Having a customer experience strategy is essential to achieving high customer retention rates, reduced customer churn, and increased revenues. That’s why it should be a priority for every business. In this episode of “Quora Corner”, David walks you through how customer service can help scale your businesses, what technologies are trending, and some tips on how to start building your CX team.
Transcript:
Hey guys my name is David Sudolsky and I’m CEO and founder of Boldr, today we’re gonna answer some questions from Quora.
Question: How can a call center help you get more customers for a business?
Answer: I think a really key metric here would be NPS or Net Promoter Score. Basically, the concept here is how are your clients or customers acting as a brand ambassador for you or your company. You really want to make sure that you’re zeroing in on where people are falling or where people are bad or disappointed with your experience and how to triage and support those.
I think as long as people are happy and they realize that their support ticket was dealt with quickly and their questions were answered that’s good. But where you really want to make sure you’re not falling down on is allowing people to be dissatisfied with their experience and not really trying to resolve those. And from there, you’re gonna win new business.
Q: What are the customer experience strategy trends of 2018?
A: Trends in 2018! I love this question I think it’s something that a lot of people have been wondering about and a lot of things that we’ve been seeing. I’ll share some of them.
So the biggest one I think was the chatbot. This was “hey how can we deflect tickets?” This was really an idea that people wanted to have a chatbot in their customer support to be able to deflect tickets that were quite easy. This worked I think for the most part some really simple questions were answered and things that were really easily scripted. However, as soon as the robot or the chatbot needed to answer a little bit more complex questions I think that’s when the human intervention really was there. If companies were aligned as to where they wanted the chatbot to intervene and where they needed humans to answer there was a success. But if companies just implemented this without really thinking it through it kind of failed.
Another one would be moving from voice support to non-voice support. We saw a lot of our clients prioritizing and investing in other channels outside of just the traditional email support and moving into chat and to moving into other social media platforms as well.
Another big theme would be leveraging artificial intelligence, data science, machine learning or whatever you want to call it in order to incorporate automation and workflows into your customer support and customer experience.
Q: Are call centers and business process outsourcing at the risk of being rendered obsolete by progress in machine learning?
A: Yes. However, I really believe that the more and more complex the solution or process or task being executed is technology will not be able to get there yet. What we’re seeing when we talked to other automation companies is that the scripted process-driven work will be displaced by technology. It’s just a matter of time. Some of it’s already happening.
There are a lot of great AI companies out there that are actually working with outsourcing companies to be able to deliver a more BPO + human experience + technology.
Next Read: Answering Quora Questions: Outsourcing Advantages & Secrets
Bonus Question: Tips on developing your customer support team
A: So building a customer experience team is probably one of the most enjoyable aspects of my job or one of the things that I like the most.
One of the things that we really noticed that we work with our clients on doing is really helping them understand the career path of a customer advocate and where those people go. One of the things that we’ve noticed and we see across a large percentage of our clients is that this customer support team is the front lines of the organization. It’s the first job a person’s getting into when they come into your company and they usually get placed into this team.
For us, one of the most important things is their boot camp. This is the place for them to understand your culture and values. So really make sure that you invest in the training and on-boarding of who they are and what they do. Have them speak to the leaders of different departments. Have them understand your product and invest in their training so that way they can really understand and speak to why you guys exist.
The most important part there would be the interviews and understanding of why the founders started the company or the leadership team is there. Why does your company exist? I think that understanding and that nuance is really important in building a great customer support team.
The other thing that we’ve noticed with a lot of our clients is that when you build a great culture in your customer support team they get hired from within into different departments into different teams. To me, this is the most exciting aspect of working with our clients. What we do here is that when we build a remarkable team, other departments and functions want them because they know their company they’re aware of the industry they’re aware of the challenges and they want to help.
Thanks guys for watching! I hope you found this somewhat usable, somewhat helpful. If you like what you heard today, please like share subscribe and we’ll be back next week. Thank you!
Next read: Answering Quora Questions: Outsourcing Explained
