Call Center Management Featured Article
Craft a Customer Care Program Around Eliminating Customer Pain Points in Your Industry
There are millions of column inches written about the best way to provide customer support. While there may be some value in all the advice out there, the truth is that the “right” way to provide support is going to vary depending on your product or service, your price points and the demographics of your customers. Older customers still prefer the telephone or e-mail, while younger customers will lean toward social media and mobile app, for example.
That said, there are some universal truths when it comes to building a customer care program. For starters, ensure that you’re building it from the customer’s perspective and not the contact center’s. What makes life easier for agents may inconvenience customers, and what may provide a short-term boost to the bottom line for the company – reducing the head count of agents, for example – will cause long-term problems in customer attrition.
One really unique way of crafting a customer care program, highlighted recently by Michael Mink writing for Investors’ Business Daily, is first finding out what drives customers in your industry crazy, and crafting your customer experience to eliminate the pain points. Chad Laurans, CEO of home security company SimpliSafe, told Mink that he built his business by taking stock of home security customers' frustrations and eliminating them from his business model. Providing his service for less, without long-term contracts, has contributed to garnering support from customers. Laurans told Mink that he doesn't believe in locking his customers into ironclad, no-out agreements, and calls them a "huge pain point in the alarm industry. Doing business without contracts means that we treat each customer like gold. That kind of customer service requires a lot of attention, but when you deliver on it, you'll reap the rewards in customer loyalty."
Consider following this example. Ask customers, through focus groups, surveys, in social media and via e-mail what their biggest frustrations when buying in your industry is. Tally the responses and identify the biggest pain points. Now ask yourself: how can I build a customer care program (from scratch, if necessary) to entirely eliminate these pain points? The exercise represents one of the most critical activities in customer care: listening.
“Listening to your customers is old hat,” wrote Mink. “Learning from them and following through make a special difference.”
The results of this experiment may not be popular in the executive suite. Customer care excellence costs money, and when you’re disconnected from the day-to-day issues of customer support, it’s easy to imagine that cutting out expenses such as agent training, sufficient contact center technologies and discounts or bonuses to turn upset customers back into loyal customers is good for the budget. It’s not. And today’s, it’s often call center management who needs to sell that message to the top of the company.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi