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Call center customer service strategies often get tied up in trying to do too many things on top of what they should be doing—Serving customers. While it can generate revenue, requiring agents to cross sell and up sell to customers can be a quick way to alienate and annoy them into cutting ties with your operation. This is especially true when you’re not performing due diligence on the issues they’ve initially called with. 

So how do you make customers happy and loyal? How do you make them want to do business with your company? The answer? Keep it simple, focus on the basics, and excel at a call centers core responsibility of service, and your customers will always come back.

Kim Odom, Sr. director of marketing at Contactual recently had an interaction with USAA credit card servicers that was so positive it resulted in accolades on Contactual’s (News - Alert) blog. “The entire interaction took less than 15 minutes and my issue was resolved with a single call.  At the end of the call the rep thanked me for ‘being a USAA member for over 20 years,’ WOW! I walked away from this experience not just satisfied but more loyal than ever to USAA,” she said.

In the post, Kim outlined the steps the credit card support line took addressed fraudulent charges on her account. The company walked her through each step, transferred her call with her information to a specialist who could stop it fraud from happening in the future and then thanked her for her being one of their customers. Obviously the interaction was enough to get USAA a shout out on the Contactual blog, but it also raises a good point. 

Perhaps too often call center managers and agent are concerned about harvesting each and every interaction with a customer for information. If they were more focused on providing top notch service instead, the long term results would likely outshine any immediate sale.

 Loyalty is one of those things that can’t be bought or assured by the loftiest budget or skilled marketing team. But train call center employees to make customers smile and you won’t need all that fancy stuff anyways.

Chris DiMarco is a Web Editor for TMCnet. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert) Chris worked with e-commerce provider Suresource as a contact center representative and development analyst. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Janice McDuffee