3 Steps To Turn Customer Care From Cost Center To Profit Center

Giving your customers a method to contact your business is crucial to providing for their needs. Customers can contact your business through inbound service to provide comments, ask questions, or seek guidance. The representatives for customer service inbound listen to consumers, provide product recommendations, or address concerns to assist your business keep customers and enhancing its standing with clients. What inbound service is, how it varies from outbound service, and what inbound customer service employees do are all covered in this article.

A Detailed Brief about Customer Service Inbound

When a customer contacts a business, inbound customer service begins. A person will then help the consumer, whether it be by responding to a query or addressing a problem with a recent purchase. If necessary, they could also recommend updates or new items. Instead of attempting to sell a consumer a product or service, the goal of customer service inbound is to help the customer. Inbound service may not even entail sales, depending on why a consumer contacts a firm.

What if I told you that the call center could be one of your enterprise's biggest revenue generators? Today,  the call center is seen by many COOs as a cost of doing business - a  necessary evil - rather than a revenue-generating group. This negative perspective didn’t start overnight. It’s the result of a much broader changing tide.

Basic Role of Inbound Call Center Services

Five or ten years ago, core call center activities would perform efficiently and effectively. Take outbound and inbound call center sales, for example. You had a challenge, and the typical buying behavior was to reach out to a salesperson, or have them reach out to you, to discuss potential solutions.

• Today,  though, consumers do their own research on the web, talking to  salespeople as a final step (if ever at all!). Customers are also more interrupted than ever, with a million calls, emails, and advertisements vying for their attention. They screen cold calls, ignore solicitation emails, and are harder than ever to get in touch with.

• Because of these new customer behaviors, when today’s call centers  do outbound sales, they perform very poorly. This means that those activities are dragging down the efficiency and effectiveness of the  overall call center team.

• But the other side of outsourcing customer service - is blooming because of those same changes to consumer behavior.

• Customers  want on-demand support, constantly putting calls into the support team looking for help with their service. When they do, effective customer care specialists can upsell and cross-sell organically, offering advice around complimentary products or service upgrades, and doing so in a  non-interruptive way.

• If  the customer is calling about the shoes they just purchased, a good  customer care specialist will be able to weave socks, shoe polish, and  insoles into the service conversation. Today, this is the most efficient  and effective way to create revenue through the call center outsourcing services.

• Call center revenue generation doesn’t happen without a detailed end-to-end process, though.

These are the three big concepts to consider when building out your contact center process for real revenue generation:

1. Training in the Art of the Soft Sell

 Selling  is not the primary function of customer support, but that doesn’t mean  Care Specialists don’t need to be good at the soft sell. They can easily  double up as inbound call center sales specialists, and help you increase your sales.

 Ensure that you’re training your customer support team to get to the  heart of the customer’s challenge, steer the conversation around  cross-sell and upsell opportunities, know the inventory and catalog  inside and out, and don’t apply pressure. Your training program should  revolve around the power of support and suggestion.

2. Set Goals & Objectives for Clarity

While  the aim is not necessarily to create a sales culture within the  customer support team, clear goals and objectives do need to be set so  that the team knows what they are shooting for.

How  much should your Care Specialists be selling each month? Based on their  volume, how does that translate into conversion levels?

What’s the  average revenue per call across the team? With clearly defined metrics  in place, this level of tracking becomes easy, and by monitoring how  individual Care Specialists are performing, then they can be  strategically motivated through positive feedback, incentives, and  end-of-year performance appraisals.

3. Supercharge Conversions with Predictive Analytics

Finally,  incorporating big data. Your customers have very particular tastes - no  two are alike. How then, can a Care Specialist know what products or  services to recommend? The answer lies in the customer data.

By  knowing what customers have purchased in the past, and knowing what  products and services generally complement or follow a purchase, the  Care Specialist can truly add value to the customer experience.

Amazon  has been a long-time leader in this kind of predictive analytics, and  every company investing in customer experience should be following suit.  By being smarter with data, it’s going to be easier to sell, the team’s  conversion rates will increase, and the cost per interaction will  decrease.

The Big Picture on Customer Care

At the end of the day, the goal of the customer support team is to provide the best possible level of service. For the call center  to start driving real revenue, instead of simply being a cost of doing  business, Care Specialists need to strike a balance between creating a  great customer experience and being on the lookout for soft-sell revenue  generating opportunities. To be able to do that, the customer care team needs to be properly trained on cross-sell and upsell skills, they need to understand their team’s goals and individual objectives, and they need the support of predictive care analytics to supercharge their conversion rates.

Inbound services may enhance customer relationships and assist your business in converting existing customers to new product sales. The reputation of your business may also be enhanced by a pleasant customer service experience, especially if the consumer spreads the word about it.

Is your call center simply a cost of doing business, or is it a revenue generating machine?

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