screen or handset. When the system is merged with your data network you can also have customer records from your contact management software pushed onto the screen before you pickup the handset and take the call. EXAMPLE: When I call our local chinese restaurant they know who I am and what I usually order. They greet me with "Good evening Mr Windley, would you like your usual?" Wow - that is customer service!! How do you direct calls based on operator skills and customer needs ? If you can identify the caller, where they have called from or even get them to indicate their basic requirement first you can begin to divert calls to operators based on the specific or individual requirements of the caller, such as language or product knowledge. EXAMPLE: Claims solicitor deal with many calls some from callers that do not speak very good english. If you could provide a specific number for these callers to use that was routed through your phone system to operators with those langauge skills, that sale, and the likely hood of another is increased even further. How do you make sure you have your customer records to hand even before you pickup up the phone? Well thats easy, using the same technology as described earlier, we can arm ourselves with information about the caller from any number of sources and have it pushed onto a screen. How do you give your customer choice when deciding on how to engage with your business from internet to email to phone call? By intergating your voice, data and other applications customers can choose when or wether to call you, email you, fax or make a VoIP call directly from your web site. With an integrated system you don't have to worry about where the contact is coming from. If done properly a multi contact system will route your incoming communication to one place - i.e. the inbox of your email account. EXAMPLE: Ebay recently purchase Skype because they could see a demand from their customers to transition from contact via the web site or email to concluded a sale over the phone. People love to talk so why not make the process of transitioning from the auction site to a voice call easy and FREE (at the time of writing this)!! |
