Foolproof ways to improve customer service

As a business owner, you are probably thoroughly accustomed to hearing the advice that customer retention is cheaper than customer acquisition. This certainly holds true in e-commerce, where you may need to keep paying more for clicks and conversions.

Still, you might remain none the wiser about how exactly to charm customers into making repeat purchases. It can all start with your customer service, which you could tweak by following these tips.

Consider the metrics of CSat, NPS and CES

If you have never heard of any of the above three acronyms, you could understandably mistake them for university degree prefixes. They do look very technical at first, but you can waft away much of your confusion when you consider how each metric measures an aspect of customer sentiment.

CSat is short for “customer satisfaction”; it refers specifically to customer happiness, explains Customer Think. In that respect, CSat differs from NPS, which records customer loyalty. Naturally, then, pushing up your firm’s CSat score can benefit its NPS figure, too.

However, don’t overlook CES, a metric concerning how well you handle customer issues. Therefore, CES can help you to track the source of customer grievances, making it useful for shedding light on how exactly your company’s customer service could be improved.

How quickly are you resolving customer issues?

To collect data for calculating your company’s CSat score, you could conduct customer surveys. Indeed, at Planet Telecom, we can help you to carry out post-call surveys; however, there remain factors that you can measure yourself without needing to ask a customer for their opinion.

Those factors include First Call Resolution (FCR) – defined as whether, over the phone, you are helping customers not only as quickly as possible but also without the necessity of follow-up calls. There’s also the question of Average Wait Time (AWT) – in other words, how long a customer is left waiting before they meet an agent capable of addressing their requirements.

It’s also worth thinking about the Abandonment Rate; that refers to how long a customer stays on hold before they hang up. The higher the caller abandonment rate, the higher the caller’s evident frustration, you could theorise. However, what if you fail even to pick up the phone at all?

Make your company truly available to callers

Naturally, if you fail to answer a customer’s call, you can’t deliver customer service of any quality via that call. However, you might not always be able to answer such calls…or, more to the point, you and your staff might not be so capable. There are many good potential reasons why.

For example, the office might be closed, whether as a matter of routine or in the wake of a crisis. On the other hand, all of your lines might simply be engaged already. These are situations where a business answering service could save your bacon – you never know how valuable that call could turn out to be. We offer an answering service for your company’s ready use.