There is no gainsaying that Customer Support has assumed more significance as a competitive advantage in businesses than even price because while customers are happy to pay a premium for good service, they will never brook bad customer support even for free! However, good customer support is important not only to keep your customers happy but investing in customer support pays rich dividends to every department which are otherwise neither interested nor encouraged to pay any heed to customer support at all. Let’s look at how
Sales, Marketing and Customer Satisfaction
Sales, Marketing and Customer support often share a complex relationship in an organization. Under pressure to sell, sales and marketing sometimes end up focusing on the wrong audience or aspects and customer support is left with the onerous job of assuaging the feelings of aggrieved customers whose expectations weren’t met. This problem becomes more glaring when you use call center outsourcing solutions because other departments consider customer service outsourcing team as an external to them. This isn’t a healthy situation for a company since sales and customer support outsourcing team should complement each other and not be at loggerheads.
In an ideal situation where Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support are in sync with each other, business grows and customer is the main beneficiary. A perfect balance needs to be maintained among these teams in order to create a multiplier effect and this applies even if you use customer support outsourcing solutions. You need to ensure that you make efforts to assimilate your customer support, outsourcing team.
Since customer support is the only department that is an interface between business and customers, they are the only ones who can tell you how your customers perceive you. The feedback received through customer service outsourcing team plays an important role in the sales and marketing department for planning their future campaign strategies. Such information helps them to selectively choose prospects that are more in tune with their product. Customer support outsourcing solutions team also benefits by working closely with sales and marketing as they are better prepared to anticipate and tackle customers’ queries and concerns about product features and position during pre and post sales.
The ongoing interaction with the customer support employees makes sales personnel treat their customers with a lot of empathy, positivity and patience that helps in fruitful communication resulting in better strike rate. Their approach towards customers become more humane rather than robotic.
It is expected from marketers to treat customers as equal partners in a business relationship and are expected to know about customers’ actual problems, opinions, pain points, preferences and obstacles. Customer support outsourcing team’s know-how will help them achieve this.
In the last decade, social media has revolutionized our society to effectively redistribute power towards customers that were once the monopoly of corporations and institutions. Now, marketers can no longer use social media to deliver one side monologic advertising messages to a target audience, they are also expected to meet customers’ support demand over social media. With the help of customer service, outsourcing solutions team social media marketing managers can transform customer service into new age marketing by engaging customers as collaborators. Satisfied customers act as brand advocates and ambassadors and word of mouth marketing is any day more valuable and credible from your prospects’ perspective than your advertising message.
Technology & Brand Improvement
The customer service outsourcing agents are at the forefront of addressing clients’ problems and receiving feedback related to their product. By making a seamless interaction among customer support, tech and product specialists, latter can gather a lot of invaluable information about what customers like or dislike about your product, what features they like to add or remove, what are the issues they face while using your product.
Customer feedback should be an integral part of every product related meeting and discussion. The feedback from customer outsourcing solutions should be given a priority while taking a tech-related decision. The user experience can only improve by taking customers’ feedback seriously which will help in making the end product more acceptable. The customer support outsourcing solutions team also becomes wiser by this regular interaction with tech that prepares them to offer better solutions to customers. They are better educated to guide customers on fixes to a problem or your plans to improve a problem.
Sales and marketing also gain because they have a better understanding of how your customers perceive your products and what product features allure them so that they can accordingly highlight your product’s strengths in their marketing efforts.
For example, a company dealing in sportswear to associate its brand with sportspersons who represent fitness, health and wellness. However, their customers may purchase these items because of personal reasons like comfort, style and fashion. Hence, it becomes necessary for companies to communicate their marketing department to incorporate these values.
Finance & Operations
It’s not surprising to find that a happy customer is generally loyal and is also the biggest spender. Recent research has revealed that 50% of customers purchase a particular brand more after getting positive customer service and around 86% of customers pay up to 25% more if they are satisfied with the quality of customer support.
This additional revenue raises the bottom-line of companies giving them leverage while making financial projections and expansion plans. By ensuring better communication among various departments, the wastages of precious resources can be minimized.
Better coordination between customer service outsourcing solutions team and finance department also helps lessen customer’s anxiety. For instance, if a customer is chasing refund, customer service outsourcing team will be better equipped to give realistic timelines only if there is proper communication between the two departments, lest call center outsourcing team will have no option but to give dodging replies leading to dissatisfied customers.
Human Resources
Various departments working in sync with each other would yield a healthy work culture and positive brand perception, which are both crucial for attracting the best talent in the market. The young and dynamic workforce likes to be associated with those organizations where they find synergies with their own personalities and belief system. A company that adopts a service-oriented culture often ends up employing potential hires that find their core values reflected in a company’s business identity.
Such employees easily settled in and are also least expected to quit. This is important, given the high attrition rates and their adverse effects on business. Employers often end up spending a fortune to find and train a replacement for them.
To accomplish this, it is imperative that you demolish the silos that each department works in and get them to consult each other. This can only be achieved through meaningful interaction and cooperation among various departments by doing away with a narrow-minded approach. Encourage knowledge sharing amongst departments.
Customer feedback collected through the call recordings, complaint tickets raised and other numerous queries could be effectively used to address the customer pain points and in easing customer onboarding processes as per requirement. It can be used in developing appropriate learning material for customer support outsourcing solutions team. Sales pitches can be customized to align with customers’ preferences and marketing strategies can be honed for better targeting and an appropriate roadmap can be planned that is in sync with the emerging aspirations and needs of customers.
It is understandable that with so much customer data available, not every information may be useful but given that your customer service outsourcing team may be an answer to a lot of your unanswered questions and unsolved problems, it is imperative to provide that you give them a proper forum to convey your customer’s voice and their valuable insights to you.
At LiveSalesman, we understand the importance of customer feedback and hence, our customer support outsourcing solutions are designed not to just answer calls and emails for you but we proactively seek feedback from your customers and ensure that you stay constantly updated about what your customers think about you so that you can channelize your product development and marketing efforts in the right direction.
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