Those who work in customer service know a thing or two about working with people—after all, they do it all day, every day. And, according to new research from the Temkin Group, most customer service professionals feel they are really making a difference and are valued by their companies—83 percent to be precise. What’s more, a whopping 98 percent of those surveyed agree with the statement "customer experience is a great profession to be in,” and these levels have stayed relatively steady since 2010.
So how do these customer service reps do it? If you were to think about a typical customer service exchange right now, you’re likely to imagine an angry or frustrated customer, and then an agent trying to calmly guide that customer to a satisfactory resolution, no matter the customer’s attitude. It takes a lot of resolve, and an intuitive understanding of each customer, to reach a resolution, but there are a lot of other factors that go into the process as well. In many ways, an agent is only as good as his or her tools: agents can be hindered by poor communications tools, and so these tools become a very important piece in the puzzle.
Contact centers using hosted phone systems enjoy a number of benefits to traditional communications services. Hosted phone systems offer increased connectivity regardless of physical location, can be expanded in capacity to take on larger loads, and can host a variety of unified communications avenues such as voice and video calling, as well as messaging services. This means that not only can customers reach out to a company using whichever channel makes them the most comfortable; it also means that, regardless of the channel chosen, the service will be more reliable and streamlined.
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By providing communications options to a customer and making the initiation of contact as painless as possible, exchanges between customers and agents are more likely to start off on the right foot. The customer is probably reaching out because there is a problem in the first place, so making it difficult to even get in touch with someone who can help will drastically hurt the customer’s experience.
In the Temkin Group’s report, titled “State of the Customer Experience (CX) Profession, 2014,” the firm examined responses from 293 customer experience professionals in late Q4 2013 about their current jobs, comparing their responses to similar studies completed over the previous three years. The study found that 87 percent feel their efforts have had a positive impact on their organizations in 2013, and 98 percent expect to have a positive impact in 2014.
The report argues that this overwhelmingly positive outlook has a lot to do with increasingly supportive leaders. Seventy-seven percent of respondents agree that their executive team was committed to their company's customer experience goals last year, and that number has grown to 82 percent this year. Effective leaders also need effective tools to run their contact centers, and to keep tabs on their agents’ performance. So, while it takes a particularly patient and pleasant person to be a great customer service agent, having the best hosted phone system possible will make the process easier for everyone involved.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson