Customer Service, Part I: Use Contact Centers to Treat Customers Like Royalty

The rise of the Internet has given way to a customer who is more informed about her buying options and more discerning about what constitutes good customer service. The challenge then becomes how to meet increasing customer expectations in a time of shrinking budgets and resources, according to the authors of “5 Contact Center Megatrends and How to Ride Them,” a whitepaper recently released by contact center software provider eGain.

In the whitepaper, eGain offers two tips to improve customer service in the contact center.

1. Think like your customers. While simple, this first step often is overlooked by contact center managers focused on the bottom line, eGain writes. You need to design service processes and scenarios from your customer’s perspective rather than your own.

Ask yourself the following questions, the whitepaper’s authors suggest. What would make it easy for your customers to do business with you? What kind of help do they need in the various phases of the customer lifecycle? One of the easiest ways to answer these questions is just to ask your customers.

2. Establish an evolving multichannel customer interaction hub. Using your customers’ answers to the previous questions, put together a road map for transforming your contact center and other customer-facing branches of your company into an organization that responds to changing customer expectations, the whitepaper’s authors write. This modular, multichannel customer interaction hub is a cost-effective way of providing your customers with the high-quality service they expect.

Be sure to establish a priority for any new customer interaction options, such as Web self-service, automated e-mail responses or Web chat based on what your customers actually want, what your business strategy is and what your competitors are offering. Any plan should also include measuring the strategic and operational benefits to convince senior management of its efficacy.

For a copy of “5 Contact Center Megatrends and How to Ride Them,” visit http://www.egain.com/best_practices/white_papers.asp.