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Your customer service agents might be the most skilled in the business, but without the right tools in place, the quality of their work might not reach its full potential. 

In today’s competitive business landscape, the impact of being unhelpful to customers and delivering poor customer service is too great to ignore. Nowadays, consumers have so many choices at their fingertips. If you don’t delight your customers from the first interaction, they’re likely to take their business elsewhere. 

Having the right software to improve agent efficiency by facilitating communication and collaboration among customer support teams is essential. Without implementing tools to improve workflows and keep teams connected, the customer experience is likely to suffer. 

In this article, we’ll examine how effective customer service can improve your business’s bottom line and help you to reach your goals. We’ll also provide some customer service tips to enhance your business efficiency. Let’s jump right in.

A customer support agent answering inquiries

What Does Efficient Customer Service Look Like?

Working efficiently means reaching maximum productivity levels with minimal wasted effort.   

In the customer service world, this means avoiding inefficiencies that can impact the experience of customers. Ideally, good customer service involves streamlined customer service interactions and catering to the customer’s needs across various service channels.

It’s about ensuring your team is equipped with the tools they need to maximize productivity. It involves ensuring your customer service team isn't being held back by dysfunctional workflows or segregated systems. Most importantly, it all boils down to ensuring your team is equipped with the tools and know-how they need to effectively deliver unforgettable customer service experiences. 

An example of great customer service could be anything from answering an existing customer’s question in a timely and respectful manner to implementing robust self-service channels to improve employee efficiency. If it results in satisfied customers, it means you’re doing something right!

As a business owner, providing the best customer support solution to empower your team is the key to providing excellent customer service. When you do this, you’ll start to see improved customer satisfaction that’s reflected in your company’s bottom line.

How Efficient and Effective Customer Service Can Improve Customer Satisfaction

You’re probably already aware that satisfied customers are more likely to become loyal customers. Most likely, this is something that aligns with your business success goals. Often, business owners spend so much time focusing on the actual customer interactions, that they overlook the role of efficiency in customer service operations.

Customer service can make a huge difference to the experience your customers have with your business. However, it’s not just about what happens during the interaction. It’s about what goes on behind the scenes; how your service agents communicate, collaborate, and stay on task. 

Improved customer service efficiency improves customer satisfaction rates by reducing first-call resolution time and other key customer service metrics. The more well-equipped your support agents are, the better they can handle customer issues. Which in turn leaves customers feeling satisfied and ready to do business with your company again.

What are the Business Benefits of Delivering Excellent Customer Service?

Sure, good customer service results in loyal customers who are more likely to become repeat buyers—but that’s not all. Excellent customer service yields plenty more business benefits. Let’s take a look.

1. Reduced customer service costs.

Bad customer service comes at a cost to your business. People are more likely to remember (and talk about!) a bad customer experience than they are a good one. Moreover, when customers are unhappy, you’re more likely to need to spend money to make up for their inadequate experience. 

Whether it was a faulty product or a disappointing service, efficient customer service that deals with the request quickly and comprehensively can salvage your relationship with the customer and even undo some of the damage already done. More importantly, they can prevent disastrous customer experiences from occurring in the first place!

Investing in the right tools to help your team provide the best support possible can reduce customer service costs in the long run. Ensuring your team has a robust knowledge base to refer to, collaboration tools to gather customer information across departments, and the most appropriate service channels to communicate with customers in real-time is what allows them to effectively and efficiently solve any issues that arise.

2. Satisfied customers drive sales.

We live in an age of social media, and in that world, it’s all about word of mouth. Happy customers are more likely to chat with their peers or take to social media platforms to discuss their experiences. In this way, customer satisfaction not only creates loyal customers, but it’s a great method for lead generation. 

A business marketing strategy might include various paid advertising and content marketing campaigns to attract potential customers. Customer satisfaction drives sales by attracting leads through word of mouth while, at the same time, reducing the costs that come with drawing in customers.

3. Happier customer service agents.

When your customer service team is equipped with the tools they need to do their jobs at the best of their abilities, the happier and more satisfied they’ll be. Happy employees and happy customers—what more could you ask for?

Automating customer service operations with robust customer support software makes your employees’ lives easier. Customer support efficiency-enhancing tools allow agents to use their time more productively. This means agents waste less time chasing up customer information when they have access to everything they need, allowing them to work quickly and effectively. 

When staff is engaged with their work, they’re more likely to be friendly and positive. Happy employees lead to happy customers!

Tips to Help Your Customer Service Team Work Efficiently

Unfortunately, there’s no cheat sheet for great customer service. However, there are some tips for customer support agents teams that can help them to navigate the dos and don’ts of efficient customer service.

1. Empower your customer service team with the right tools.

Putting customers first is difficult when service teams don’t have the tools they need right at their fingertips. Efficient customer service solutions and business collaboration tools like RingCentral Video can work in tandem to help agents be as fast and productive as possible to reduce customer wait time and improve business efficiency. 

There are plenty of tips and tricks that can help customer support teams provide great customer service. However, without the best tools behind the scenes, they’re going to have a hard time working with complete efficiency. 

Team collaboration platforms like RingCentral Video can help teams to:

  • Stay connected with other agents and managers during tricky customer issues. Agents can chat in real-time to get quick answers when they need them most by direct messaging them or @mentioning them in the team chat. 
  • Access the information they need in a heartbeat. RingCentral Video keeps a record of your team messages, allows you to store FAQ documents, or create an internal knowledge base with unlimited storage. 
  • Assist clients wherever, whenever. Take your customer conversations on the go with RingCentral Video’s mobile app and review shared files or chat to a supervisor or teammate at any time.
  • Quickly solve client issues. When a problem can’t be solved via email support, self-service, or live chat—RingCentral Video allows you to start a video call. During the call, you can let your customer share their screen or share your to walk a client through their problem. 
  • Stay connected throughout the customer journey and work efficiently with integrations with ticketing tools like Zendesk, and much more.

Empowering your customer service team with a collaboration platform like RingCentral Video will allow them to stay connected whenever and wherever they’re located. If you’re managing a remote team, they’ll benefit from unlimited message and video calls for staying in touch and on top of customer requests. Moreover, with unlimited file sharing, cloud storage, and business app integrations—your team will have everything they need at their fingertips.

Remote software developers having a group video call via RingCentral Video

2. Take a customer-centric approach.

More often than not, business systems are created to work in the favor of the company. Businesses that deal with consumers like eCommerce websites, for example, must adopt a customer-centric approach. 

This means that the focus of your business should be creating a positive customer experience. That means hiring customer-orientated service reps, being available across channels, and facilitating direct interactions with customers through live chat, social media, emails, etc. 

In a customer-centric approach, metrics are key. Your team should be measuring and tracking key metrics to calculate their customer service efficiency and discern what needs to be improved. This includes things like first response time, customer satisfaction rate, and customer effort score.

Hint: It’s a good idea to hold regular training sessions to ensure your team understands the processes and procedures for customer care you have in place. This way, your team is always empowered with the skills and know-how they need to deliver effective customer service.

3. Create a self-service knowledge base.

Sometimes long-winded phone calls aren’t necessary. Customers want quick answers to their questions. That’s why implementing a self-service knowledge base for your customers is a great way to handle their questions and concerns efficiently.

Having a centralized knowledge base that’s accessible for all of your support agents is essential. It should contain blog posts, white papers, webinars, and other relevant information that agents can share with customers to solve simple problems efficiently. This way, agents can spend more time solving difficult customer queries. 

Tools like RingCentral Video allow your support teams to share, store and annotate business documents and files from within the team chat. The result? Streamlined workflows and more efficient and comprehensive customer service.

Tip: RingCentral Video acts as a centralized storage hub. Your team can upload product manuals, training videos, instructional manuals, and more that can be accessed anytime, anywhere.

4. Ask for customer feedback.

You’ll be amazed about what you can find out about the efficiency of your customer service by simply asking your customers! Follow-up support requests with customer surveys or feedback forms, or try to ask them for their feedback during support request downtime. 

For feedback to be effective, you need to use it to inform future customer service strategies. Ensure your team takes the time to review the feedback they receive and identify strengths and weaknesses. This can be done with regular video call catch-ups or team chat check-ins, which—by the way—RingCentral Video provides an unlimited amount of!

Remember: Be sure to close the feedback loop by reporting your findings back to those you surveyed. This will show that you valued their opinion and are taking it on board as you take steps towards improvement.

Take Your Customer Service to New Heights with RingCentral Video Collaboration Software

Whether you’re operating a small business or a large enterprise, customer service should be at the heart of what you do. When the systems involved in executing customer service strategies aren’t efficiently designed, your business, employees, and customers will suffer as a result.

Fortunately, bad customer service can easily be avoided. With RingCentral Video’s team collaboration software, your team can stay connected behind the scenes to ensure agents have access to all the information and help they need to provide excellent customer support.

Want to see with your own eyes how RingCentral Video can facilitate efficient customer service? Contact our sales department to view a demo and see RingCentral Video in action.

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