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How to Provide Great Customer Experience through Phone Support

Discover how to provide exceptional customer experience through phone support with strategies and best practices that prioritise customer satisfaction.

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes 42 seconds

Introduction

Understanding the Customer Experience

Strategies for Providing Exceptional Customer Experience Through Phone Support

Best Practices for Delivering Exceptional Customer Experience Through Phone Support

Conclusion

Introduction

As you’re here probably already aware of the massive value that customer experience (CX) has on your overall business success. Put simply, great customer service is necessary to improve CX for your business. This blog will cover everything about providing an excellent customer experience through phone support, including top strategies and practices to take customer experience to the next level. Let’s dive in!

Understanding the Customer Experience

Before you can master your customer experience strategy, you must know the ins and outs of the concept:

According to Holbrook and Hirschman:

"Customer experience can be defined as a whole event that a customer comes into contact with when interacting with a certain business. This experience often affects the emotions of the customer. The whole experience occurs when the interaction takes place through the stimulation of goods and services consumed."

A poor customer experience can harm your revenue and drive potential buyers away from your brand.

While the quality of your product or service plays a big part in CX, it's important to not overlook a key customer touchpoint: people.

The Importance of Understanding Customer Expectations and Preferences

Knowing what customers want is the best way to increase customer loyalty. Customers have the power to make or break your business. Consumers have so many options available today. Your brand needs to stand out from the crowd. One of the best strategies to accomplish this goal is to identify customer expectations. You can then use this knowledge to improve the quality of your phone support.

But how can you understand more about what your customers want? Consider these:

Know how your customers buy. Do most of your sales come from in-store experiences? Or do customers mostly shop online when buying from your brand? Focus your efforts where they’ll make the most impact.

Know your customer preferences. They extend to software usability, shopping time, convenience, and preferred communication. 42 percent of customers prefer to solve customer service problems over the phone.

Look into customer reviews, and focus on the common issues customers have with your brand. Also, pay attention to positive comments from your loyal customers to understand what you’re doing right.

Compare your pricing with competitors. Are you offering the same products or services with similar quality but at higher prices? If so, consider changing your pricing model.

Common Challenges in Providing Exceptional Customer Experience Through Phone Support

Since many customers prefer to solve issues over the phone when they need help, providing quality phone support is really important. And it goes without saying that positive customer interactions rely on good communication.

But what are the common issues companies face in ensuring great customer phone support? How do these harm the customer experience? Here are some typical problem areas to watch out for:

Long wait times: Customers can become frustrated if they have to wait on hold for an extended period of time. This can make customers feel like their time is not being respected, which can negatively impact their experience.

Support agents don’t know the answer to a question. This can cause a customer to believe that the support agent isn't taking their query seriously.

Your phone support process includes too many transfers. Customers are moved multiple times from one agent to another.

Your team doesn’t know how to best deal with angry customers and can sometimes accidentally make situations worse.

Inconsistency: providing inconsistent support can cause confusion and dissatisfaction among customers, leading to a poor experience. Especially if a single customer receives different service each time they contact your business.

Agents sometimes don't call customers back after saying that they would. This can make your customers feel as if they have been forgotten about, or that their concern is not important.

Strategies for Providing Exceptional Customer Experience Through Phone Support

Do you see any of your own customer support issues in the list above? Delivering quality phone support can be challenging. However, there are strategies you can implement. With the right plan, you can improve the overall customer experience and boost brand loyalty. Consider some of the following methods to improve your customer support quality.

1. Hire and Train the Right People for Phone Support Roles

Let’s face it: not all employees are suited to manage customer phone support, and that’s okay. However, this means prioritising hiring and training people prepared to handle phone support like a pro. Here are some steps you can take to create a customer-centric training program for new hires:

Teach employees proper contact centre procedures. Phone etiquette doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Etiquette can become second nature for those willing to learn. Train your employees to follow best practices.
Know the skills necessary to master customer phone support. Hire people who excel in emotional intelligence.
Offer technical onboarding. New hires might not be familiar with your company’s tech. This can lead to poor customer experiences.
Give new hires opportunities to shadow experienced call centre employees for practical training.

2. Develop and Implement Customer-Centric Processes and Policies

Excellent phone support means setting up customer-facing processes in your company. Remaining customer-centric means your business understands customer needs, situations, and expectations and builds around these.

When you make decisions, keep the customer as your focal point. Additionally, remember the following tips to foster a customer-centric culture:

Anticipate customer needs - keep your finger on the pulse in terms of what is happening in the world of customer support
Conduct anonymous customer surveys - find out what your customers are thinking and action the feedback
Make your support team easily accessible - ensure that your team is available when your customers need to speak to them.
Respond to customer concerns promptly - ensure that your customers are given a timeframe for how long they should expect to wait, or how long it might take for a response,.
Use the latest customer service tools - ensure that your team is equipped with the best tools that allow them to be efficient and use their time effectively.

3. Use Technology to Enhance Phone Support Capabilities

It is now essential that companies are aware of the latest tech to boost customer engagement and satisfaction. Advanced call centre software is a fantastic way to boost your overall phone support capabilities. For instance, the conversation intelligence feature offered by Cordless offers in-depth insights into current phone support quality.

Voice analytics can be crucial in improving your phone service through accurate transcriptions, sentiment analysis, call summaries and more.

When looking for software to help with conversation insights, look out for:

Accurate call and voicemail transcriptions
Efficient call transfers
Call recording
Automatic QA
A flexible call journey builder (IVR)
Custom business hours
Integrations with other tools and CRMS

4. Collect and Use Customer Feedback to Improve Phone Support Offerings

Customer feedback is an accessible and effective tool to improve your phone support strategy. Therefore, you need to have solutions in place to gather feedback from buyers. Swiftly implementing the feedback into your phone support is a surefire way to to boost satisfaction. Some ways to collect customer feedback include the following:

Customer surveys
Request feedback through your emails
Gather feedback from social media
Organise focus groups
Keep your eye on social media
Get feedback via SMS

Feedback can help you measure customer satisfaction, allowing for crucial improvements. For instance, companies often measure customer experience with the net promoter score (NPS) customer experience scale. The NPS scale gauges loyalty and satisfaction by asking customers to rate how likely they are to recommend a product or service on a scale from 0 to 10. Tracking this will give you an overall idea of how your customer support function is performing.

Best Practices for Delivering Exceptional Customer Experience Through Phone Support

You can improve your customer experience strategy by implementing various practices to deliver a new and improved customer experience. Focus on the following to give your company a competitive advantage:

1. Answer Calls Promptly and Professionally

Have enough team members (or the right tech) to answer questions efficiently and solve problems promptly. By doing this, you can show customers that your business is capable and willing to help. Customers don’t want to spend big chunks of time waiting to speak to an agent only to be put on hold multiple times or be connected with an unprofessional and unequipped agent.

2. Listen Actively and Show Empathy

Answering questions in real-time isn’t enough to provide an exceptional customer experience through phone support. It might sound basic, but your team needs to actively listen to customers and ensure that they don't interrupt or over-explain things that don’t offer value.

One of the best ways to show your care is by being empathetic. Customers that call your contact centre may be frustrated because they can’t figure out how to get an issue resolved. Diffuse this by showing your customers empathy through listening, acknowledging a customer’s feelings, being concise and clear, personalising customer solutions, and using empathetic language.

3. Communicate Clearly and Effectively

Vague answers and uncertain responses will make customers less likely to trust your company’s authority in your field. Clear and effective communication is integral to providing customers with high-quality phone support.

Consider some of the following fundamental techniques to communicate with customers even more effectively:

Reply on time
Respond calmly to unhappy customers
Use analogies to explain complex issues
Have high-quality customer service standards that are clearly understood by your team
Build a relationship with your loyal customers through understanding them and personalising your service
Listen to what customers have to say about your brand, and use it to improve your processes

4. Resolve Customer Issues Quickly and Efficiently

Know how to respond to issues promptly so customers don’t have to wait to have their problems solved. You can boost the quality of your phone support and enhance the customer experience if your team is equipped to handle customer issues immediately and knowledgeable on the best practices to resolve specific issues. This also means that other customers will wait less and keeps everyone happy

5. Follow Up With Customers to Ensure Satisfaction

Following up with your customers lets them know that you value their support and want to make their next experience with your brand as positive as possible.

Follow-ups help you develop a relationship and build trust with customers, making it likelier that they’ll return to your business the next time they purchase.

If you have follow-up measures in place, consider adjusting your strategy and putting more into this area. 48 percent of salespeople never make a follow-up call, while 44 percent give up after the first attempt. Stay committed and follow up with customers based on their communication preferences.

Conclusion: Providing Quality Customer Experience

To provide an excellent customer experience through phone support, remember the following:

Deeply understand your customers’ expectations and preferences.
Identify the challenges faced by your phone support team.
Implement strategies to improve customer experience through phone support, including: hiring and training the right people, developing and implementing customer-centric processes and policies, using technology to enhance the customer call journey, and collecting customer feedback.
Use best practices to deliver high-quality service through phone support, including answering calls promptly and professionally, actively listening and showing empathy, communicating clearly and effectively, resolving customer issues quickly, and following up with customers to ensure satisfaction.

Ultimately, phone support is integral to building your company’s reputation and boosting the customer experience. By prioritising phone support in your customer service strategy, you can build relationships with customers who are highly loyal.

Looking for a platform to help you navigate customer phone support? Contact us today to start improving your customer support function.

Luba Chudnovets

Co-Founder and CEO