The purpose of a customer call center is to retain satisfied customers for your business. Shopify outsourced customer service call centers accomplish this by giving your customers options to communicate personally with agents. The agents have training in helping customers find answers to questions and solutions to problems.
Choosing a business processing outsourcing (BPO) company to handle your customers’ calls can be a difficult decision. Can you trust someone else to treat your customers the way you want? How can you decide what kind of customer service call center is right for your business?
Consider Your Business Needs
Your answers to the following questions can help you fine-tune your call center business needs:
- Are you looking to provide support for inbound, outbound, or blended customer calls?
- How many calls do you receive/dial out a month?
- Which essential features
do you need?
-
Answering/reception services
Solving technical problems
Responding to complaints
Taking sales orders
Qualifying sales leads
Providing support for loyalty programs
Collecting customer feedback
-
- How many and which specific communication channels do you want to use?
- How much are you willing to budget for the call center service?
- What kind of analytic reports help you measure success? How often do you want to receive them?
- Do you prefer native English-speaking agents?
- Do you require bilingual agents?
- Would you want customers to use a call prompter to hear automated messages?
- Do you want to provide service 24/7/365 or only during a weekday? In what time zone(s) do you want your agents available?
- How important is data security?
- Do you need your call center to have a backup system in case of a natural disaster or trouble with the local infrastructure?
- Will your customers expect to contact you via an app or a desktop browser interface?
do you need?
Look for Experience and Expertise
To handle your customer calls with care, your agents will require a combination of specific knowledge and skills. You should look for Shopify outsourced customer service call centers that have experience working with organizations that are similar to yours. Their agents should already have knowledge that is specific to your industry. Then you can work with the call center to train their agents as subject matter specialists for your company’s products or services. One of the benefits of outsourcing is finding workers who already have a significant amount of training required for the work you need them to do.
You should also look for outsourced call centers that share your customer experience principles. At Peak Outsourcing, we have an extensive recruitment and training process to prepare our team for any challenge, no matter how complex. And we commit to providing the same smooth and efficient experience we hope to have when calling a customer service line.
Check Availability and Response Times
You need to know if the outsourced Shopify customer service call center handles calls 24/7/365 or only during regular business hours. Will you need them to answer calls on weekends and holidays? Response time is vital for improving customer satisfaction. Call escalations can lengthen response time and irritate customers.
Evaluate Communication Channels
According to Salesforce’s 2022 State of the Connected Customer report:
- 83% of customers expect to interact with someone immediately when they contact a company.
- 78% of customers have used multiple channels to start and complete a transaction.
This report also displays the ten different communication channels used most by customers in 2022. In descending order of customer preference, these channels are:
- Phone
- In-person
- Online chat
- Mobile app
- Messenger apps
- Social media
- Video chat
- Text/SMS
- Online portals
This data shows that customers prefer to contact a company via phone. The percentage of customers who chose phone communications increased from 54% in 2020 to 59% in 2022. Email communications decreased from 65% in 2020 to 57% in 2022.
Review Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is critical. Listening to customer feedback lets you know what your customers like (or don’t like) about your product or service. You can then use that information to improve business processes, leading to a better customer experience. A satisfied customer is a return buyer and will recommend you to friends and family. An unsatisfied customer will likely never return, often without an explanation.
Conclusion
At Peak Outsourcing, our team can provide omnichannel customer call center support. Whether you only need a few or 100 (or more) agents, we can help. Our call center support can save you money and free up your employees’ time. If needed, we can also provide multilingual and after-hours support. Contact us today.
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