Creating a great first impression

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Jason Roos reveals how you can make a great impression on your customers from the minute they pick up the phone.

Use professionally recorded announcements

Use professionally recorded announcements as they are really worth the money! You should also apply these announcements intelligently. For example, it is good practice to have different announcements at peak times and non-peak times.

In addition, play music that is appropriate to your customers (not just what you like) and keep the customer updated in their progression in the queue.

Provide a self-service option

Like the self-service check-out, more customers than you would expect would use a self-service application rather than wait in a queue.

Introduce self-service as a highly effective way to fast-track service to set a positive rather than a negative impression.

Offer your customers a call-back at a time that is convenient to them

At times of excessive queue lengths, offer the customer the ability to be called back at a time that is convenient to them.
This shows that you care and that your service is focused on being convenient for the customer.

Ensure consistency across all departments

All too often the excellent work done by the contact centre is undone when the customer interacts with other parts of the organisation.

The same professional greeting and service needs to be consistently applied, regardless of whether the customer is calling the contact centre, a back-office specialist or a regional office.

Provide a truly personalised service

If you know which customer is calling from their Calling Line Identification, then use this information to provide a truly personalised service.

Understand what products and services they have bought from you, when they last called you and what this call was about. All of this intelligence is available, so why don’t you use it to more intelligently greet and route the call?

Use post-call surveys to capture first impressions

Many contact centres place a lot of focus on reviewing the actual customer interaction and have programmes in place to improve agent quality and agent performance.

However, it is not just the conversation that counts, but the end-to-end customer experience.

Ensure that you can understand the customer journey, and even better, use post-call surveys to capture the first impression that the customer has of your service.

With thanks to Jason Roos, Chief Executive Officer at Cirrus.

Author: Megan Jones

Published On: 9th Apr 2014 - Last modified: 18th Sep 2019
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