This is a guest post by TeleCMI.
Businesses spend a lot on customer service operations by investing in contact centers that deal with numerous IVR (interactive voice response) calls and support tickets. One way for businesses to save expenditure is by migrating to modern contact center platforms. Along with that, there are other ways of reducing customer service costs.
So, let's jump into these five valuable tips that can help your business reduce annual customer service costs by a whopping level.
ProTip 1: Adopt a virtual contact center to minimize onsite expenses.
Setting up an office and placing agents is not only a time-consuming task but also skyrockets expenses. With virtual call center software, you can onboard new agents and expand to new markets without worrying about office setup, hardware installations, and high investments. It would also allow managers to add, monitor, and manage agents in one place.
Benefit: Support agents can work remotely using their existing mobile or desktop interface through installed mobile or desktop apps. With virtual phone numbers, agents can use local or international toll-free numbers for any country.
ProTip 2: Implement IVR and conversational AI to enable customer self-service.
IVR is an interactive voice response system, a default feature in any cloud contact center platform. Once set up and live, all support calls can be automatically handled by human-like voice bots and routed to the correct departments and agents. With the help of conversational AI, IVR fetches information for all basic customer queries from the database and promotes self-service and customer service automation.
Benefit: This minimizes the number of agents required to process queries by automating everyday customer service operations. As a result, agents can focus on solving complex customer complaints, and unnecessary investments in workforce procurement can be eliminated.
ProTip 3: Improve agents’ skill sets to maximize first-call resolution.
Support tickets requiring more than one agent to provide resolution directly increase businesses’ expenditure on customer communications. Thus, apart from advanced contact center tools, you need intelligent and well-trained agents to resolve inbound queries within the first contact.
Benefit: With the help of skilled and attentive agents, support centers can avoid multiple contacts and follow-ups to solve a single query. As a result, businesses can eliminate unnecessary call charges, messages, and customer service costs.
ProTip 4: Partner with the right software vendors to double your savings.
Choosing customer service tools that are both reliable and cost-saving helps your business save big every year. Choosing the right virtual call center software can get you money-saving benefits like unlimited calling, free call recording, and unlimited users. This helps you avoid paying more for communication software that generally charges per minute and user.
Benefit: Save the extra money for other helpful business development activities and switch to a cloud communication platform to cut down customer support costs by a considerable ratio.
ProTip 5: Create an FAQ knowledge base on your website and app.
Adding a knowledge base section for frequently asked questions on your website and the app helps customers find answers to their questions without reaching out to a customer care agent. Agents can inform customers about this at the end of every conversation so they can use the knowledge base for resolving a query next time.
Benefit: By doing this, you can reduce tickets and call volume every day as it enables customer self-service. It also reduces the support team's workload and allows them to concentrate on high-priority and complex queries.
Implement the customer service cost-saving tips by integrating TeleCMI’s cloud telephony platform, a virtual call center software, into your Zoho CRM. TeleCMI for Zoho comprises all modern call center features and simplifies support operations, including sales.
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