What makes your organization go from average to the best one your customers have experienced? Yes, the first guess is generally the quality of customer service your brands provide. However, maintaining loyal customers is not just about the customer service, it is also about the experience you provide to them.
There are two basic categories of contact centers – inbound call centers and outbound call centers. As the name suggests, inbound call centers receive calls from regular customers to solve queries and get information from the supporting team. In the case of outbound call centers, the sales team connects to potential customers and introduces them to their products and services. Now, let’s have a look at the different services provided by these centers in detail.
Inbound and Outbound Call Center Services
Inbound call centers can also generate revenues through cross-selling and up-selling apart from providing customer services. These centers can resolve a wide range of issues related to a product or solve technological discrepancies like updating passwords, changing information, etc. For advanced technical support, customer service agents can use a helpdesk system to divert the call to an IT specialist. These centers also have trained representatives to help the customers with online shopping or resolving payment issues if needed.
Companies rely on outbound call centers not only to attract their target customers but also for market research. This helps organizations survey customers and understand their needs and interests for having a successful journey in this competitive world. This ultimately helps customers with a better design and quality of services. The approach can vary depending upon one’s requirements. It could be telephonic telemarketing, appointment setting, or lead generation as well.
Both inbound and outbound call center services open up opportunities to create a successful business and a name in the market. This is the major reason why hybrid contact centers were introduced for the customers’ benefit. To run these centers, appropriate technology
and software are required that can receive calls as well reach out to the customers. This centralization approach of communication creates a consistent and efficient customer experience.
Now, let’s talk in detail about customer service and customer experience.
Customer Service
Customer service and customer experience sound very similar and are often used interchangeably. However, when you go into the details, they are slightly different. Customer service is the key function of inbound call centers. It is the information and guidance provided to the customers who purchased a company’s products or had benefited from their services. This term wraps the assistance provided during repair, purchase, trouble in refunding, or requests made during purchase. A mix of human and technological tools like self-service, emailing, chatbots, social media, voice recording, etc. power the customer service interactions. The basic goal is to gain customer satisfaction and loyalty for long-term income.
No company can run without its loyal customers and the biggest reason that brings customers back to your brand is the service they get at the time of trouble. It is very important to focus on how an organization makes its customers feel during every purchase. Customer confidence can be achieved by creating an environment where customers feel heard and by providing them with policies that are flexible.
Customer Experience
In this competitive world, fulfilling customers’ expectations is a bit tricky. All that an organization needs is a platform that creates the best customer experience. Customer experience combines all the steps involved in a purchase. It starts with the search for the right product that fits in the budget and fulfills one’s needs. From discovering the appropriate product to connecting with the brand or services, all the communication processes followed come under customer experience. Not only this, the connections made after the purchase and the services provided in trouble join the large group of customer experience. It is the emotional as well as the psychological impact that the organization creates on the customers’ minds that makes a difference.
Customer experience or CX is the holistic approach that is not the result of one or two interactions; rather, every interaction between a brand and its customer matters in this case. Delivering a great CX is a very important aspect to create a successful business as it creates a market perception of your brand and services.
Customer service vs Customer Experience – a detailed insight
Customer service is a term on its own but it is a part of customer experience and can be distinct in some ways such as:
- Control level –
A company has full control over the services it provides and has some boundaries when it comes to customer experience. The experience can be controlled at some stages but the customer requirements and how the customer perceives the brand is not under the organization’s control.
- Metrix –
There are various modes of measurement to score customer experience. It is a company’s choice to use any of these parameters – like customer churn rate, customer effort score, net promoter score, or any other. Customer effort score measures how efficient it is for a customer to use the product or service provided. Net promoter score is the measure of how loyal a customer is. TTR or time to resolution is the average time taken by the agents to solve customers’ trouble related to the product or services. Keeping such records will boost your power to reach the top. This type of support is limited to customer experience.
- Responsibilities –
Customer services are the primary responsibilities of the customer support managers and agents. Other employees can contact customers and guide the agents but are not responsible for the quality of services. On the other hand, customer experience is not limited to a team and is the responsibility of the company as a whole.
Conclusion
Increased customer satisfaction results in increased customer loyalty which means higher revenue in the long run. Better word-of-mouth marketing and positive reviews can increase your sales to a large extent and make you reach out to the top.
Every business is unique and so are the customer’s needs and interests. Bad customer experience can be the result of long waiting calls, lined-up troubles, non-personalized services, rude or unprepared agents, the untrained approach to communication, too much use of automation, or any other. Therefore this gives us the idea, it is important to make customer services perfect to result in a better customer experience. The best way to ensure that your customers are happy is to have well-trained contact centers like ITCube BPM working for your brand.
