Delivering Amazon-quality customer service on your company’s budget
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If one of the goals for your growing company is to offer significantly better customer service than your competitors, a great way to start is to study the companies that have become huge and successful in large part because of their own extraordinary customer service.
The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), among the most-trusted customer service research providers in the nation, recently analyzed three years of survey data to identify the top ten companies.
Half of the companies in that list are supermarkets. In order, that list includes Trader Joe’s, Aldi, HEB Grocery, Publix, and Wegmans. While it technically isn’t a supermarket, many of us enjoy stocking up (and grabbing a $1.50 hot dog) from Costco, another name on the list.
Two divisions of the same auto company also earned honors: Toyota and Lexus. And the world’s second-biggest retailer, Amazon, made the list. Chick-fil-A and its legions of unfailingly polite employees round out the ten best.
So what about your company? You may dream of having the best customer service in your industry, but the constraints of your budget may pose an obstacle. Let’s look at that in one of the most important areas: your call center. No matter what you offer, you’re bound to get contacted by customers who need some help.
How you handle those contacts is a key factor in how people will view your company’s customer service. Know that old saying that you never get a second chance to make a first impression? It’s absolutely true! From the moment that customer call is answered, your company’s reputation is being defined. How you resolve their issue largely determines what they’ll think about you.
Here’s what typically happens to growing companies when it comes to customer service. Initially, calls from some of your more confused customers get routed to your employees, such as your resident engineering experts. But as the number of calls increases, those employees find themselves spending less time on the work they should be doing … and grow frustrated at answering the same questions again and again or from being yelled at by angry callers. Now you have a morale problem that could cause turnover.
So you decide to establish a service desk. Simple? Well, you’ll need to find and hire enough employees to handle the call volume during the hours you’ve established. (You may not think you need 24-hour coverage, but that customer who works the night shift disagrees.) You also have to provide pay and benefits for all those employees. Then you’ll also need space for your service desk operation, which probably involves a buildout, new furniture, and plenty of expensive technology, from software to new phone and internet lines. And did we mention training and supervision? Suddenly, your bright idea to create a consumer service infrastructure looks like an expensive proposition.
What if you took a different approach? Instead of building a customer service operation from the ground up, you outsourced those functions to a company specializing in that work. A company that has earned a reputation for the same quality of service customers of those national brands have come to expect. Someone like Netfor, for example.
We ensure your customers can get the help they need 24/7/365. You don’t need to find someone willing to work the midnight shift, because that’s our job. We use a proven process to learn everything we need to know to handle those calls, and put that information on a system so our team can access it instantly. And, because our agents specialize in providing Costco-quality service, the caller comes away with a positive impression of your company.
In other words, you can immediately offer a level of customer service that’s every bit as good as those familiar names you know – and probably for far less than it would cost you to do it on your own.
There are other advantages to outsourcing, too. For starters, because companies like ours handle multiple clients, we can balance out each client’s ebbs and flows in call volume. Your service cost is predictable and scalable. And we’re motivated to deliver the best service possible, so our business grows alongside yours. Plus, we back our promises with plenty of data, so you’ll never wonder how good we really are. You’ll see the numbers.
Your company may not have a lot in common with Amazon and Toyota, but by teaming up with the right partner, you can immediately start offering customer service that’s every bit as good as theirs. The sooner you do that, the sooner you start setting new standards for your industry.
Jeff Medley is the CEO and founder of Netfor.