[Johannesburg] 22 November 2021 – Retailers are hoping this festive season will help them recover from the ups and downs of the past 18 months. Customer service remains a critical aspect of achieving that. As Forbes recently noted, “Customer service, customer feedback and meeting customers’ expectations continue to be a key focus for retailers.”
“Delivering excellent customer experiences on and offline requires a fine balance of technology and people, working together,” notes Euphoria Telecom CEO John Woollam. This holiday season, telephony technology can help deliver superior customer service in several key ways. Woollam outlines these below.
Talk to me – There are few things in life as frustrating as sitting on hold endlessly waiting for a call centre agent to help you, only to find you’re in the wrong queue. Your business telephone solution can help here, provided you set it up properly. For franchised retailers this is particularly important. Your telephony solution should enable you to implement a uniform setup across all of your branches to ensure you have a consistent welcome message, accurate call routing and relevant marketing messages being played to callers while their calls are on hold or being transferred.
Cut the queues – Festive season is frustrating for consumers, call centre agents and call centre managers. Increase seasonal goodwill by ensuring you have real-time monitoring and reporting in place so you can manage increased traffic volumes. With a real-time view of your call volumes and queues, you can reallocate agents on the fly to busy call queues, ensuring all calls are answered promptly, and the queries dealt with. Call dispositioning and call recording functionality are critical here as they will enable you to see call outcomes, as well as go back and check up on details that may have been missed during the conversation.
Two-way communication – While they’re not ideal, call queues are often unavoidable during peak purchase periods. Take advantage of this to get input from your consumers on your products, services, customer experience and more using surveys and give them a chance to win something for participating. Most people understand that queues are a necessary evil, and if they stand to get something out of it, all the better.
Your business telephony solution should also help you manage your budget, Woollam notes, by allowing you to set call limits on your extensions. And interbranch calls should be free.
“Your telephony solution should be geared to give you real-time reports and analytics on how long customers are waiting, what they are hearing, how many abandon a call and so on. Set up call back options to stop consumers sitting in queues endlessly.
“Telephony may feel like old school tech, but with the right solution and set up, it can be a real asset in delivering excellent customer experiences,” he concludes.
About Euphoria Telecom
Euphoria Telecom is a leading provider of an innovative, cloud-based, cost effective, business telephone service that offers unprecedented control and automated operational efficiency. The solution offers any business a truly simple approach to managing communications across an increasingly decentralised and mobile workforce. Seamless integration and automation make it simple for businesses to access insights, reports and efficacy of communications.
The company has earned a reputation as a customer-centric business, decreasing customer telephony costs by up to 50% and maintaining excellent customer service. Established in 2010, the company now proudly hosts over 4 000 business customers in South Africa and continues to grow rapidly. The company was founded by George Golding, Conrad de Wet and Rafal Janik, and is managed by John Woollam and Nic Laschinger.
