Knowledgeable and Friendly Agents Earn Customers for Life: Why Brand Trust Rides on the Customer Service Your Contact Center Agents Deliver
If you don’t deliver good service, customers won’t trust you.
Turns out, excellent service is the number one factor that impacts a consumer’s level of trust with your company. And, trust is as important to your company’s financial health as growth and profitability, according to Accenture.
Providing a good experience for your customers isn’t about being perfect. Every company has hiccups. What matters is how you handle each hiccup when it happens. Handling customer issues with knowledgeable and friendly service is how you build trust and earn customers for life.
That’s why 71% of consumers said employees have a huge impact on their customer experience.
If your customers trust your agents are by their side to work through the issue with them, they’re likely to stick around.
Simply put, you build trust through the service you deliver. Your agents are on the frontlines communicating with customers. They’re the face of your brand and the ones in the driver seat when it comes to building relationships based on trust.
Learn how knowledgeable and friendly agents keep your revenue in check and build trust that keeps customers for life.
Knowledgeable agents build trust.
According to research out of PWC, 46% of all consumers will abandon a company if the employees aren’t knowledgeable.
When you get the sniffles and need advice on how to leave the tissues at home, who do you turn to? Do you check Wikipedia for the answers (and the millionth unvetted edit)? Or, do you turn to your local doctor or clinic?
I turn to the experts.
Why? Because they have years of knowledge and experience to back their claims. And because of all this knowledge, I trust they’ll have the right answer to my persistent sniffles.
(It’s really starting to make my coworkers sweat).
When people are knowledgeable on a certain topic, you trust them and feel better about your experience. The same goes for interactions with your agents.
The American Express 2017 Customer Barometer Survey found that 62% of customers said a representative’s knowledge or resourcefulness was key to their positive service experience.
Your agents are superheroes in disguise.
Customers look to your agents to solve their most pressing problems, using the product and service knowledge tucked in their brains. Your agents’ expertise builds trust, and trust breeds certainty that a customer’s fate rests in capable hands.
Knowledgeable agents have access to the metrics they need to measure (and improve) performance regularly.
Use these 7 agent-first metrics to give your team the performance knowledge they need.
Friendly agents keep customers for life.
Knowledge builds customer trust, but that’s not the only factor that matters in the service experience. Your agents can have all the knowledge in the world, but if their delivery comes served with a side of bad attitude, your customers leave.
PWC found that 60% of all consumers said they’d stop doing business with a brand if the service they received was not friendly.
“There’s a reason every employee at Ritz-Carlton Hotels* has the freedom to use up to $2,000 to rescue a bad guest experience. The risk of not getting the human element right is significant. 60% of all consumers said they’d stop doing business with a brand if the service they received was not friendly.”
– Experience is Everything: Here’s How to Get it Right by PWC
An agent who lets their bad attitude seep into the customer service experience flips the script and diminishes trust. It makes customers feel unheard and misunderstood. People won’t do business with companies that don’t show empathy and understanding when issues arise. That’s why a whopping 97% of customers say bad customer service changes buying behavior.
Almost ALL of your customers will buy differently if they encounter a bad service experience at some point during their customer journey.
Empower your agents to take charge of the service experience.
To lock in the friendly, knowledgeable service your customers expect at every touchpoint, empower your agents.
Give your agents the data, tools, and development they need to be knowledgeable experts for your customers. Coach and train them in-line and on-time, right after their interactions. Deliver contextual lessons to their queues and ID moments in their interactions where they need to improve, and where they nailed it.
A recent HubSpot article said half of customers increase their purchasing with a company after a positive customer service experience. Coaching your agents to empowerment means they’ll be ready to find unique resolutions for customers.
Then, build a contact center environment with the culture and support agents need to be happy, so they’ll pass that happiness off to customers in the form of friendly service.
You don’t have to shell out two grand every time a customer gets angry. But be like Ritz-Carlton and let your agents rescue customers from a poor experience. Give them guidelines (and wiggle room) to help customers how it makes sense in-the-moment.
The payoff will be two-fold, benefiting your customers and your bottom line.
Lock in more ways to earn customers for life. Build customer experience strategies based on data about what your customers want and how they interact with your brand.
Get the ebook that helps you put your metrics to work for your customers (and agents).