10 Steps to building an effective Support Centre for every business

by Prarthana Sachdev | Aug 24, 2018

85% of the customers reported that a bad customer experience makes them switch brands and quit doing business with a particular company. With social media playing as a huge channel in making or breaking a brand these days, reputation of a company is basically in the customer’s hand. Providing 100% customer satisfaction has become the goal of every business since one negative incident reported on social media spreads like wildfire.

A superior customer experience goes a long way in achieving success in any business. It acts as the core of business making it harder to achieve the goal. To accomplish this goal, businesses need an effective customer support center. Most businesses face issues while setting up an effective contact center. Hardware purchase costs and installation delays the process and in the long run might not be feasible since conventional methods pose limitations.

Businesses might not have large initial investment budget and with a rigid EPABX system, it gets more difficult to handle large call volumes, track incoming calls and monitor call center all at the same time. As businesses expand, a more feasible option which allows scaling up or down in an easy manner and adapts to the growing businesses seamlessly is important.

Here’s a few things that will help build an effective support center for every business:

#1. Workforce

Workforce or commonly called as Agents are the most important component of any contact center. It’s important to provide a comfortable workstation and good pair of headsets which improves productivity. It is important to calculate the number of employees required to run your support center efficiently.

#2. Define purpose

For any support center or call center to work efficiently, it’s important to define the core purpose behind opening your support center. Once it’s defined the same needs to be communicated to your agents well for them to handle calls more efficiently. By clearly outlining the core purpose, businesses can set proper standards which will help measure contact center efficiency.

#3. Set expectations

To measure the support team’s efficiency, it’s important to set the expectations and benchmarks which the team needs to follow in order to achieve the goal of customer satisfaction. Businesses can set the right expectations through addressing basic steps like:

Typical response time taken by other competitors in the industry to resolve the customer issue
Tone, language, and attitude while dealing with customer issues
Method to handle complaints and grievances from customer
Improve customer experience with every call answered
If the issue is unresolved, what’s the next step ahead to delight the customer

By allowing agents to follow the set expectations, business can create a successful customer experience

#4. Multi-channel support

Conduct research on where your target audience is coming from. It is challenging for small businesses to provide customer support across multiple channels because this might lead to inconsistent service. However, studying your target audience and understanding their preferred choice when it comes to customer center goes a long way.

Multiple channels like email, live chat, voice, social media, etc. are increasingly making their headway where customers raise concerns regarding user experience with businesses. Ignoring them totally can have a negative impact on the business. Businesses can choose the most preferred platform after research and start providing support on one or two channels, to begin with, and expand as they grow. This ensures business presence across platforms and helps provide customer satisfaction.

#5. Dream team

A reliable and high-quality customer support team can be provided only when the right set of people are recruited. The person hired must be passionate about improving customer service through contact center set up and must possess the right skills for the job. He/She must have good communication skills that must be clear. They must be attentive to customer queries, can persuade customers, resolve queries at a faster rate with good problem-solving skills.

When running a contact center, one must always be prepared to handle surprises. The agent must be smart enough to handle these surprises and not compromise on quality while resolving customer queries.

#6. Measure performance

Measuring the performance of customer service department periodically helps businesses understand which metrics are important and promotes business growth. This helps define the KPIs that are in sync with your business objectives. It’s also important to set feedback or a survey system that tracks customer’s responses meticulously on frequent intervals to improve customer service.

#7. Technology

Technology is one of the most important things while setting up a call center. Often businesses use conventional PBX systems that hampers the growth of your customer contact center due to its rigid features. But Cloud contact center, on the other hand, is the perfect solution to achieve the goals of the customer support center.

Cloud-based contact center solutions are very popular and gives businesses a flexible, scalable, reliable and secure platform. It automates processes allowing agents to concentrate on more important queries that require actual manual intervention.

Kaleyra offers one of the best cloud contact center solutions which is simple and easy-to-use and can be set up very quickly. It provides numerous features like Live-Call monitoring, Call tracking, call recordings which not only enhances agent productivity but improves customer satisfaction as well.

Providing the right tool like cloud contact center has multiple benefits like makes it easier to handle large volumes of call, achieve brand recognition, guarantee customer satisfaction, measure the quality of contact center effectively. This will have a huge impact on the team’s productivity thereby helping businesses achieve their goal of offering 100% customer satisfaction.

#8. Location

Although in the earlier days businesses preferred keeping contact center close to headquarters, with the advent of Cloud-based contact center solutions it’s easier to set up multiple centers and still stay connected. It allows the possibility of remote working which allows agents to answer calls anywhere anytime. The multi-language support that can be provided through Cloud contact center helps support center function in an agile way.

#9. Documentation

Documentation is a very important part to be followed while setting up a call center. It provides a two-fold benefit for businesses. It makes customer’s self-sufficient by allowing them to read through documents and get solutions, it also helps agents to know about business, products, etc in detail allowing it as training material.

#10. User Experience

Last but definitely not the least, focus on user experience. When setting up a call center, always keep in mind not to create a maze and provide easy navigation options to customers to make their experience more seamless. Conducting surveys goes a long way in understanding what the customers want and provide solutions such that it helps businesses enhance user experience and thereby achieve customer satisfaction.