Top 8 Customer Service Tips from the Contact Center Experts

Did you know the first week of October is celebrated in the customer service world? October 2-6, 2017 is National Customer Service Week, and this year the team at Five9 would like to recognize customer service experts.

We’ve gathered the top eight tips from the customer service experts themselves to effectively run their contact centers.

“A contact center can only be as great as the technology it possesses. For a more effective contact center, you have to be willing to optimize the technology available to you and go out and find the right tools to complement what you already have. Just having the technology is not enough; you have to be willing to leverage every ounce of that technology to obtain the results you want.”

--Casey Brandt, Senior Account Manager, GilsbarPRO

“Customer Service starts at the moment your customer dials your number. Spend as much time enhancing your IVRs to be customer friendly as you do your agents.”

-- Gene Howell, Director of Process Optimization/Dialer Operations, CURO Financial Technologies Corp

“One tip I have for experts looking to build a more effective contact center is to use data to inform decision making. Whether you’re trying to make improvements to your IVR, measuring customer sentiment with CSAT and NPS, or hoping to improve other key metrics, leveraging data is important.”

--Hannah Gordon, Market Research Analyst, JustAnswer

“Integrate your customer database and CRM with the phone system. The customer won't need to provide their information, so you can provide quicker service.”

--Andrew Lassise, CEO, Rush Tech Support

“For maximum customer service, contact centers should measure service level compliance on an hourly basis. By measuring on an hourly basis, organizations are able to create a tiered compliance levels and identify the outliers in a targeted manner. For example, tier 1 service level compliance is 80/20 or 80% of the calls answered within 20 seconds.”

--Stacy Calvaruso, CHAM, Founder/CEO, Access Strategies, LLC

“For many companies one of the only direct interactions you will have with your end customer is through the contact center. Each customer interaction is precious as it reflects on the quality of your entire organization. Make sure your processes are aligned to benefit your customer. Too many times a contact center will drive a metric without considering the downstream impact on the customer. Build your interaction from a solid base. The customer experience that you deliver built on understanding what your customers are asking for. Listen to the customer, confirm understanding, and work to exceed their needs with urgency.”

--Ted Jordan, VP Customer Service, Five9

“As system admin for our company we send a report to our inbound manager with any calls over a five minute queue time and we reach out to these customers to make sure all is good and to apologize for any long hold times.”

--Sevan Menechian, System Administrator, Golden Hippo

“So much focus today has been focused on providing a single customer the ability to resolve a customer service issue through their channel of choice and even during an interaction with an agent in an omnichannel contact center. However, boots on the ground experience from my work on customer implementations across health, finance, retail, and BPO industries has proven that not all agents can handle multi-task well and ensure a high customer experience. Only a select few agents can multi-task well where they can talk to a customer on an issue, and then also respond to an email from another customer as an example.

I always advise the contact center supervisor to limit less skilled agents to work in two channels at most and control the number of interactions they are assigned to work on concurrently. Determine which of your agents are more skilled and have those ninja agents be the selected few to work more interactions and enable them for the omnichannel tools to serve those high touch customers.”

--Danny Wang, Senior Product Manager, Five9 

How are recognizing the hard working teams running the contact centers this year for National Customer Service Week?