While brands spend lavishly on acquiring customers, many fail to retain them by providing quality customer experiences. But that’s exactly what customers want from brands. Nearly 73% of customers expect companies to understand their needs, but only 51% of them say that companies can understand them.

This showcases a drastic divide between customer expectation and reality, and this can have a direct impact on your sales and revenue. That’s because customers not only want but expect brands to deliver great customer service.

In fact, about 84% of customers say that the experience that they have with a company is as important as the products or services that the company offers. And if you’re a B2B company, this rises to 89%.

So, if you’re not paying attention to your customers yet, it’s high time that you start doing so, else you might end up losing them. Your goal should be to strive to improve your customer service, which can affect your customer experience. 

That said, here are various strategies that you can implement to improve the quality of your customer support and phone calls.

1. Personalize Your Service

Personalization can play an important role when it comes to improving the quality and speed of your customer service calls. This is because 62% of customers expect brands to adapt based on their behavior and actions. By personalizing your support operations, you’ll instantly be able to please this section of customers. 

Also, personalization would mean that you would have a past record of the customer’s calls and problems. If your customer support team has this information handy, it can potentially improve the average handle time (AHT) too.

For this, it’s recommended that you incorporate a CRM (customer relationship management) platform into your customer service strategy. These platforms can help your support team understand all about past interactions with your customers, which can help with personalization.

2. Empathize With Your Customers

It’s critical to empathize with your customers as they would most likely be facing some issue when they get in touch with your customer support teams. When they’re experiencing such frustration, even the slightest of misses can lead to the situation escalating out of hand. 

To train your team to handle this, you should consider leveraging call transcription services like ours. Through the transcripts, you can show your team how they’ve been responding to the customers. Then, you can suggest improvements to what can be said during such situations.

Alternatively, you can choose to use our AI-powered automated transcription service that can transcribe all your calls in real-time. This can also help you keep an eye on how your team is performing after the training sessions.

3. Broaden the Knowledge Base

Nearly 78% of customers want their issues to be resolved by speaking to a single person. This puts immense pressure on your team as they’d need to know how to troubleshoot a wide range of problems to satisfy the customers. 

In such a situation, it helps to conduct regular training sessions to tackle new issues brought up by the customers. You can take those call recordings and bring up the issue during training sessions and explain how it can be resolved. 

To further boost the effectiveness of your training sessions, you could get a transcript for the calls as well. This can ensure that even if the call recording isn’t up to the mark, you’ll be able to drive home your message well.

And that’s not all.

You could also create a powerful database of all the major issues faced by your customers. Your team can refer to this database to resolve the queries quickly, hence reducing the average handle time (AHT). This, in turn, can decrease the average time in queue and increase the average speed of answer (ASA).

4. Share Best Practices

One of the best approaches that you can adopt to improve your customer support and service calls is that of sharing the best practices with your team. While doing so, it always helps to teach with examples.

Whenever a good call is identified, you should organize a training session where everyone can listen to it and read the transcript as well. You can then pick out the important parts of the call and share insights with the team to help improve their customer service skills.

Also, it helps to create videos of these training sessions to ensure that your team can revisit them whenever they want. To make these videos more user friendly, you could leverage our captioning services to add captions to them. 

5. Clear Communication

The goal of customer support and service is to ensure that your customers clearly understand what you have to say. After all, there’s no point of customer support if your customers aren’t able to understand what your team is talking about. 

Besides, clear communication can also improve the average handle time (AHT) and reduce the average time in queue. It’s because you won’t have to reiterate your message multiple times for the customer to understand it. 

So, you should train your team to:

• Speak clearly, such that they’re audible without any issues.
• Communicate in the local language.
• Explain only the essential details without beating around the bush.
• Set a supportive and helping tone. 
• Communicate the hold times effectively.

It always helps to teach this with examples. Whenever you find a good call that ticks all the right boxes, make sure that you use it as a model to follow. Similarly, keep an eye out for calls that fall out of place and use those to help your team understand what they must not do.

6. Incorporate Customer Feedback

Asking your customers for inputs is a great way of improving your customer support and service call quality and speed. After all, they know exactly what works for them and what puts them off. 

You could conduct telephone surveys or send out emails to your customers to ask for their feedback. One of the other methods that many businesses apply is that of asking the customer to leave feedback post the call. 

While all of these methods are great, don’t just stick to the simple 1-10 rating scale for the entire call. Instead, ask a few important questions that can help you identify the root of the problem. 

Some of the questions you can ask are:

• Did you have to hold the call for too long to get to our agents?
• How quick was your issue resolution?
• Did the customer support agent understand your problems well?
• Was your call transferred to multiple agents before the issue was resolved?
• Did the agent come across as rude?

Based on the feedback, you can hold training sessions that will target the main issues faced by your customers. After all, getting to know your customers is crucial to your company’s long-term success.

7. Leverage Multiple Channels

When you’re scaling up, you need to be able to cater to your customers at all touchpoints. Also, channels such as live chat have become important for businesses. In fact, 52% of consumers say that they’re more likely to repurchase from businesses that offer live chat support and technical support.

But how can this help you improve your customer support call quality and speed?

As your customer base grows, so will the number of customer service calls. This can lead to long waiting times for your customers. 

When you diversify your customer support to multiple channels, your customers will be able to reach your team through the channel of their choice.

At the same time, it’ll take the load off your phone support team and reduce the average time in queue too.

Final Thoughts

Customer support is an essential ingredient of any brand’s marketing and growth strategy. Without solid support and service, you’ll find it difficult to retain customers and promote brand loyalty.

Start by personalizing your customer service and incorporating CRMs to do it effectively. Also, train your team to empathize with your customers and understand their problems.

You should also regularly conduct training sessions to expand your team’s knowledge base and share the best practices for support calls with them. It’s also critical to show them how to communicate clearly.

What’s more, you ask?

Make sure you ask your customers for feedback and implement it to improve your service. Finally, diversify your customer support by allowing your customers to reach out to you through multiple channels.