How Can I Deliver an Amazing Customer Service Experience?
These days, great retail is about delivering an amazing experience to your customers…again and again and again………right? Not only do consumers crave great products at great prices they also want to experience great service whilst they interact with your brand too!
So, if that’s what consumers expect, then it is imperative that you manage your customer experience across all the touch points of your brand, which includes your physical outlets as well as your virtual ones.
So what can you do?
A contact centre maybe the answer…
Ouch! That’s gonna be expensive! Right?
Not necessarily, you could find you’re able to create efficiencies by looking closely at what you are already doing on a day-to-day basis.
How will that help?
You can start by ask yourself a few questions about your current in-store customer experience, such as:
How many queries do I get a week?
What topics are these queries about?
How well do these queries get answered?
What similarities are there about these queries from store to store?
Is there a pattern?
On average, how long does it take to answer the query?
Who within your organisation is handling the query? Is it an appropriate team member i.e. not the store manager?
In total, how many minutes are spent researching and answering customer queries a week across all your stores?
How much does that cost your business?
How satisfied is the customer with your response? How do you know?
I am going to go out on a limb and state that most of you won’t know the answers to these questions!
We worked with a retailer recently to perform a time and motion study in one store in order to answer these questions.
The answers were scary and highlighted the high costs involved with servicing ad-hoc customer queries in-store. What was even more frightening was the lack of control over the quality of answers to those queries, and the absence of management information reporting the levels of customer satisfaction with the end result.
What is the solution to Customer Service?
A contact-centre approach could allow you to centralise the service, manage the responses, gain insight into common issues/queries that will allow you to provide a consistent and high quality response, control costs and measure the volume of contact and provide the right level of resources at the right time.
This solution can then be provided across all your channels providing a further level of consistency and control over the quality of experience that you provide. In addition, your contact-centre staff have the opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell to on-line consumers too.
There are a number of technology solutions available that tie-in email, live chat, Twitter, Facebook and telephony into one management solution allowing you to control all your customer interactions.
And guess what? When you centralise and manage the solution it is actually cheaper than the ad-hoc in store service solution you have today!
Imagine – Observe – Measure – Evolve.
Improve your business and your bottom line.