How to Build and Implement a World-Class Customer Contact Centre

As experience strategist Megan Burns warns in a TechTarget article: “It takes more than great products to woo buyers. They want to know working with you will be a good experience.” 

Naturally, that’s exactly the kind of experience you, as a business owner, want them to receive. Still, it’s not entirely straightforward to get a variety of customer-service staff working in tandem so that the customer doesn’t just end up getting fruitlessly passed from one contact to another. So, what should you do?

Make sure your core product or service is good quality 

Yes, it’s just been acknowledged that great products alone can’t suffice for impressing customers. At the same time, though, you can’t expect high-quality customer service to make up for bad-quality products.

Besides, by being stringent with the quality control processes for your product or service offerings, you can help to limit the number of customer complaints that arise in the first place — and so reduce the strain on your customer-service staff, helping them to meet other customers’ concerns.

Consider customer service everyone’s responsibility 

Admittedly, the use of the word ‘centre’ in this article’s title is somewhat misleading, as the job of supporting customers shouldn’t just be left to a specific department or team within your company.

In that sense, your customer contact ‘centre’ should really be more of a metaphorical one — as every single member of your team should be prepared for swiftly and effectively addressing and, hopefully, resolving customer concerns as and when they are raised.

Act as if the customer is always right 

Even if you honestly don’t always think they are right, you can still learn a surprising amount from your customers. Remember to treat all of these customers as you know you would like to be treated if you were in their situation.

As this LinkedIn article explains: “Even a complaining customer represents an excellent opportunity for more business.” After all, their feedback can show you exactly where your business needs to improve.

Use the right technology 

You certainly shouldn’t skimp on what technology you use to interact with customers. Trying to get by on a ‘make-do’ telecoms solution could significantly hamper your efforts to put customers at ease — and so, in the long run, ultimately cost you much more than investing in reliable communication tech in the first place.

To avoid a situation where — for example — you fail to notice someone’s instant message in time because you were paying a little too much attention to the phone, you could set up a unified communications (UC) system that would weave various contact channels into one.

Respond to customers quickly  

This would be another good incentive for you to get that UC system all up and running as soon as possible. Once it is in place, your employees could find themselves able to more easily pounce on customer calls, messages and so forth shortly after they actually arrive — as a customer left waiting for too long could be tempted to turn to one of your competitors instead.