Improve Customer Satisfaction and reduce costs with good CRM design and Outsourcing

There is plenty of evidence to show that customers who quickly get answers to their questions are happy customers. Placing your customers on hold, transferring them around the office and worst of all providing imprecise or incorrect information are all certain ways to upset customers.

Traditional thinking is that excellent customer service comes at a cost. For example, if you don’t want to keep customers waiting in a phone queue then employ more call centre staff and if you want to make sure customers queries are answered efficiently then invest more in CSR training.

Certainly, sound workforce management and better staff training will lead to a better customer experience. However, with clever design of CRM and Knowledge bases and with a good outsource contact centre partner you can deliver an excellent customer experience without an increase in cost.

CRM and On-line Knowledge Base

A well designed CRM with an associated online knowledge base will deliver all the information a CSR needs to quickly satisfy a customer’s query. I am referring to the need for it to be very intuitive and easy to use. When it is, these benefits follow:

• CSR training time is greatly reduced
• Simplicity of design leads to less errors
• It becomes much easier to outsource some or all your calls without a drop in service quality. The outsource company simply accesses your systems and becomes an extension of your business.
• You can consider providing your customers with direct access via the Internet so they can help themselves.
  

Outsource Contact Centre Partner
Obviously, the largest cost component in your contact centre is staff and when they are sitting waiting for the phone to ring this cost becomes waste. A key area where a good outsource partner can add value to your business is workforce management. They can provide levels of CSR occupancy and scalability way beyond what is possible in most small to medium sized fixed resource in-house centres.

Historically, the negative to outsourcing has been the inability of the outsourcer to match the customer experience through their lack of knowledge. This is no longer the case.
Online access to your CRM and on-line knowledge base enables the outsource company to provide a completely seamless customer experience.

Depending on the circumstances, the relationship might be a full outsource or it might be a split by call type, overflow, or just afterhours.

Summary

YOU CAN improve your customer experience and reduce costs by good CRM design and effective use of outsourcing enabling you to have just the right amount of resources at all times to service your customer demands.

John Chetwynd
Telnet Services Limited