The Secret to a Successful Business? Hint: It Starts with Your Customers

You know that without your customers, you would have a pretty hard time running a successful business. It has been said that a customer remembers the experience of a sale long after they have forgotten the price of the purchase. Let that sink in. Are your customers pleased with their experience with your company? If not, ask yourself why. Chances are your company should be listening more to what your customers are saying and putting what they say into action in some way. Your customer may not always be right, but the insights you can gain from listening to their needs can be invaluable.

How do you listen to your customers?

There are many ways to pay attention to what your customers are saying. One way is to offer direct channels of communication such as live chat, email, and phone based support services. But it’s not enough to just assist them with an issue; it is as important to go back and review the interaction and check it for possible improvements.

By listening to customers, you can keep close watch on what is important to them. Only employing a rating system with 0-5 stars means you are losing out on the all details your customers are telling you. These are the details that can influence the success of your business.

Quality Assurance

Quality assurance practices that were developed to ensure that agents offer high levels of service are now also used to gain insights from customer interactions. Call monitoring and recording is no longer for agents and managers to evaluate how a call went for training purposes. Now the recorded data gets transcribed and processed through AI and machine learning technologies.  Also known as data mining, the result is digestible information.

Data mining isn’t a negative thing. It’s the practice of examining large databases to generate new information. The data mined becomes reports with easy to interpret charts and graphs to help you see trends in service calls and see fluctuations in customer satisfaction. From this data, you’ll learn what keywords your customers use most about your business, specific mentions made about competitors, complaints of specific product features, attitudes towards pricing or contract terms, what triggers churn language and what frustrates or satisfies a customer.

Centris offers a robust quality assurance program, including protections for customer information privacy, which allows us to maximize efficiency and improve the experience. We can reduce talk times and handle times, manage agent performance, uncover fraud and abuse cases, and discover opportunities for increasing sales.

Social Media

Listening to what your customers are saying on social media can be revealing as well. Mentions, discussions and direct interactions, all are great ways to stay connected to them. Don’t be afraid of social media, email and live chat as customer service channels. Remember, a customer will usually reach out to you in the way that they feel most comfortable. Whether that’s via Facebook or by phone, it’s important to embrace it.

Marketing Surveys

Another way to listen to your customers is by conducting marketing surveys. A company can get specific, actionable data straight from customers. Centris has a long history of developing marketing surveys that are an integral tool to understand your customers. When you partner with Centris, you get market survey support that provides clear insights into your business along with strategic recommendations for improving the experience.

Let our agents conduct your customer service interactions and market surveys and analyze the data collected. We provide a thorough report that details the customer experience, giving your business a clear perspective on how you’re doing. We also make strategic recommendations for improving the customer experience and develop a plan to implement and support those changes. You will see what is working and what is not.

If you are contemplating outsourcing your customer service and adding quality assurance to gain customer insights, contact us; we’d love to show you just how efficient your organization can be when you outsource your business needs with our nearshore contact centers.