Key Components to Deliver Stellar Order Taking Customer Service
What are the key components to deliver a stellar Order Taking service?
Having an order taking BPO partner is not enough. You need to have the best among the rest.
Settling to a mediocre company means you are not getting your money’s worth. And it also means you are depriving your customer for greater service.
So in this article we will help you identify the key components that call centers should have to deliver stellar order taking service.
Order Taking Call Center Must Have Characteristics
Like most things, there is a correct formula, component, ingredient or characteristic that can elevate a service from good to great status.
Here are some of them:
1. Immediate Response
Your revenue relies on your customers.
You wouldn’t have much of a business without them, so it’s critical to keep them pleased.
Despite this obvious fact, SuperOffice discovered that 62 percent of companies do not react to client emails. That is more than half of the companies they surveyed.
Replying to your customers can help you differentiate yourself from the competition. In fact, in a follow up survey SuperOffice conducted they found out that nearly half of all customers (46%) expect businesses to respond in less than four hours.
So do you know how long it takes for you to respond to your customers?
Call centers usually know their FRT or First Response Time.
FRT is the time it takes interacting with your customers – whether they’re disgruntled or simply have a query – it’s important to be responsive and resolve their issues as quickly as possible.
Include FRT in your checklist. It will help you get a picture of your call center partner’s responsiveness.
2. Better Conflict Management
There is no perfect business. All of them, at some point, will receive complaints and it is up to their call center partner to manage these conflicts.
One key component you should always look for is your potential call center partner’s ability to manage conflict.
To help you, Brigham Young University-Idaho made some suggestions dealing with angry callers:
- Demonstrate sincere sympathy and understanding. Say something like, “I’m sorry about that; tell me what happened.”
- Express a willingness to help.
- Listen. Take notes to help you remember important details.
- Make a commitment to help, and then keep your promise.
These may look like normal things to say during a phone call, but to mean it is a skill that not everyone can possess.
To check your order processing call center’s ability to manage complaints, look at their Customer Retention Rate.
Customer Retention Rate is the number of customers a company keeps over time. It is calculated as a percentage of a company’s existing customers that stay loyal over time.
Did you know that gaining a new client might cost 6-7 times more than keeping an old one?
That is why it is vital to keep your customers happy. Your customer retention rate can tell you whether your consumers are returning – or leaving you after a single transaction.
Ask your potential call center partner about their retention rate to better measure their conflict management ability.
3. Consistency
It’s one thing to provide excellent customer service; it’s quite another to do it on a consistent basis. Today’s customer, on the other hand, expects this level of constancy.
Consistency is key to building a brand.
University of Nevada writes, a strong brand presence can be achieved through thoughtful and mindful execution. And creating a consistent brand message and tone builds trust.
This implies you must concentrate on ensuring that your interactions with customers are consistent and of high quality.
It’s only reasonable that delivering a constant level of quality in your service will enhance a client’s trust in your company; attaining this ensures that the customer feels valued by your company.
It might also influence them to recommend your company to others.
If you are keen into checking your call center partner’s consistency in providing quality service, look no further than their NPS or Net Promoter Score.
Ever heard of this question?
“On a 0 to 10 scale, how likely is it that you would recommend our product, service or brand to a friend or colleague?”
Well, that’s basically what NPS is. It is a survey to have an insight into the customer experience.
NPS is a gold standard metric for gauging customer loyalty and measuring customer experience. Customers complete a single-question survey after contacting your contact center via phone, email, social media, or live chat.
If you have a high NPS score, that means the product, service or brand has enriched your customer’s life. And they are most likely to share your brand to their family, friends or colleagues.
It is a measure of consistency as well. An always high NPS score, means your call center partner is able to maintain high-quality service.
4. Knowledge and dedication
Of course, it is not enough that your call center partner is just fast and consistent. The accuracy of information is also important.
The importance of product knowledge in customer service cannot be overstated.
You won’t be able to sway your customer’s decision to buy or even consider your offerings until you have a thorough and all-encompassing understanding of the items and or services offered.
How can your call center partner answer queries anyway if they do not understand your industry or business?
The next time you will get a call center partner, make it a point to discuss what is their Average Resolution Time.
Average Resolution Time is the average time it takes for your call center’s support agents to resolve all open tickets in a specific time frame.
You can see who is taking longer to solve tickets by measuring on a per-agent basis. But it is much easier to check the company’s average.
This metric is also referred to as Average Time to Resolution, Average Ticket Resolution Time and Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR).
Basically, having a high Average Resolution Time means there is a problem with the agent’s knowledge about the product.
It could also signal that the support team needs more aid and training to manage increasingly sophisticated client requests. It is also possible that there is a lack of coordination between the support team.
5. Empathy
As what we mentioned, in customer service, it is easy to speak what is on your mind but it is hard to mean it. That is why a call center with empathy is a must if you are looking for an order taking call center partner.
Simply put, empathy is the most effective approach to demonstrate that you care about your customers.
While customer service employees may not always be able to remedy a customer’s problem, demonstrating empathy makes customers feel valued. It emphasizes how much your firm values them.
It is the most important component of Customer Service, especially in Order Taking.
To ensure that your order taking call center partner has empathetic agents, look at their Customer Satisfaction rating.
Customer satisfaction, often abbreviated as CSAT, is a measure of how happy your customers are with the services you provide.
To measure CSAT, businesses directly ask the applicable customer base to rate their satisfaction of an agent, product or service. This typically comes in the form of a survey communicated through some channel to the customer (direct mail, email, phone, etc).
A high CSAT means your call center partner’s agents are doing a good job connecting to their customers. It also represents how good the company is in maintaining a positive image for your brand.
Besides having empathy, there are four other ways to increase CSAT according to Zendesk:
- Focus on the customer experience
- Staff enough agents to field inbound calls
- Empower agents to make outbound calls
- Ensure that CSAT is your primary key performance indicator.
Conclusion
Before hiring an order taking call center partner, it is important to look how they do their work. And to do this, you need to look at the numbers.
So going back to our question, what are the key components to deliver a stellar Order Taking service? There are several. But there is only one way to look for them and that is through KPI or Key Performance Indicators.
These KPIs are composed of metrics such as:
- CSAT
- FRT
- NPS
- Customer Retention Rate
- Average Resolution Time
KPIs can help you. Not only to better understand how your service team is performing right now, but they can also help you run your operations more efficiently, lower your expenses and enhance job satisfaction.
So for the next time you look for an inbound order taking services provider, look no further than their Key Performance Indicator.
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