There has always been something of a paradox in the area of customer service. It is a cost center, not a revenue generator, so companies want to do get it done while spending as little as possible. But everyone knows that customer relations are absolutely vital to future sales and maintaining long-term relationships with buyers, so it needs to be done as well as possible.
While these dual objectives may seem at odds, modern solutions are helping to make them align. Technology has cut out a lot of the waste we saw with traditional operations, and hybrid call center implementation has brought new levels of both quality and efficiency into the landscape.
To show just how well this can all work, the following represent merely a few of the big-time cost benefits that can be achieved through call centers.
1. Customer Experience at Scale
Single proprietors and some small businesses can get by with small solutions. But as soon as a certain threshold is crossed, there needs to be a strategic approach to support and elevating the customer experience. And today’s modern call centers are laser focused on allowing firms to scale up in this area without piling on the costs.
At some point, extra volume adds to costs, but the ability to serve more customers efficiently is a primary goal for modern and hybrid call centers. By going with this strategy, it means that acquiring new business won’t be negated by a massive increase in costs to serve them properly.
2. Customer Self-Service
One thing all companies have learned over the past decade is that many customers only want to interact with the firm when it’s absolutely necessary. This is especially true among younger consumers, but really nobody wants to call up a firm and sit there on hold for 10 minutes when they could be doing something — anything — else.
This makes self-service options critical to success. Call centers specialize in offering high-level methods for customers to avoid unnecessary communications and wait times whenever possible. From AI-powered chat interfaces to modern IVR systems, a key goal is to allow the customer to get in and out as quickly as possible without having to wait for an agent to show up on the phone.
3. Omnichannel Integration
Call centers today are also highly focused on being wherever the customer goes. This means being available everywhere from social media and chat to traditional channels like phone and voice calls. While this omnichannel approach is very difficult — and expensive — to achieve for a company that is outside this area of expertise, it has become a key driver for the call centers leading the marketplace today.
And this is not just some pie-in-the-sky concept or a nice-to-have strategy. Customers are increasingly demanding it. They use Twitter, Facebook and other digital-first platforms in their everyday life. They expect the brands they interact with to be there too.
Savings You Can’t Pass Up
Doing more with less. It’s the impossible mission that so many companies are faced with today. The landscape is simply so competitive in almost all areas that the days of wasting any resources are long gone. Mean, lean and agile is now the name of the game, and this is definitely the case when it comes to customer service.
While this will always require some investment, implementing a call center can bring great cost-saving and efficiency benefits to any enterprise. It allows firms to scale up painlessly, provides the customer self-service options that buyers demand, and enables a level of omnichannel support that most companies cannot achieve on their own at a reasonable price point.
Given all the advantages, it is no wonder that call center implementation is a growing trend among even small and medium-sized enterprises. So if cutting costs is high on your list of objectives — and when is it not? — it may be the time to hop on board now.
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