Exceedingly Satisfied Customers

The old adage “The Customer Is Always Right” rings true to this date as well. A satisfied customer is vital to any business and at Epicenter we ensure that your customers are exceedingly satisfied by receiving the prompt, courteous and resolution based service from all of our agents.

Epicenter firmly believes in letting your unsatisfied customers guide you towards changes in policies or procedures that may need to be established and listening to those that are dissatisfied and act on their advice when it makes sense. Being honest, which customers appreciate and listening to and educating them for better understanding are some methodologies we implement to engage them more and let them see the bigger picture and the background of some of your decisions.

Our agents are trained to always be positive and smile at all times, even if they are not personally in front of the customer. A positive experience and a customer care representative that leaves a positive experience will go a long way as positive words and a positive tone with a genuine interest for the customer’s needs is extremely important.

Some key activities we ensure we follow to create a memorable and positive customer experience are –

Allow the team to listen to and score their own calls

In a previous role I encouraged my team to listen and score their own calls. This built buy-in to a predominantly uncomfortable coaching session by giving agents the opportunity to identify their own areas of improvement with customer satisfaction

Throw away the scripts

We have found that scrapping the script has had a huge positive impact, treating the customer as the individual that they are – talking to them like a fellow human being has seen us receive feedback for being friendly and approachable and is bringing people back time and again.

Present a sample of customer complaints in team meetings

Get team members to present a sample of the customer complaints in the weekly team meetings. This allows the team to review the problems faced and also feel engaged in the process of coming up with longer-term solutions

Listen to customer feedback

Listen and read the customer feedback. Then, you can change your own behavior if you see what customers are saying about you.

Never say no to a customer

Our golden rule: never say no to a customer – if a Customer Service Rep can’t deliver a solution for the customer, they escalate this to their Team Lead, so strategically we can resolve the root cause.
If we ever have to say no, it’s a ‘Disney No’ – we turn a negative into a positive through freebies such as goodwill credit or free loyalty points.

Treat the customer as you would a friend or business partner

Take care of the customer end to end. Treat them as you would a friend or business partner. Do not get stressed about KPIs such as AHT, only get stressed, if necessary, about the impression you leave in customers’ minds.

Act on feedback

Hardly any companies do – it seems like companies think that measuring the problem will solve it, but customers are won and lost one at a time.

Epicenter also ensures focus on First Call Resolution as well as Net Promoter Scores which are important to any business. Our operations team believes in the listed key do’s and don’ts which have a high impact to your trade –

There is no consistent scoring link between CSAT and FCR metrics. There is, however, a link between FCR and NPS and FCR and customer effort and some ways of improving the same are -

• You need to move to monthly tracking of FCR from the eyes of your customer
• Get your insight at agent level.
• Ask the customer if they feel their CURRENT query was solved first time.
• Ask how many times they believed they had to contact the organization to get a fix.
• Ask about the agent’s professionalism, knowledge and manner.
• Ask the customer to tell you what you could improve in an NPS question to give yourself the opportunity to benchmark against your peers.
• Use call recording to give yourself the opportunity to further inspect repeat contact. (If you use surveys and call recording, the survey will date stamp the call time and the agent. Even the most basic call recorder will allow you to go in and listen to specific calls where callers have been unhappy.)
• Ask your agents to rate their own performance as part of the survey.