5 ways to elevate your customer service with Zoom Contact Center
The pandemic changed consumer buying behaviors in ways we never imagined, resulting in brand abandonment and turnover among 59% of shoppers after a bad experience. Now, organizations are having to rethink traditional customer service business models and pivot to generate a positive experience that re-establishes brand loyalty.
With this in mind, the shift from traditional call center services toward omnichannel contact centers reflects the growing desire to streamline customer support and give customers more flexibility. With this in mind, businesses need to meet customers on their preferred channels to deliver a positive and memorable customer experience.
What makes great customer service?
Before we can talk about elevating customer service, it’s important to know what makes great customer service to begin with. While there is good customer service and even great customer service, businesses that offer excellent customer service are better positioned to create loyal customers who will stay with your brand for the long term.
To achieve excellent customer service, it’s important for agents and employees to show:
- respect
- responsiveness
- reliability
- empathy
- professionalism
With those steps in place, you can begin to build a foundation for long-term customer success.
What is the best way to improve customer service?
Even a strong foundation can require upgrades and improvements. If you’re noticing lower CSAT and NPS scores or wondering why your customer churn is high, you may be wondering how to improve your customer service.
One of the best ways to improve customer service is by implementing solutions that meet your customers’ preferences and enhance productivity for your agents. After all, happy employees often equal happier customers. Thankfully, today’s modern contact centers provide a variety of tools that give your customers the flexibility they desire while enabling contact center agents to work successfully in remote or hybrid teams.
If you’re evaluating modern contact centers, look for a platform that ensures timely service delivery, is tailored for your workforce (remote, hybrid, or onsite), and provides access to robust data and analytics to drive better decision-making. Or more simply, seek out contact center solutions that address as many of the four P’s as possible: (promptness, politeness, professionalism, and personalization).
When the time comes to implement a new CCaaS solution, here are some things to consider.
1. Omnichannel support is one of the best ways to improve customer service
Today’s customers require several digital touchpoints when interacting with a brand. With social media, AI chat, and videoconferencing readily available, customer service operations have progressed significantly from the days of long hold times and 9-5 business hours. This “always-available” mentality is convenient yet problematic for businesses that are slow to adapt, as people expect their favorite tools and technology to follow them from one interaction to the next.
To transform the customer experience and generate a quicker path to brand loyalty, organizations need a variety of digital channels to provide superior service throughout the customer journey. This makes omnichannel contact centers one of the must-have customer experience tools to elevate your customer service.
Zoom Contact Center is a modern contact center solution that’s optimized for video and adds a human touch to customer service conversations. Offering voice, SMS, web chat, and video, our cloud contact center platform delivers convenience to digital interactions directly within the familiar Zoom experience. With the addition of our intelligent AI chatbot, customers can self-serve 24/7 and find the answers they want, when they need them most.
2. Look for features that boost employee engagement with timely service delivery
In customer service, timing is everything. The ability to assist customers promptly can minimize disengagement and boost employee morale. Look for a platform that ensures timely service delivery through advanced call routing features and a familiar or intuitive experience that enables agents and experts to quickly connect and easily resolve customer issues.
Zoom Contact Center agents and supervisors enjoy immediate productivity and a streamlined call-handling experience when engaging with customers, as our omnichannel contact center is built into the familiar Zoom app experience. We’ve made it easy to send calls to individual agents based on skill levels or categories with expansive call routing features. Further, the routing profiles can be customized to reflect a combination of skills within a category. This ability to quickly match the caller to a knowledgeable agent, reduce wait times, and efficiently resolve concerns can help lay the foundation for long-term customer relationships.
3. Advanced analytics can provide valuable insights
Knowing how data informs and drives decision-making is a valuable investment for any organization. But without insight into your agents’ performance, it can be difficult to measure their effectiveness or identify potential areas for improvement.
Our analytics dashboard unlocks key insights for agent supervisors and account owners to measure the proficiency of an individual agent. Zoom Contact Center admins have access to real-time analytics, where they can view up-to-date metrics on video engagements. Supervisors can then more easily identify opportunities to streamline calls, re-skill agents based on need and performance, and better optimize the outcomes of customer interactions.
Analytics can also help you improve customer service when they are part of a workforce management solution. Our new Workforce Engagement Management suite features Zoom Workforce Management, which integrates directly into our cloud contact center and can help you better predict agent workload to ensure proper staffing during peak seasons.
4. Combine platforms to simplify collaboration, increase cost savings, and enhance customer support
It’s been reported that 54% of CX and IT business leaders use the same cloud provider for both their unified communications and contact center platforms. This shift toward a single provider should come as no surprise given the benefits it provides:
- Cost savings through bundled licensing
- Employee productivity improvements with a common user interface
- Easier application integration
- Reduced burden on your IT teams
Integrating your unified communications solution with an omnichannel contact center platform invites additional opportunities for collaboration as a single platform for employee communications. This simplicity is why more than 50% of IT and CX leaders use the same cloud platform for their UC and contact center operations, as it helps reduce operational costs and increase agent and annual sales.
With Zoom Contact Center, you can easily add contact center capabilities to your unified communications solution and enjoy the familiar Zoom platform. With only one provider bill to reconcile, Zoom Contact Center easily integrates with other business applications, optimizes your IT footprint, and removes the IT burden of deploying additional software.
5. Support modern workstyles with flexible cloud solutions
Remote and hybrid work has become permanent workstyles, as research reflects that 41% of people with remote-capable jobs are working a hybrid schedule (at the office some days, at home other days). To maintain productivity, contact center agents need remote-friendly, location-agnostic technology. In a time where agents work across time zones with extended customer service hours, updating your office with hybrid workplace technology is key to promoting collaboration between remote teams.
Our cloud-based CCaaS removes the dependency on legacy hardware and on-premises tools that inhibit remote work. Offering seamless integrations with popular cloud-based business applications, Zoom Contact Center helps organizations discover new opportunities to improve workflows and increase employee engagement.
Cloud-based technology is key to keeping customers and employees happy
Looking for ways to keep customers happy? Here’s a secret, look up! As we begin to accept the current state of hybrid work, it’s time to move past the on-premises contact centers and legacy call centers of yesterday and move to the cloud. Businesses that embrace cloud-based contact centers with omnichannel support are better positioned to move ahead of the competition and elevate the customer experience.
Get started today to see how Zoom Contact Center can elevate your customer service organization.
This blog was originally published on April 29, 2022, and was updated to reflect Zoom Virtual Agent and Zoom Workforce Management.