Making a difference in customer service

Usually, companies hire contact center services with the primary purpose of responding efficiently to customer needs. However, with the right strategies and techniques, they not only respond to consumer complaints or queries, but can also generate revenue and make money for companies. In other words, your contact center can become a revenue center.

Obviously, there are telemarketing services where call centers have a defined function to make sales in a direct and specific way, either by receiving calls from people interested in acquiring the product or service, or by calling potential customers based on market research.

However, this time we will also show how customer service advisors and other customer experience (CX) tools can become powerful revenue generators. While HubSpot’s 2022 report indicates that nearly 40% of customer service leaders say they consider this area more of an expense than a growth driver, the reality is that Salesforce’s most recent State of Commerce study showed that nearly half of companies have already been able to close sales because of their customer service experiences.

Turn your advisors into brand ambassadors

In a contact center, customer service advisors are more than just problem solvers; they are part of the customer experience (CX) and therefore can move from being considered a “necessary expense” to becoming revenue generators.

Advisors have access to detailed client data that can be used to provide highly personalized product recommendations specific to each client’s needs. This creates a win-win situation in which customers receive tailored solutions that are more likely to meet their needs, while companies benefit from increased sales through increased cross-selling opportunities.

While it pays to provide sales training to advisors, in reality it is not just a telemarketing effort where the consumer seeking to solve a problem receives a sales pitch in return, but also the opportunity for the advisor to seek to solve additional needs based on the potential customer’s experience and history. This is, in other words, to counteract the fact that 91% of users reported receiving poor customer service during 2021.

Increase customer lifetime value

In the previous point we indicated how providing users with excellent customer service can transform into getting loyal customers who will return again and again for your products or services. A fundamental point if we consider that, according to the SalesForce report, 71% of consumers change brands at least once a year.

The same report shows that the three main reasons for switching companies are primarily better offers, followed by product quality and better customer service.

To improve all that, it is important to pay attention not only to the quality of products, offers and the aforementioned CX, but also to programs that encourage customer loyalty, such as reward points or personalized discounts based on customer information and tastes. Remember that it costs 5 times less to retain a customer than to find a new one, so extending their lifetime value is a way to make money.

Re-evaluate KPIs

A common example is the measurement of AHT (Average Handling Time), which is usually kept low as it implies that you should not hire more consultants than necessary and therefore costs do not increase. However, in the long term this implies that the customer experience may be poor and that there will be lost revenue opportunities.

Therefore, rather than being focused on cost reduction, KPIs should be focused on revenue generation, such as conversion rates and additional sales. It will take more call time and perhaps more users but will ultimately yield longer and more loyal customer relationships.

Invest in AI and other technologies.

It may seem like an expense, but these are actually tools that can help use the time managers spend listening to optimize it by solving problems, save agents work on simple tasks, and provide answers quicker  to consumers.

For example, the number of people using chatbots to solve simple customer service cases rose from 43% in 2020 to 58% in 2022. It is a matter of anticipating what new generations will request without forgetting that the majority of current users still prefer to be attended by an advisor over the phone.