A key challenge facing most business owners as they proceed on the path to expansion is maintaining the quality of communication with their external customers. An interesting way of looking at clients would be to regard them as stakeholders in your business and actively seek their opinions and feedback about your products.
When you are the one running your very small scale venture, you can communicate personally with all your clients and ensure that they are satisfied with your responses. However, as your business expands there comes a point when you cannot possibly handle the volume of communication and therefore delegate this activity. Over time you find that the quality of communication deteriorates. So what should you do to change things and ensure that despite the expansion of your business, your communication standards continue to rise?
The first step in the process of improving communication quality is to get an objective assessment of your communication level as perceived by your clients. You could get an external agency to determine the current satisfaction levels amongst your existing customers. Communication can be written or oral and the most commonly used metric to measure the quality of both mediums is accuracy and timeliness of responses to customers.
If you are using call tracking then you could also get a call rating based on customer experience. You could generate a call tracking report telling you what proportion of your calls were handled well. Why not go a step further and get a complete transcription report highlighting irate and dissatisfied clientele. For example, if you’re a clothing store, you could set triggers for “expensive” and “poor quality.” This way if a call does not end in a sale you know exactly why. You know where your business needs improvement and can focus your energy in the right direction.
If the external agency that you hired to assess your communication quality confirms that your communication standards are low, then you need to embark on an aggressive improvement plan immediately. If you lack the time and/or the expertise to undertake this challenge yourself, then consider hiring a specialist/consultant who can look at your existing set-up objectively and suggest meaningful enhancements. The cost of the consultant will be more than justified by the quality enhancements in communication.
An objective re-evaluation of the communication process may show that you have improved communication quality while also reducing costs. One way to enhance quality is through intelligent call routing which uses the round robin feature to allocate calls in an optimum manner. My colleague at AvidTrak, Amin, has written an interesting blog post on how you can “Never miss a lead through intelligent Call Routing.” You may want to refer to this for further details or better yet get in touch with AvidTrak to learn how we can improve help you improve upon your goals of customer satisfaction.
