How to improve customer service: 10 strategies

Customer expectations are changing, and your customer service team isn’t just part of the company, they’re the heart of the entire customer experience (CX).

Customers define their relationship with a brand by how well it responds to their needs. A well-crafted plan and a commitment to excellence, enables you to deliver the kind of service that not only meets but exceeds your customers’ expectations.

In this article, we’ll discuss 10 simple tips that can help you improve your customer service.

10 strategies to improve customer service in the contact center.

1. Implement an omnichannel strategy.

Implementing an omnichannel strategy is crucial for improving customer service. Offering your customers diverse communication channels can elevate customer satisfaction (CSAT), enrich CX, and positively impact agent performance and engagement.

An effective omnichannel strategy offers seamless, consistent service, regardless of the channel customers choose to interact with your business. This fosters loyalty and long-term engagement.

2. Improve average speed of answer. 

To further improve the quality of customer service, implementing an automatic summary feature is a smart move. This tool, powered by GenAI technology, can shave 30-60 seconds from every interaction by automatically summarizing the key points and selecting the appropriate customer disposition code. 

Automatic summary ensures that key points from customer interactions are accurately captured and easily accessible for future reference. This significantly enhances the average speed of answer, contributing to improved customer satisfaction and agent productivity.

3. Let customers self-serve.

Customer self-service empowers customers to help themselves, enhances customer control and convenience, and significantly boosts contact center productivity. This means time and cost savings and increased customer satisfaction.  AI-powered self-service options, such as voice and chatbots, are able to provide human-like customer support and instant service at any time.

4. Implement an AI-powered workforce management tool.

Workforce management tools, such as Talkdesk Workforce Engagement Management™, use AI to optimize staff scheduling and resource allocation based on real-time data. This ensures the right agents are always available to handle customer inquiries.

Using AI to analyze patterns and predict staffing needs can help reduce wait times, improve customer service, and enhance overall operational efficiency. The AI-driven insights also enable management to make informed decisions about staff training and development, further enhancing the quality of customer service.

5. Ask customers for feedback.

Actively seeking out your customers’ thoughts and opinions not only demonstrates that you value their perspective but also provides invaluable insights that can shape and improve your business operations.

Gathering feedback is essential for understanding what your customers think about your products or services, and making them feel valued and listened to. Feedback also provides a yardstick to measure customer satisfaction and helps you target potential customers more effectively.

6. Take cues from customer conversations. 

To improve contact center customer service, pay attention to what the customer says when talking to your agents. An AI-powered speech and text analytics tool can find key conversational moments, topics, customer intents, and sentiments.

7. Improve processes and procedures.

Red tape, hierarchical restrictions, cumbersome procedures—they all affect your contact center customer service experience and, ultimately, the entire business performance. To improve your contact center performance, you need to assess which processes are hindering agents from providing the best possible service experience. It will also help to integrate the most commonly used systems with the contact center platform and give your agents a single workspace for all different platforms and systems.

8. Reach out proactively to your customers. 

Don’t wait for customers to have problems and reach out to you. You can anticipate your customer’s needs and reach out proactively to create the personalized engagement that drives loyalty and business growth, using tools and agent skills to upsell and cross-sell while still effectively handling service calls.

9. Set tangible service standards.

Define important key performance indicators (KPIs) to track and set goals for metrics like customer satisfaction (CSAT), first call resolution (FCR), and others. Go back to these metrics, analyze, and readjust periodically.