10 Tools For Call Centers To Provide Customer-Centric Customer Support

CUSTOMER SERVICE
10 Tools for Call Centers to Provide

Customer-Centric Customer Support
by Shauna Geraghty
July 11, 2018
5 min read
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More and more companies are adopting a customer-centric approach to providing
support. They are hiring more qualified agents, providing them with comprehensive
training, and continually providing feedback to their team – all in an effort to enhance
the service that they provide their customers.
Why go through all this effort? Because their business depends on it. According to
the Harvard Business Review 40% of customers surveyed said they would stop doing
business with a company based on a bad customer service experience. Thus, providing
sub-par customer service will not only impact customer retention and loyalty, but also
your bottom line.
If providing top-notch support sounds like a daunting task, fear not. With the right tools,
processes and team, you can adopt a customer-centric approach to providing support
with relative ease. Below are the top 10 tools for call centers to provide amazing
customer-centric customer support.
1. IVR
Providing amazing support begins before your agents answer the phone.
With interactive voice response (IVR) technology, your team can record professional
greetings and efficiently route callers to the agent who can most effectively address
their needs (i.e. tech calls to technical support agents, French customers to agents who
speak French, VIP customers to the most skilled agent, etc.). This will increase
professionalism and enhance the customer’s experience – before they interact with
anyone from your team. Additionally, when all callers are routed to the most appropriate
agent to meet their needs, your agents will be more proficient at solving specific
problems and meeting specific needs of the customers that they are assigned. The
result is an increase in customer service efficiency and customer satisfaction.
2. Automatic caller information screen pop
Routing the caller to the most appropriate agent is just the first step to providing
amazing support. With call center software that provides the caller’s information in the
browser as they call, your team will know everything about the customer (e.g., picture,
name, company, position within the company, email, address, phone number and
information from their LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter accounts) before they answer the
phone. This will allow your agents to provide a more personalized experience to each
and every customer.
3. Call center software that integrates with your business tools
Providing customer-centric customer support requires that your team understands the
customer and meet their needs accordingly. With call center software that has two-way
integrations with your business tools like Salesforce, Zendesk, Live Chat, Magento,
and others, your agents will have access to all of the caller’s previous interactions with
your company before they answer the phone (i.e. their previous tickets, cases, events
and issues from all integrated business tools). Call center software that provides this
information in real-time will allow your agents to not only understand the caller’s history,
but adjust their approach to providing service based on this comprehensive information.
This will dramatically improve the capabilities and performance of your agents.
4. Call conferencing
There is nothing worse for a customer than explaining their issue to an agent, finding
out that they can’t solve their issue, being transferred to another agent and having to
explain their issue again from the beginning. Eliminate this common customer service
frustration with call conferencing. When an agent is struggling or would like the help of
an agent from a different department, they can conference in the agent without having
to transfer the call. This increases service quality and improves customer satisfaction.
5. Call monitoring, whisper coaching and call barging

In order to adopt a customer-centric approach to providing service, call center
managers must drive the customer focus to their team. Three must-have features in this
pursuit are call monitoring, whisper coaching and call barging. Call monitoring allows a
manager to listen to a live call without the agent or the caller knowing. This is helpful
when monitoring the call for quality assurance and training purposes. Whisper coaching
allows a manager to talk with the agent, without the caller knowing. This is helpful when
training new agents to get up to speed, or helping more experienced agents through a
difficult call. Call barging allows the manager to listen to calls without the agent or caller
knowing and then speak with both the agent and the customer when necessary. All
three features are critical when teaching agents to adopt a customer-centric approach to
providing customer support, and monitoring calls to make sure they do so.
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6. Call recording
Having call monitoring capabilities are fantastic, but not enough for busy managers who
don’t always have time to listen to live calls. The solution? Call recording. Managers
aiming to increase service quality and agent performance will find that it is impossible
without call recording. Call recording allows them to keep a close eye on each agent,
regardless of when they work or where they work. Managers can listen to recorded call
when it is most convenient for them and provide feedback to their team to adjust their
approach accordingly.
7. Real-time and historical reporting
Ensuring that your team of call center agents is providing amazing support
requires comprehensive metrics. Providing your team with an agent dashboard that
displays real-time metrics like service level, number of calls in queue, average hold
time, average handle time, etc. will allow them to improve their performance with
minimal management feedback. Providing your managers with real-time and historical
data will allow them to make data-driven decisions based on comprehensive metrics.
This is an essential tool for customer-centric companies that provide support.
Adopting a customer-centric approach to providing customer service is essential for any

company looking to enhance the customer experience, customer loyalty and revenue.
Doing so may seem like a difficult task, but with the right tools and a little effort, any
customer service team can provide excellent customer-centric customer support in no
time.

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CUSTOMER SERVICE

10 Tools for Call Centers to Provide

July 11, 2018

2. Automatic caller information screen pop

3. Call center software that integrates with your business tools

5. Call monitoring, whisper coaching and call barging

Subscribe to the Blog

7. Real-time and historical reporting

Adopting a customer-centric approach to providing customer service is essential for any

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