The Small Businesses Imperative for Proactive Customer Service

Revenue and cashflow are the lifeblood of a small business.  It is no surprise that one of the highest priorities for a small business is to find and keep customers.  Why? There is a direct correlation between customer satisfaction and top-line revenue and bottom-line profit. Consider the following:

• Satisfied customers are more likely to make repeat purchases, refer friends and family, and require fewer resources to service.
• Satisfied customers are less likely to defect meaning customer acquisition costs are lower and upsell opportunities are greater.

In short, customers do business with people they trust.  If you want your small business to thrive, you must build trust and loyalty. 

Utilizing proactive customer service as a growth strategy is even more imperative when you consider its effect during fluctuating business cycles.  When the economy is growing, good customer service acts as a growth accelerator. Conversely, when the economy is stagnant, good customer service improves a firm’s ability to weather a downturn.  A firm may not be growing, but it may survive off the customer base it has created.

Therefore, to earn the benefits that only satisfied customers can deliver, a small business must understand its customers and create the kinds of satisfying experiences that will keep them engaged.  An effective contact center is essential to these objectives. 

The contact center is the designated interface between a business and its customers. It is used to create sales conversations, deliver post-sale service and support and serves as a listening post to alert of changing consumer preferences and trends. 

Proactive customer service vs sales

The idea that a small business can thrive by taking care of its customers is very intuitive.  Yet too often business leaders continue to prioritize sales and marketing over customer care.   It’s easy to measure revenue.  It is more difficult to understand what effect a customer referral had or whether a satisfied customer really does purchase more.  Difficult, but not impossible.  This article will give you more insight on a concept called customer lifetime value and how to calculate the value a customer brings to your small business.  There is also interesting research showing that delivering great customer service is more important to consumers than product or pricing.

The key takeaway is not that sales is more important than customer care or customer care is more important than sales.  They are two sides of the same coin.  Customer service accelerates sales success.

How to deliver exceptional proactive customer service

Achieving good customer service is predicated upon three criteria:

Not surprising, many contact center KPIs are designed to measure these criteria.  More on this later.  First, let us look more closely at these three criteria.

Effectiveness

This measure determines whether a customer can have their issue satisfactorily resolved during the first attempt. It stands to reason that multiple, ineffective attempts inevitably lead to customer frustration and dissatisfaction.  First contact resolution (FCR) and quality evaluations (QE) scores are good predictors of contact center effectiveness.

The job of delivering effective customer service rests with you contact center agents and they need all the help they can receive.  Working in a contact center is stressful.  The work is highly repetitive, and agents are often asked to resolve problems they have not been adequately trained to handle. For these reasons’ agent morale is often low, and attrition is high.  Yet your call center is the front-line between you and your customers.  Under these conditions, it is difficult to see how your business can offer its first, best, impression to your customers.  Therefore, to deliver exceptional customer service, you first need to empower your agents.  Empowered agents deliver effective customer service.

Outdated call centers make it more difficult for agents to deliver effective customer.  Consider the following common problems:

Ease of use

This measure helps determine how easy it is for a customer to get help.  The satisfaction received from effective service can be tarnished if the experience was difficult or unpleasant. Basic contact handling KPIs are a good starting point for measuring customer ease.  These KPIs include average speed of answer (ASA), abandon rate, transfer rate, hold rate, self-service rate, and customer feedback. 

But also consider the recent explosion of conveniences driven by changing customer expectations.  These include the rise of mobile and social media, smart omnichannel ACD, chat, AI, AI bots, sentiment analytics and more.  This trend continues and is accelerating.  For proof, think about all the call center advancements made during the past decade.  These advancements are far greater than all the advancements made during the previous five decades!   This underscores just how quickly a call center can become outdated. 

An example of this is something you may have heard of called “digital first contact center”.   This is a strategy many contact centers are beginning to adopt. It is a recognition that advances in mobile technology along emerging preferences of younger consumers now require contact centers to pivot and make digital access as pervasive and convenient as voice has been.

When call centers become outdated, they become less convenient for customers to use.  Consider the following problems.

Emotion

Perhaps this is the most important measure because it reflects a customer’s overall satisfaction.  There are numerous ways a contact center may deliver easy and effective service yet still leave customers unsatisfied. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) are good measures of how satisfied customers are with their customer service interactions.

Customers who report high levels of satisfaction are more likely to remain loyal customers.  But how do you know how satisfied customers are if you cannot measure their sentiments?  How can you make needed improvements to increase satisfaction without knowing what customers like and dislike about their interactions? 

Outdated call centers make it difficult for business leaders to understand customer preferences because they lack basic to advanced feedback and interaction sentiment analytics.

Cost control vs Customer experience

Some contact center leaders may prioritize call center cost control savings over superior customer service delivery.  This is understandable if the connection between customer satisfaction and customer lifetime value is not well understood. Still, there is anecdotal belief that unhappy customers do consume more time, energy, and resources. These costs alone may offset any savings that may come from deprioritizing proactive customer service.   However, the evidence suggests that the benefits derived from satisfied customers outweigh cost-cutting savings.  In other words, implementing cost savings at the expense of delivering superior customer service may be a “penny wise, but dollar foolish” strategy.

Summary

Customers reward businesses they trust with ongoing patronage.  This loyalty can accelerate small business growth. Your contact center is key to building customer loyalty if it can deliver proactive customer service.  Customers value proactive customer service that is effective, easy to access and satisfying.  The best way to deliver effective, easy, and satisfying customer service is to make sure your contact center fully empowers agents, offers conveniences customers demand and can help you measure and understand customer satisfaction.  Your KPI’s, when benchmarked against other top performing contact centers can help you identify areas where your call center could benefit from modernization.  To see how, use this free interactive benchmarking tool.