How to Be a Good Customer Care Executive?

As customer service representatives are the key strength for any successful organization, and keep you connect with your potential customers. So customer care executives should have excellent verbal and interpersonal skills, including being receptive to other's views and opinions.

In the recent time, it can be difficult to provide excellent customer service for each of the calls, especially when they have to deal with angry customers who might had to wait on hold for an hour or more before they even reach you. Often, the customer care executives will only have to answer the phone to listen to an immediate escalation of a customer angry voice.

Its very tempting to put on the defensive, it's much better to let the customer continues to say what I mean. Angry customers who feel as if they were really being listened cooled off faster than customers who think that the customer care representative is not really concerned about their needs.
Customers who are angry are going to blame anyone for the problem they have, do not take it personally, instead, ensure them that their struggle has been ended now and issues will be resolved at the earliest. It is the responsibility of customer care representatives to make their customers happy and satisfied before hang up the phone.

It is important to realize that the customer believes s\he is talking to the particular company. they are unaware or not interested that they are talking with a very good lady named Gelsey or some one else who has her own family problems. All they know is that they have a problem and you caused it, that's why want to know what to do about it from your end. And this is you responsibilities to resolve all their issues till hang up the phone.. All customers don't h same type of attitude, many customers are very nice and just have a question about your service.

The key, however to provide best customer service, in spite of the situation is completely focused on the customer who is talking. Customer Service Representative is the key person who represent the image of any organization, and help the company to make a faith in the eyes of your business assets i.e Customers. If a customer has angered hard before, you should be able to let go of the anger before speaking to the next customer or notice through the call.

Source:http://www.callcentersindia.com/

Focusing on the 'Customer' in Customer Care

Customer service is becoming an increasingly important leverage tool in today's competitive business world. With so many options to choose from, customers can easily switch their allegiance to a new company if their needs are not being sufficiently met. This situation is relatively new to the utilities industry, however, as legacy utility companies have operated competition-free for decades. The newer market entrants understand the importance and value of customer retention and have molded their business objectives around keeping their customers -- and winning new ones -- by providing quality customer service. For the larger, more established utility companies this has been a more difficult concept to embrace, begging the question: Why isn't every reasonable effort being made to retain customers?

A recent survey of 105 utility companies conducted by InterWeave, a Tampa-based consulting firm, found that the industry is falling short when it comes to meeting customers' expectations for quality service. Out of all of the respondents surveyed, only 46 percent reported that they were satisfied with the customer service they received.

Given the multitude of operational challenges facing utilities companies, including environmental issues, conservation, regulations, new infrastructure and unpredictable forces of nature, it goes without saying that customer service can sometimes slip through the cracks. But when you consider that there are such few opportunities to interact with your customers and that your company may only have one chance to make a first, and lasting, impression, you can begin to see the value of providing exceptional customer care.

Focusing on the Customer in Customer Service

Successful utility companies are those that embrace and address the elevated expectations of their consumers. After all, customers compare your company's service not only to that of other utilities, but also to the service they receive in other industries. As deregulation and re-regulation continues, customers' increased buying power and access to information may lead to easy utility switching, like we see today in the form of long-distance telecommunications and cable operators. All forward-looking companies need to ask themselves if they are sufficiently differentiated to withstand that level of instability and customer choice.

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Seven ways to improve the customer experience: Gartner suggests

Increasingly, companies are turning to customer experience initiatives to boost the bottom line, but it's an effort that requires cooperation across the organization and extends beyond just CRM, research from Gartner Inc. suggests. In fact, targeting, attracting and retaining new customers remains a top priority for CIOs this year, a Gartner survey of 1,500 CIOs worldwide found.

In the past, CRM failure was often blamed on too much IT involvement and not enough backing from the business side. However, customer experience initiatives and CRM are not the same. CRM projects may be a subset of customer experience initiatives. For example, in companies where the CRM initiative went well, it's organized, funded and there is a plan for a single view of the customer, according to Thompson.

"Most companies are much more fragmented and disorganised," he said. "And in those cases, there's a bit of a vacuum and CRM is just one little piece that might help. It depends on how successful CRM was in the past."

Customer experience team structure

While customer experience initiatives are often led by someone from marketing, organizations with the best-run programs tend to have a mixture of people who are responsible for, or report on, customers across the organization.

"The main types of people you get are brand- and design-type people, then the customer satisfaction and sometimes the loyalty people, then the process improvement people," Thompson said. "When you look at that group, if you have two of the four, maybe three of the four, that's what tends to work the best."

To improve the customer experience, Gartner advises focusing on projects that are doable and critical. There are two things to keep in mind before embarking on a project.

"One thing everyone tells you is: 'There's no silver bullet,'" Thompson said. "The second thing they all say is [that] as they start to look at what they're doing already … they're sort of amazed at what's going on."

Gartner's seven key initiatives are:

• Act on feedback: Companies that fail to respond to customer feedback are throwing away the chance to increase the number of satisfied and loyal customers. Changes need to be deployed throughout the company and communicated to employees and customers.
• Design processes from the outside in: Organizations need to identify which processes matter most to customers rather than designing them with the objective of improving operational efficiencies.
• Act as one organization to ensure consistency: Companies need to ensure that information gleaned from a customer at one interaction is not forgotten in the next channel.
• Be open: Opening channels or extending hours are one way, but it can mean more, like building communities. Organizations should be transparent and clear, open-minded and inclusive.
• Personalize products and experiences: Personalization can be complex, and complexity can mean costs for the company. Companies need to beware of just evaluating the costs of personalization against the sales benefits and to factor in the longer-term value of improving the customer experience when building a business case.
• Alter attitudes and company behavior: Employee actions are often the most powerful actions in a customer's experience. There are three ways to alter employee behavior: recruit the right employees; ensure standards with policies, procedures and governance structures; and create training programs that incent and can modify employee behavior.
• Design the complete customer experience: Organizations need to plan and design the customer experience, rather than letting it "just happen."
  

Companies should focus on what's already working, particularly in tough economic times.

"When you start to think about it, every part of the organization can be involved," Thompson said. "But the first thing to ask is: 'What are we already doing? What are the aspects of it? What can we fund better that's already being successful?' Often, people throw good money after bad, but how about throwing good money after good."

Author, Source: Barney Beal, SearchCRM.com

Homeshoring: Buzzing more for popularity Customer Service Center

Contact Center Industry has always looking for new ways and methods to increase the productivity, client satisfaction, employee benefits and satisfaction while keeping the cost as competitive to lure more and more business and clients.

Homeshoring, is also a way to get the employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, cost calculation,

Contact Center Industry has always looking for new ways and methods to increase the productivity, client satisfaction, employee benefits and satisfaction while keeping the cost as competitive to lure more and more business and clients.

Homeshoring is also a way to get the employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, cost reduction at the same time. Homeshoring gives and advantage to companies and BPOs to utalise their available workforce in less space & facility.

IDC, Research firm - proposed in 2005 that homeshoring – the underestimated sibling of offshoring – could play the role of a certain safe-haven for American workers in a globalised world. Now, the same company indicates that the bursting U.S. housing bubble may actually serve to increase the value of homeshored customer care solutions.

Service providers want professional, productive, dependable agents like never before. Captivatingly, with regards to the delivery of high-quality customer care, therefore homeshoring becomes more compelling as a model. In fact, the American home may become increasingly valuable as compared to the American automobile that has long enabled customer care agents to commute to brick-and-mortar centers. At the same time, wage earners are looking for ways to ease the stress of demanding commutes and are now being forced to become more attentive savers.

According to IDC, the homeshored model may end up becoming increasingly valuable as the American home is becoming an appreciating asset in the form of a new kind of contact center for the future.

Benefits form homeshoring bizwiz can offer to both employees and companies make it worth considering, although it will not work in every situation. Instead, companies must be equipped to not only extend its virtual contact center to the employee’s home, it must also be able to effectively manage the employee and find employees able to be productive at home. A good mix can produce a cost effective model that works for everyone.

Source: http://www.callcentersindia.com/