Consider Extending Your Customer Service Hours

As you continue to look for ways to optimize your 2018 customer service strategy, you may want to take a hard look at your contact center’s hours and consider keeping your department open later into the evening.

Many customer service departments, in other words, close too early in the day forcing consumers to wait until the following business day to resolve their issues.

Simply put, this is a bad look for a business. When customers cannot speak to a service representative, or solve their issues on their own using an automated system, it leaves them in the dark. And when this happens, they may be more liable to seek out the services of competitors.

For this reason, it could be a good time to start keeping your contact center open later.  Here are some of the top benefits in doing so:

• Improved customer loyalty: So many organizations today are failing to offer strong after hours care that consumers have come to expect poor service late at night. As such, there is an opportunity here. If you provide great after-hours service, you will improve your chances of building customer loyalty which will in turn translate into higher profits. You can “wow” your customers by providing strong and flexible after-hours care.
• Faster resolutions: When customers can solve their problems conveniently after hours, it reduces the number of issues that agents need to deal with in the morning. Agents can get to work answering incoming calls, instead of backtracking and returning phone calls. This can lead to reduced wait times, and faster issue resolutions.
• Lower operating costs: Encouraging customers to solve their problems late at night will lead to reduced monthly communications costs, as you will have fewer callers waiting on hold to speak with agents. Spread out your inbound communications, and watch as your monthly phone bills plummet. It can be an effective way to save money, if you go about it in the right way.

A growing number of businesses are also outsourcing their contact center services to third party solutions providers, offering fully-managed systems, experienced service professionals and data-backed strategy.