How average is your customer service?

“People won’t remember what you said or did... they will remember how you made them feel”

Can you think of a time you received exceptional customer service?

Can you think of a time you received poor customer service?

No one tends to remember the times that their customer experience was just average and at iNarrator we’re not fond of being mediocre.

We provide professional, clear and informative recordings to a wide variety of business types. No matter what sector you’re in it’s important to make a good first impression. Don’t mistake this for being the only important aspect of connecting with your customers. Coming across a helpful and friendly recorded message is only a tiny element of your customer’s overall experience.

Taking the time to prepare scripts and get your new recordings installed is time wasted, if once the phone is answered your caller receives poor customer service. Customer service is a talking point and we Brits love a good grumble, as the old saying goes news travels fast. The power of the internet has allowed us to see the good, the bad and the ugly of customer service go viral.

Poet Mary Angelou once said…

“People won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel”

This is the customer service mantra that we want your call handlers to adopt, the chances are that if they upset a customer that they won’t feel great themselves which could then have a further negative impact on their next few calls. Good customer service is underestimated, it doesn’t need to be a huge gesture to make someone feel that they’ve had a good experience with your company.

Your call handlers should strive to reflect the professionalism demonstrated in your IVR and In-Queue Messages. Mirroring and matching what your caller has been greeted with should be your standard. Customer’s expect to be met with a certain tone, manners and a handler who is adequately trained to assist them. Set the bar high and you’ll find callers are more satisfied, they may spend a little longer on the phone but this will help to build a positive relationship with your business and reassure them that they’re not just another number waiting in a long list of queries.

According to Walker Info by 2020 Customer Service and experience will be the leading brand differentiator, making how you treat your customers even more important than your pricing structure and products or services.  We take for granted how far a little empathy can go and the statistics below highlight the key skills that your customer service agents need to have in order to impress.

The research found that:

“71.5% of positive customer service experiences that people share in person or on social media began as negative experiences and in 82% of negative customer service stories employees were perceived as not caring.”

Training is vital in ensuring that your call handlers are able to deal with the kinds of requests and queries that they receive, there’s nothing wrong with going off script to make a call a little less robotic but the way agents handle calls should be monitored to ensure consistency, accuracy and professionalism.

If you don’t consider customer experience as something you need to be monitoring then you might want to read these statistics, consumers decide where their loyalties lie based on customer service so it’s important that you value them otherwise they won’t value you.

• 76% of consumers say they view customer service as the true test of how much a company values them. – Source: 2015 Aspect Consumer Experience Survey

• 60% of consumers have higher expectations for customer service now than they did just one year ago. – Source: 2015 Global State of Multichannel Customer Service Report

• 97% of global consumers say that customer service is very important or somewhat important in their choice of and loyalty to a brand.  Source: 2015 Global State of Multichannel Customer Service Report

•  88% of people have been influenced by online reviews while making their purchase decisions.  – Source:  Zendesk

• 79% of high-income people, 51% of B2B clients, and 54% of Gen Xers will avoid your company for two years or more following one bad customer experience.  – Source:  Zendesk

If you've got the right team but you’re lacking the right first impression, that’s where we can help. Plug in and listen to our Case Studies to discover what a good first impression really sounds like.

Source of Statistics:
http://customerthink.com/customer-service-statistics-to-guide-you-for-2016/

Merry Christmas from IVR Recordings

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from everyone at IVR Recordings.

Find your Moneypenny

Today sees the release of the latest Bond film, as ever it’ll be full of gadgets, action and of course cars. The Aston Martin makes an appearance in 11 Bond films and is one of the most iconic vehicles in cinematic history, yet even James Bond’s car needs a service every now and again particularly after running into an enemy!

From the Aston Martin DB5 featured in Goldfinger, complete with rotating number plates to the V8 that ends up in a wooden hut on an ice rink in The Living Daylights, it’s clear to see each of the cars featured in the films brought something new, whilst maintaining a Bond tradition. Yet most impressive by far must be the DB10 in Spectre. The car was purpose built for filming, with only ten being produced it’s never going to be sold to the public, making it the most exclusive Bond car of all time.

We think that you and your business should be as impressive and unique as the DB10, bringing us to an important question, are you an Aston Martin or a Reliant Robin? Does your company sound as good as it should? The Aston could have all the gadgets in the world but if it didn’t look the part it wouldn’t have the same impact. First impressions are valuable when it comes to your company, don’t settle for being reliable, be impactful.

According to Inbound Telephone Call Centre, 94% of marketing budgets entice a customer to call, yet only 6% of the budget is actually spent on handling inbound calls. Customers deserve to be entertained if they’re prepared to wait on the line to speak to your advisors, welcoming IVR Prompts and Music On Hold Marketing is proven to retain those waiting on hold, compared to those who are faced with silence.

Bond has Moneypenny, your customers could have an IVR menu. Being able to direct your customer’s calls as quickly as possible through simple and easy to navigate menus is far more efficient than leaving someone on the line or passing them from department to department. Bond has Moneypenny, why not include an almost virtual secretary to your phone systems with IVR recordings?

How to place people on hold

Yes it is as simple as hitting the hold button but, as always, there is a better way!

Over the summer we've been working closely with a call centre client to improve the experience for their callers. This included providing a report on the current system and offering a full solution to make customer service improvements, from rationalising the IVR routing scripts to recording the new IVR messages with a professional female voiceover; in addition we made a recommendation to train staff on how to place callers On Hold.

 Now stick with us here, yes it is as simple as hitting the hold button on the phone but how you prepare the caller before placing them on hold has an impact on how they feel and the customer satisfaction level. Think about it how often are you unceremoniously dumping someone on hold without any warning?

 It’s much better to explain (even apologise if the interaction isn't going well) before placing the caller on hold, something along the lines of:

 I’m going to place you On Hold, I’ll be back with you as soon as possible and won’t keep you any longer than necessary. Then place the call On Hold

When you return to the call: Hi [callers name] thanks for being On Hold, sorry to keep you.

Simple but effective and callers will appreciate it. Test it out. Get your teams together, brief them, then at the end of the week hold a team meeting and see the responses they have had.

How call centre metrics impact customer service

We all know the frustration of badly recorded IVR messages, a muffled at the other end of the line presenting a baffling array of department options then being placed on hold and listening to terrible music. Do we ever think about the people at the other end of the line? There’s pressure behind these calls for measuring and judging staff on several different factors that we often overlook.

Call centre staff usually have their work measured and assessed on their average call times with a customer, the amount of calls they make or take in a day and of course customer feedback. Are all these factors really contributing towards good customer service? Or are they merely ensuring the numbers at the end of the month are on target? What impact do these metrics actually have on a customer’s call?

In any work environment being assessed can leave you with a sense of self-doubt, even when you know you do a good job. Whilst it may be better for a company making or taking calls to have their staff abide by a strict max call time, this won’t necessarily benefit the customer or resolve their issue if an agent is rushing to get them off the phone. A three minute call doesn’t quite justify half an hour on hold.

Many large companies choose to outsource their calls to a call handling company, which can mean agents need to know the ins and outs of several businesses and be familiar with different call handling styles and queries. For example I had three calls in the same day last week from a telephone provider, from the same agent each time in an outbound call centre, demonstrating the desperation some agents face just trying to hit targets.

There are several areas call centre staff are rated by:

• Call handling times
• Sales tactics
• Feedback and surveys   

The issue is that, to really get to the bottom of where improvements need to be made in a company, calls need to be monitored by senior members of staff, yet their time is precious (they don’t have the time to wait on hold, unlike the rest of us, clearly) thus instead of listening in to their staffs’ calls they merely take the averages and turn this into statistics, which are often unreliable.

Call Centre Helper note the importance of realising what your customer wants and then using this information to make changes to the products and services you offer. This is where you see the real indication of what improvements are needed, rather than being focused directly on how staff handle a call and pressuring them to shave seconds off their call times. They note that “Monitoring from the caller’s perspective will give you an overall impression of what it is like to call your centre. It will demonstrate how frustrating it can be to wait in a queue and how friendly or annoying your voice messages really are.”

Perhaps it’s time to call your own company and experience a call from the customer’s point of view? If you think you could do with an update and improve your company’s image then contact us today for a quote for our professional IVR message solution. Maybe next time you’re put through to a call centre agent spare a thought for the real reasons they’re rushing and pushing!

Is your IVR suffering from broken window syndrome?

In the early 1980s James Q Willson and George L Kelling introduced the world to 'The Broken Window' theory. 

The theory gives the example of a building with one broken window; if the window remains broken, more windows will suffer the same fate until eventually the building is broken into in its entirety.  This, Willson and Kelling refer to as the ‘norm setting’, which will signal all-out urban disorder! 

The same applies in business - if a guest arrives at a hotel to a hostile welcome from the front desk this sets the tone for the remainder of their stay. So when they arrive in their room to discover a cobweb, or when they are shown to a table in the restaurant and not given menus, they are much more likely to complain about anything and everything throughout their stay.

The same is true of your IVR system.  It's your front of house.  Your head housekeeper.  Your maître de. 

If a customer has to spend what seems like an eternity in a call queue listening to the same messages telling them their call is important, their call is valued, their call will be answered as soon as an agent becomes available…frustration builds, and before you know it their patience has just about run out. 

How can this situation be avoided? Well like any good hotel you should have happy, well-trained, informed and interested front of house staff.  Think more Cesar Ritz than Basil Fawlty.

Call queues are, more often than not, unavoidable, but at least if those queuing callers are listening to the right style of music, a voice over that puts them at ease, and informative, engaging messages, they might actually learn something about you instead of just being irritated by the time they speak to a human being! 

Sound like a good idea? Got a ‘broken window’ that needs fixing?  Then give us a call - we can mend your IVR system and avoid all-out caller disorder.

Welcome to the new IVR Recordings Website

Hello and welcome to our new look IVR Recordings website, we hope you like the refreshed style and additional content.

We've got lots of information and audio samples of IVR Message Prompts to make your call centre sounds great. If you need professionally recorded IVR Prompts for your telephone IVR System then we're the people to talk to!

You can also Request a Call Back or Free Quotation here

Keep checking our blog as we'll be launching some exciting new content over the next few weeks.

If you're looking for On-Hold Marketing Messages then visit our sister website www.iNarratorOnHold.com