Imagine a big brand Big XYZ doing good business during regular times (but of course!). Now suddenly imagine that the times got bad and that too really fast (not so strange, huh?). So, now our beloved Big XYZ started losing business real fast. They could no longer sell, and this irked the top management giving them sleepless nights. But then came a silver lining to this ominous cloud, as far as Big XYZ was concerned. A specific set of customers came back, and they continued buying from our brand. Now the million-dollar question is – what is this customer cohort that is still purchasing from Big XYZ even during tough times? The answer – LOYAL CUSTOMERS!
So therein lies the moral of the story. Brands that go to great lengths to build a loyal customer following find it easy to conduct business even during tough times, thanks to these wonderful customers repaying the goodwill to the brand. So now suddenly you want to have loyal customers, huh? Well then, let’s find out how you can build a loyal customer base through your contact centers.
Improve your agents’ soft skills
Just like humans value relationships with other people, we value an excellent brand relationship too. So it is up to your brand representatives, aka your contact center agents, to ensure that the relationship between the customers and your brand is built on trust, mutual respect, and understanding. That’s where the agent’s soft skills come into the picture. It could be all about your agents following the customer service etiquette, always being polite and courteous towards them, getting enough context on them to serve them better, anticipating the customers’ needs even before they explicitly announce it. All these efforts from your contact center agents go a long way in cementing your brand’s reputation to value customers over just doing business with them. So, it’s about building deeper customer relationships, which creates loyal customers for life. And it all starts with your contact center representatives!
Listen attentively to your customers
If you want to genuinely solve your customer’s problems, you first need to listen and listen well. Your customers could be going through a lot of things in their lives. Explaining a severe product or service issue to an agent who couldn’t care less is the last thing that they want at this time, right? Your contact center reps need to modify their tone and tempo to connect with the customer at an individual level. The reps should clearly understand the problem, respect the time the customer is spending trying to explain the problem and find out how best and fast they can resolve the customer problem. For all that to fall into place, first, the agents need to patiently listen to the customers and understand what they precisely expect from you.
Well, sometimes, all this can be a bit overwhelming for the contact center agents. That is when you need to augment your contact center agent capabilities with the right Artificial Intelligence solution. What you need is a Conversational AI platform that can understand the real intent of the customer, can give real-time assistance to the agent, can provide the agent access to knowledge bases at the click of a button, and one which can do all the miscellaneous tasks too, so that the agent can concentrate on what he/she does best – empathize with the customer. Now that would be a great addition to your customer service repertoire. Well, you can find out more about it HERE!
Reduce your customers’ efforts
With every passing year, customers are becoming more demanding, and technology, in general, is making sure that the customer aspirations are not in vain. As a brand that is trying to win over customer loyalty, you need to have the right human ingenuity and technological prowess in your contact center to ensure that customer effort is always at a bare minimum. An excellent way to start would be to have a self-service option within your customer service for your customers who value time and want to get things done in a jiffy. An AI-powered Virtual Assistant can help you precisely get this job done. Customers can interact with the voice bot or chatbot to resolve their FAQs, get access to their accounts, do simple transactions, search for information, get help with how-to-guide’s, and the list goes on.
Then, as a natural progression, your contact center agents also need to have all the skills to solve a customer issue by keeping customer efforts to the bare minimum. Thus, the agents should be able to hand over to the subject-matter experts as seamlessly and, when needed, make informed decisions on the fly, and gain a broader picture of the customer issues to serve them better.
All this will ensure that your customers would be more than happy to do business with you the next time. Now that sure looks like a winning recipe for garnering customer loyalty, regardless of your industry vertical!
Click here to find out how Uniphore can help you build customer loyalty through your contact center now!