Keith Leung

Feeling stressed out? Head on over to Business News Daily and check out their article on the ‘5 Worst Customer Service Disasters.

The difference between creating a successful transaction and a fantastic customer service experience is in creating an emotional connection between your staff and the customer. Want to find out more? Check out the Financial Post article found here on how you can create emotional connection with your customers and how you can find staff dedicated enough to go the extra mile for customers.

Customer service matters in B2B not only is it an important part of your company’s sales pitch but also a vital part of rapport building between you and the client. So how do you ensure your company provides excellent customer service in B2B sales or in sales in general? Check out this new article at CIO and speak to us about improving your service level.

Remember this

Highlighting how a little lapse in service can cause a PR disaster for your company.

Here’s another example of how the power of social media can cause any lapse of service in your organisation to lose you money.

Unite Bank of America in 2006 had a fraud victim arrested resulting in an uproar and many of their customers closing their account. Find out exactly what happened at Boing Boing.

 

You may have heard the term ‘the cloud’ dropped every now and then when discussing call centres. You could be forgiven for thinking that it’s some kind of bizarre weather phenomenon. But rest assured, you won’t have to check cloud status at the Met Office as part of your management duties at a call centre. When people talk of cloud in IT they refer to a private server with software essential to managing your contact centre ; what this means is that with better internet speed and the right software on your computer you can access any software running on the cloud.

We have discussed in the past how the internet allows customer service agents to action customer’s accounts instantaneously across multiple systems. The cloud allows for the customer service agent to access the call centre system from anywhere allowing for better coverage for your contact centre but also giving your staff members a new found form of flexibility in how they work.

So how does this help you and your company? The most obvious way a cloud aids in the operation of your contact centre is in setting up home sourcing solution for you and your staff. Its ability to allow you to access your contact centre system from any computer/mobile phone/tablet with sufficient band width means that work load can be moved away from the office and into the wide blue yonder. This kind of mobility also offers contact centres that rely on specialists, whom may have additional responsibility, to offer their service away from an office allowing for extended access for your clients. This flexibility could apply to those working in management positions as it also allows for call centre metrics to be measured from outside.

The cloud provides better security for your company information by keeping a back-up of all the data your company produces on your master server. This provides your company with different methods of handling sensitive information, for instance instead of storing information on each work station and therefore leaving it vulnerable to passers-by you can instead opt to store all data on the cloud in one location. This not only makes data your company produces more secure, it also allows a more accurate set of data as your customer agents can be updating one set of client data whilst ensuring all copies of the data accessible is up to date. The major benefit this has to your company is that regardless of how many times a client’s profile is updated you can be assured that having one database stored on the cloud prevents you from having to update any off-site databases.

There are also other smaller benefits for adopting the cloud.  The small expanding contact centre business will find the cloud networks a cheap and easy way to network across multiple contact centre or multiple home based customer service agents.

While the benefit of using the Cloud is primarily based around the way that data is stored and used, it also has a less obvious, but important effect on customer service. The main benefit to the customer is more accurate records and better accessibility for them to your your customer service agent because they are easier to contact.