Providing inherently good customer service to your paying consumers is no longer an option. Today, it’s a necessity. Current market trends show that satisfactory customer experiences massively dictate the difference between customer retention and attrition. As a result, it is important to keep customers at the forefront when making strategic decisions in your business operations. And outsourcing contact center services to a professional call center company in your industry is the first step toward customer-centricity. This enables superior customer experience deliveries and helps you offer satisfactory services to ensure maximum customer retention and revenue inflow.
However, the customer service industry is progressing rapidly, and primitive customer engagement practices can only get you so far in the current landscape. As a result, modern businesses have been forced to come up with innovative approaches to engage customers for improved retention. Some businesses have resorted to offering pricing benefits in the form of discounts and package deals. At the same time, others have made significant attempts to improve the quality of their product/service offerings without increasing prices. These practices have certainly improved the value of their products/services in combination with professional inbound and outbound call center services.
Enabling your business to enjoy a competitive edge
However, they aren’t enough to enable your business to enjoy the competitive edge in a highly-aggressive landscape. Every other business out there is also doing the same thing with their customers. So, how do you make your business appear at the forefront with major differences apart from product/service quality? But, before we get to that, let’s understand the importance of the professional services offered by outsourcing call center companies.
Why do you need the professional services of an outsourcing contact center?
To the modern customer, satisfactory CX is an outright guarantee rather than a genuine expectation. Without satisfactory experiences, customers do not even hesitate for a second before moving over to a competitor for their purchases. What’s more? Some customers even post negative online reviews condemning a brand due to its poor customer service, negatively impacting its reputation. This results in further loss of customers and revenues, while clients and vendors also often back out of business agreements. As a result, negative customer engagements can significantly ruin businesses and hamper their chances of thriving in their respective industries.
Hence, the professional services of an inbound and outbound call center can be of immense value to your business operations. Their superior customer experience deliveries will ensure positive customer relationships, which will, in turn, foster brand loyalty and increase retention. At the same time, it will also help you maintain a positive brand reputation, creating an incredible brand identity. What this does for you is that it will get you the customers that are unhappy with your competitors’ services. When they look for another company in the industry that can meet their needs, they will look to you. This way, you gain new customers to help you with your customer acquisition practices. At the same time, you may also acquire new customers through referrals from your current customers.
Things to consider about outsourcing contact center
However, the important thing to consider here is how to stand out in a highly competitive marketplace? You can get unhappy customers from your competitors with a positive brand identity and satisfactory customer experience management. But how do you attract those customers that are already happy with their current service providers? To establish supremacy in the industry, you must think beyond your current practices instead of settling into a comfort zone. You could just settle into delivering competent customer service by engaging an outsourcing contact center company. But that will do very little to make you stand out in the sea of other companies offering similar products/services. You need to do something unique that will make your brand different from the dozens of other companies out there.
Proactive outbound call center services are the answer!
What is proactive customer support? Unfortunately, there is quite a confusion among businesses regarding the definition of proactive customer support and all that it entails. Proactive customer support includes preventative customer engagements taken by businesses to minimize customer issues by initiating communications with them. How is it different from standard customer service practices, you ask? Well, let’s consider an example.
When a customer faces issues with a product or service they purchased from your company, they contact a brand representative. They explain their problems to the agent, who will then identify the cause with adequate probing and determine appropriate resolutions. The agent from the outsourcing contact center may use internal and external resources to identify the issues and corresponding solutions. But they will only be able to help the customer when the latter contacts them with their problems and queries. Therefore, it is the customer who must initiate the interaction in order to get the desired solutions to their problems. This is reactive customer support, where the contact center representative reacts to customer concerns and offers appropriate resolutions to them.
Different Approach
Now, let us consider a different approach. Imagine that your brand has received multiple complaints about a specific aspect of a product or service you offer. Due to these repeated complaints, you analyze customer interactions to identify the problematic area with that particular product or service. Next, you draw up a list of all customers that have purchased that product or service from your company. Finally, with this information at your disposal, you start contacting these customers regarding a prevalent issue with the product/service. These customers may not have experienced the problem yet, but you contact them nevertheless, informing them about the issue. You initiate the communication with the professional services of an outbound call center and notify your customers about potential concerns.
Once you initiate communication, you can determine whether the product/service they have may cause problems for the customers or not. If there are chances of any problems, you take preventative measures to rectify the situation even before the issues occur. This will ensure that your customers don’t have to experience problematic products/services during their association with your brand. As a result, they are likely to feel valued and appreciated, which will significantly improve their loyalty to your brand.
How can you deliver superior proactive customer support?
Modern contact center companies are attempting to make radical changes to their customer service operations to deliver comprehensive customer support. While some companies utilize high-level data management systems to deliver proactive customer support, others are switching toward AI-powered applications. Innovative technologies like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) are being aggressively utilized to maximize customer engagements. When used efficiently, AI-powered solutions can be of great value to your business in delivering superior proactive customer support.
Outsourcing contact center companies have always recorded customer interactions for quality analysis purposes. However, manual processes meant that only 2-5 percent of all recorded calls were ever considered for quality analysis. As a result, companies had access to a very small sample to monitor agents’ performances or identify customer expectations. This often limited their ability to provide proactive customer support, and businesses had to rely largely on reactive customer support. However, modern AI-powered innovations have completely changed the face of modern contact center solutions for businesses across industry verticals.
Automating Contact Center Solutions
RPA has been instrumental in automating contact center operations, especially with the quality analysis of recorded customer interactions. Today, contact centers are able to analyze 100 percent of all recorded customer interactions instead of the previous 2-5 percent. During quality analysis practices, NLP is used to determine the Voice-of-Customer (VOC) and identify potential areas that need addressing. This can help outbound call center companies identify potential issues with the products and services offered by their clients. Once they do so, they can easily contact these customers with appropriate resolutions, delivering best-in-class proactive customer support.
How can proactive customer support radicalize your business operations?
Proactive customer support can help your business in multiple ways. These include:
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Delivering superior CX
With proactive customer support, your customers will receive solutions even before they experience a problem with your products or services. This will ensure seamless experiences for your customers, ensuring satisfactory relationships between your brand and your customers.
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Avoid customer pain points
With competent and effective proactive customer support, you can identify small problems before they become impossible-to-resolve pain points for customers. This will help your business avoid negative customer experiences that could easily result in high customer attrition rates.
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Build customer loyalty
When your customers feel valued due to the proactive customer support offered by the outbound call center, they are likely to be more loyal to your brand. They may also help you with your customer acquisition by referring their friends and family to your brand.
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Valuable data-driven insights
With 100 percent analysis of customer interactions, your business can get valuable data-driven insights into customer experiences and expectations. This will help you make strategic business decisions that can propel your brand to the forefront of the industry.
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Reduce incoming customer communications
With proactive customer support, you are essentially nipping problems in the bud. This will reduce customer problems, in turn reducing their need to contact your customer support department for assistance with issues. This will also allow you to focus more time, effort, and resources on your business’s core competencies.
Engaging an outsourcing contact center to deliver efficient and effective proactive customer support can be the best business decision ever. It can eventually prove to be the difference that will help you enjoy a competitive edge over other companies in the industry that offers similar products/services as your brand.
