How to Turn a Crisis into a Positive with Customer Service

Most businesses quite understandably focus on preventing crises as much as they can. Of course, you can never completely eliminate the risk of a crisis, and when arises, it’s important that your company is prepared for how to handle it. With the help of a call center like TeleDirect, not only will your business be able to smoothly resolve the crisis, but it will actually be able to turn the crisis situation into a positive for your business moving forward.

Here are some aspects of our customer service team that make us a big help during potential crisis situations:

A winning attitude. Each one of our customer service representatives is trained to maintain a polite, winning attitude on the phone with customers, even in potential crisis situations. If your business is dealing with a public relations crisis or a rash of unhappy customers, our CSRs help to put your customers at ease over the situation by calmly talking them through it.

Professionalism. When people come calling to your business during times of crisis, the last thing you want is for them to have to deal with unpleasant customer service people. Our customer service representatives make sure to represent your business in a professional manner that will alleviate the concerns and anger that clients or media members may have with you during your crisis.

Going above and beyond. Even when your business doesn’t have a crisis situation to deal with, our customer service representatives always go above and beyond normal customer service expectations. We care deeply about satisfying your customers and presenting your brand in the best way possible, and do extra things like giving special deals to callers, sending caring follow-up messages, and more. Treat your customers the way you want to be treated with our help!

A personal touch. Simply put, people want to speak to other people – not computers. By having actual live representatives available during times of crisis for your business, you can more easily calm down your customers and ensure that you retain their patronage.

As always, it’s best to avoid crises altogether, but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared – contact us at TeleDirect to learn more about how our call center can help your business come out of a crisis situation looking even better than before.

Retain Your Customers with Great Communication

One could argue that the most important part of business isn’t finding new customers – it’s retaining them. Customer service is a major part of keeping customers happy and coming back for more, which means that you need to be able to provide the highest level of customer service possible for your business. And you can’t have a high level of customer service without great communication.

Think of it in terms of any kind of relationship; if you have a friend or a significant other, the strength of your relationship depends on the level of communication that you keep up. As the communication decreases in amount or quality, the quality of the relationship decreases as well. Think of your relationship with your business’s customers in the same way. You need to stay in regular contact with them to keep the relationship thriving.

There are several ways that you can ensure solid communication with your customers:

Be transparent. Always let the customer know what you can do for them and how you can do it. Answer every question and address every concern honestly and openly. In return, feel free to ask your customer questions about what they would like to see from your company and how you can improve with what you provide them. Their answers could be the key to strengthening your company.

Be available. Always have someone ready to take your phone calls or speak with customers online, and make sure that your customers know that your company is available and wants to hear from them. This constant availability presents your company as being dependable and caring.

Be willing to make changes. If customers see that you are not only willing to listen to their opinions about your company, but also willing to make changes based on those opinions, they will truly feel like their opinion matters to you. This will increase their brand loyalty to you.

Be understanding. Empathize with the problems of your customers, and be understanding in your approach to answering their questions. Customers want to speak to someone they know has a pulse, not someone who could very easily be an unfeeling robot.

Having a call center to handle your customer service ensures that you follow these tips and maintain great communication practices. At TeleDirect, our customer service representatives are highly trained in interacting with customers and are eager to handle your calls. Contact us today to learn more about what TeleDirect can do for your business!

What Makes Human Interaction Important in Customer Service?

Have you ever called in to a customer service line, only to be greeted by a robotic answering system? These automated services can be frustrating to work with because it’s hard (or occasionally impossible) to get the response you’re looking for.

At TeleDirect, we believe strongly in the importance of human interaction with customer service. All of our customer service representatives are highly trained in a number of crucial areas to ensure that your customers get the best over-the-phone customer service experience possible.

Here are some of the reasons that human interaction is so important when it comes to customer service:

Customers feel appreciated. It’s surprisingly rare these days for companies to have actual live representatives handle customer service. When a customer calls a support line and actually gets to talk to a real person instead of a robot, it makes them feel as though the company actually cares about them.

It’s easier to make a connection. The business/consumer connection that human interaction creates in customer service is extremely important. For the customer, they get to talk to someone who can empathize with their plight, give them extra benefits, and simply listen to what they’re saying. For the business, it’s a chance to create better customer engagement and increase brand loyalty.

Your business can more effectively respond to problems. An automate response system will only aggravate customers who are calling in and are already frustrated. Only a live customer service representative can help diffuse potentially volatile situations by helping the customer solve the problem and offering them special deals to help make up for it.

It’s easier to ask questions. When customers call in and have to talk to a machine, they don’t get the chance to stop and ask questions. As a result, a lot of important information can be “lost in translation” because customers are either confused about the directions they receive or are focused on asking questions of their own. Human representatives give a more personalized touch and can patiently listen to and answer any questions that a customer has.

For more information about our services, contact us at TeleDirect today. We want to give your business the personal customer service it needs to thrive!

Taking the Initiative to Make a Sale

Customer service representatives aren’t just on the phone to help customers – they’re also there to make sales. It’s easy to get this when you are a customer service representative who spends most of the day answering customer questions, but it’s true – your job is to represent the country and continue to drive sales.

Many other call centers don’t consider this fact, and as a result, their representatives’ sale skills suffer. But at TeleDirect, we understand how important it is that customer service representatives have an understanding of sales skills and a knowledge of how and when to take the initiative to make a sale on a call.

A good customer service representative always has the attitude that he or she is an actual salesperson. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they are always pushing customers to buy products – it could just mean that they are “selling” the company’s brand image, or other things of that nature. But in the cases where customers are calling in and asking for opinions about different products, it is important that the representative has the knowledge and sales skill to make a recommendation and complete a sale.

Representatives should be able to give detailed information about a variety of different products on the spot, describe what makes them different and how each product would benefit the customer in his or her situation. If a customer has a certain problem that they’re calling in for, the representative should also be able to describe how that problem can be solved, perhaps with a particular company product. If the representative has these skills and works toward closing the sale, there should be no need to bring in a salesperson to finish off the sales job.

Best of all, call centers that work on taking this sales-like attitude to customer service are able to give the businesses they work for significantly more business. In TeleDirect’s case, we answer the phones 24/7/365, meaning you could be making sales in the middle of the night while you are comfortably curled up in bed!

Contact TeleDirect today to see how your business can benefit from all our services. We’d love to help revolutionize your approach to customer service.