More than thousands of articles are posted every day about growth strategies for a business. Certainly, there are many key areas and tactics which can inflate the growth of a business. But, what about sustaining that growth?
A business might continue to gain more and more customers every day but the main challenge lies in the retention of those customers. Unfortunately, most businesses overlook this crucial aspect. They keep on investing and expanding their sales team but don’t deem much on their customer support department.
Here’s something for entrepreneurs of the above category:
Businesses which focuses solely on winning new customers but don’t invest enough on retaining the existing ones, they are destined to fall off the wagon one day.
The success rate of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is only 5-20%!
Source: ISS Market Intelligence
The main challenge actually lies in serving your customers so well that they themselves bring you new customers, referrals what we commonly say. Earning the trust of your existing customers to that level that they recommend your name further is what encompasses the true growth of a company.
Here, it is quite axiomatic that one of the major means to earn the trust of customers is to serve them in the finest way possible, in all aspects.
Having said that, I understand that the biggest challenge for many companies would be ‘where to begin’.
So, here is this article as an answer to this precise question “how good customer experience leads to increased customer retention”.
All about Customer Experience
While businesses talk a lot about the importance of Customer Experience, there’s a surprising amount of confusion about just how important it really is for their existing customers.
The most common pitfall for businesses today is that they assume that if they have a great product or service, then customer retention will follow naturally.
Well, this is surely the basic component of customer retention, but what next?
Your product quality will be handled by your Teach team but your support team also needs to work on upgrading the level of customer service delivered.
Talking about upgraded service for your existing customers, it mainly includes how well they are responded. The way their queries are resolved after the payment, that is what accounts for good customer experience.
Calling customers just at the time of renewal is nowhere a sign of a company that is concerned about its customers. Rather, it just conveys how money is the only focus for a company like this.
On-call experience as a major part of overall CX
Talking about being responsive and responsible for your customers, the main mode of customer communication is usually the phone calls, followed by email and ticketing systems.
Where emails or ticket systems are usually used for comparatively less urgent issues, customers often prefer calls to connect with the customer care team. The logic is simple, it’s considered as a much faster and effective way of reaching out.
Live assistance has the highest satisfaction rate, with 69% of customers saying that their questions are fully addressed over the phone.
Source: Forrester
This is why your every ‘Hello’ to your customers matters the most. While very few companies today actually realize this fact, many other companies are still unaware of the importance of handling customer calls well.
Few examples of the same:
69% of customers said they were on hold for too long when seeking help from a company.
Source: Haris Interactive
26% of consumers have experienced being transferred from agent to agent without any resolution of their problem.
Source: American Express
84% of customers are frustrated when a representative does not have immediate access to account information.
Source: Mobius Poll
Now, this is not what customers of a credible and professional company would say. Putting the customers on hold, passing their call from one executive to another, making them repeat their issue for each one of them, all these attributes account for poor customer service.
Let’s face it, leaving the call unanswered or poorly handling it, that too of a customer who is facing serious troubles with your product only worsens the situation and instigates your customer to leave you for your competitor.
After all,
55% of customers would pay extra to guarantee better customer service. - Defaqto Research
As an effective resolution for this, here is when advanced call management solutions come into the picture which assists businesses in ensuring supreme customer service along with minimal manual intervention.
Call management solution for better Customer Experience
Most businesses use call management solutions primarily for driving new customers or building a professional image in front of them. Little do they realize its potential of automating the work for your customer care professionals as well.
Here at MyOperator, we extensively use our call management solution to facilitate our existing as well as new customers to connect with their concerned department in the fastest and easiest way possible.
To elaborate it further, here is a list of features of MyOperator solution that would significantly help your business in achieving top-level on-call experience for your customers:
1. Virtual Phone Numbers
The concept of virtual phone number is mostly used by businesses to eliminate the dependency of conventional phone systems and face network troubles with them. As a virtual mobile number forwards the calls to different phone numbers, it facilitates the team to attend multiple calls parallelly without being confined to their office desk/landline phones. Additionally, a toll free number further enhances accessibility for customers, fostering a seamless and convenient communication experience.
Features like these, certainly take your on-call customer experience one notch up as your professionals will be enabled to take customer calls from anywhere, anytime. Typical issues like network congestion of availability on their desk will no more be problematic. This will hence, significantly reduce the call drops and eliminate minimal chances of leaving your customer calls unanswered.
2. IVR menu
IVR added with a virtual phone number attends your customer calls professionally and even facilitate them to connect with their concerned department easily. The keypad menu provides detailed options to your callers and enables them to speak to the right executive as per their query.
With an IVR menu, you can allow your customers to connect with the team as per their concern directly. It basically will remove the need to transfer calls manually from one executive to another and drastically reduce the on-call waiting time for your customers. Additionally, you can even add language options for your customers to make their on-call experience with your business even better and advanced.
3. CRM Integrations
Let’s face it, good customer service is not done basis simple conversations– you need to have access to all the relevant data and information about your customers to be able to provide them with the appropriate resolution in minimal time. And, for the same CRMs prove to be the most important instrument.
Moving a step further, MyOperator call management solution can be easily integrated with your existing CRM to provide you with a complete overview of your customer activities. Your executives can have access to your customer’s registered details and even their previous interactions with your company. This will save the time of your executives to go through the details manually and also eliminate the need for your customers to give the same information repeatedly.
4. Extension dialling
If anything that irritates callers the most is waiting on hold to speak to the right executive. A call is received on the helpline number, random executive receives it, takes all the information of the customer and then provides a solution. Next time, some other executive receives the call, takes all the information once again, and accordingly forwards the call to the concerned executive ─ Now what could be more annoying than this?
So, a feature like extension calling makes the on-call interaction with the executive a lot easier and smooth. Each customer can be assigned a specific person of contact to resolve any kind of queries they face. Whenever requires, the customer can simply connect with the respective person by dialling the extension number. Not only it enables faster on-call resolution but also brings a sense of personalization for the customer. Concisely put, it empowers your customers with the convenience that they’ll always appreciate.
5. Call Masking
While dealing with consumers, one of the most important parts of the transaction is confidentiality. The entire thing about customer privacy is not just about keeping their history confidential but it also delves into keeping their personal data secured. And, this protection of the customer begins right from the first interaction, which in most cases, happens over the calls. The key aspect here is to provide your customers with an experience, much advanced than their imagination.
Call masking is an advanced feature that connects two parties on the call without disclosing their personal phone numbers. In the case of businesses, the caller dials the ‘masked’ number and the receiver also gets the call displaying a masked number. The solution, not only prevents the exchange of personal numbers but also provides complete recording, tracking and reporting of the on-call conversations.
6. Call Recording
Best of efforts towards any goal can’t be transformed into success if not monitored timely and effectively. Until all this while, we have been talking about how technology can make the efforts of your team easier to deliver promising customer service. But, all this is actually conveyed through your customer-facing professionals. And, if they don’t do it right, then all of this is just a wild goose chase.
Herein, proper recording of customer conversations serves as an appropriate and effective tool to supervise the way your team interacts with the customers. The recordings will empower you to get effective insights into your team performance and behaviour, and leverage key changes accordingly. Let’s face it, no customer would appreciate abrupt hang-ups or rude behaviour from a company professional.
At MyOperator, many of our customers utilise our solution to solidify their customer relationship by ensuring rapid response times and utmost convenience for them to connect with the professionals. They get back to their clients quickly, and their employees have been bought in on this by the advanced features provided to them as a part of our call management solution. ITC Limited, BarbequeNation, Bharat Petroleum Gas, being few of those businesses which have advanced the level of their customer experience with MyOperator.
The bottom line
When customers are rewarded with exceptional experiences, the effects on revenue and profitability are undisputed. And, to serve your customers in a superior way, you need a tool to aid you with the advance and requisite features. This is exactly what our call management solution does. It empowers your business to cultivate an ideal customer experience by making your journey to the end much easier and progressive.
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