Temporary business closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have been a major downfall for a lot of businesses that don’t have adequate customer service operations setup. For those businesses that have been prioritizing customer service from the get-go, COVID-19 has only amplified their efforts to continuously improve their customer experience. If you’re wondering how you can better handle your customer calls via a call center service during the pandemic, we have a few useful suggestions.
Impact of Closing Your Business during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Over the course of this pandemic, businesses across the board and of all sizes have suffered considerable losses. With nationwide closures, it’s impossible not to accumulate some level of risk. Unfortunately, this pandemic and its subsequent global lockdowns caught a lot of business owners totally off guard.
Despite the inevitable financial losses and forced closures of non-essential businesses, providing excellent and consistent customer service can help build stronger customer relationships even through the tough times. Proving to your customers that you’re still as committed as ever to answering their questions and providing the support they’ve come to expect from your business can help you establish an invaluable sense of trust and reliability.
Improve Your Customer Communication Methods
There’s no better time than a global crisis to work toward making your business stand out from the rest of your competitors. COVID-19 has afforded a lot of businesses the perfect opportunity to not only increase their customer service communications but to also improve the quality of those interactions. Customer outreach efforts are at an all-time high thanks in large part to the fact that more people have time to spend providing feedback, placing orders, and contacting companies to ask questions.
Basically, this is the perfect time to work on expanding your customer outreach programs and building your brand awareness on a much larger scale than ever before. Working with a renowned call center service during the COVID-19 crisis is a great way to extend your national and international outreach.
How to Manage Large Call Volumes during the Pandemic
Simply put, you need additional support when it comes to managing customer communications during this pandemic. You may have been forced to temporarily lay off some of your staff, but that doesn’t mean the quality of your customer service has to dwindle.
Serving clients during the coronavirus lockdown is certainly not a walk in the park and you shouldn’t have to do it alone. With the support of experienced call center agents like those who work for 3C Contact Services, you can easily manage all of your customer communications and maintain the same level of excellent quality service. From phone calls to live chats and emails, you’re going to need as much extra support as you can get during this time.
In addition to having more free time due to the lockdown or working from home, a lot of people are placing product orders over the phone or online. That means you need more skilled and qualified agents answering their questions and processing their orders as efficiently and accurately as possible. Outsourcing a well-known call center agency can help you manage all of these tasks at a much lower cost than maintaining an in-house customer service team.
Ongoing Training and Preparation for the Changing Situation
Right now, every business is facing tough times in trying to figure out their next strategic move to keep themselves afloat. Adapting to this new and unprecedented circumstance has been challenging for both essential and non-essential businesses across various industries. The best way to keep your customer service game air-tight is to make sure that all of your agents are constantly kept up-to-date on all of the ever-changing business policies and regulations that you have in place.
At 3C Contact Services, we work hard to ensure that all of our agents receive ongoing training and access to all of the necessary resources and tools that’ll help them represent your business to the best of their ability at all times. During times like these, especially, we completely believe in and advocate for the value of providing consistent support to all of our agents so that they can do the same for your customers. That’s how we’ve managed to keep such a low employee attrition rate for so many years.
Optimized and Flexible Scheduling
If there’s one thing that the COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be true, it’s that innovation and creativity in business are both alive and well. During this crisis, many businesses that are capable of doing so have offered their employees optimized and flexible working hours. This has certainly been revolutionary in the customer service industry. To maintain consistency and quality, many employees have been working remotely from the comfort of their own homes. Not only does this save businesses a lot of money, but it also allows employees to work more flexible hours as they see fit.
Invest More in E-Commerce Operations
E-commerce was always an important and constantly growing medium in the business world, even before the pandemic. Since lockdown started, however, more people around the world have relied on placing online orders for everyday items such as groceries, food deliveries, clothing, toys, and other regular household items. Since fewer people feel inclined to go out shopping in person, e-commerce orders have ballooned beyond anyone’s wildest imaginations.
For that reason, it’s in your best interest to invest more money, time, and resources in either creating a reliable online order form on your website if you don’t have one already or work to improve your existing one and keep it running.
3C Contact Services in Canada
For nearly four decades, 3C Contact Services has been one of the leading outsourced call centers for small- and medium-sized businesses across North America. Our award-winning customer service expertise has helped numerous businesses from start-ups to more established enterprises increase the scope of their target audiences and ROIs. Our goal is to help all of our clients get through this pandemic with minimal risk and cost. Contact us today to find out how we can help you grow your business!