It is highly important for customer support managers to try all means possible to lower customer service costs in order to avoid incurring huge expenses for call center workforce. Inasmuch as we may want to reduce costs, it is imperative to maintain high standards of professionalism so that your customers remain loyal to the company. Lowering the expenses incurred in the customer support department will enhance efficiency, lower turnover rates and prevent customer frustrations.
As we are all aware, customer service support department is a very essential aspect for all companies. However, maintaining better standards is usually met with high pressure to cut customer care costs that calls for the need to chip in ways to reduce service costs without affecting the quality of customer experience. You will find the following tips for lowering customer service costs very helpful without affecting the standards of services rendered.
Tips for Lowering Customer Service Costs
# 1 Take Great Advantage Of Social Media – Unlike in the past where social media was largely used for socializing and networking, today many business organization use social media such as Facebook and Twitter to market their products and services and also chatting with clients. The main advantage of social media in lowering service costs is that other social media followers can take part to help customers with free information thereby saving you workforce costs if you had employed staffs to do this on your behalf.
Just like social media, emails are yet another tool that you can also use to lower customer support costs. There are numerous email platforms that offer affordable rates that you can use to reach clients all over the world.
# 2 Reduce The Size Of Customer Service Agents – Customer service attendants is arguably the most expensive undertaking for most organizations. In very many cases, the costs of hiring and training customer care service agents usually transcends the budget allocated; this therefore calls for the need to reduce the number of customer service agents. By lowering the number of service agents, you will not only be lowering hiring and training expenses, but also enhance better customer interpersonal relations which is important for service motivation.
# 3 Equip your staff with better training – Many executives tend to ignore training their customer service agents in a bid to lower the budget of customer care service; however, giving your agents the right skills by training them will indirectly reduce the overall cost by improving efficacy and increasing staff productivity. It is ubiquitously accepted in business that time is money; good example to elaborate this is that a trained staff is likely to spend little time while using technical programs to resolve clients’ complaints compare to unskilled agent. Furthermore, updating your staff with current training will always create opportunity for new clients thereby ensuring you remain relevant in your business amidst stiff competition.
# 4 Invest in professional staff – While hiring workforce to work in various sections of service department, you should excise a lot of caution to ensure you recruit appropriate people for the job. Qualified, trained and experienced customer care staffs should be recommended so as not to lose opportunities for clients and also save unnecessary training expenses. By so doing, you will not only be hiring persons with appropriate academic background, but also right social skills that is fundamental to your business since customer’s satisfaction should always come first.
# 5 Identify bottlenecks and solutions for workflow – This is a very vigorous process that entails problem identification and how they are propagated in the department, and lastly searching for the best possible solutions for them. Better strategies in form of maps and charts are then drawn for each problem identified. This way, it will be very easy to enhance the efficacy of the customer support team thereby saving costs by lowering areas of weakness and maximizing on your strong hold.
# 6 Use Appropriate Software Programs – Hiring skilled agents without appropriate equipment can make it overwhelming to offer better support services which in the long run results to high turnover rates. It is because of this reason that you’ll need to invest in a service portal program that will help you to effectively interact with your customers. There are many self-service portal programs that you can install to help you resolve customer complaints even when you are not around to monitor live chats. Therefore, you won’t need the services of customer service agents round the clock. This way, you will be able to reduce customer service costs incurred in hiring and also reduce customer frustrations when they have no one to address their complaints.
A good example of a self-service portal program that you can use to reduce costs is WalkMe. This is a user friendly guide that many customers find resourceful when no one is around to help their issues.
The Benefits of Reducing Customer Care Costs
There are many benefits that you are going to get for using the above ways to reduce costs for customer services. Using the above tips for lowering customer service costs will not only save you money which you can reinvest in the business, but also ensure high notch customer care services.
These following are just but few examples of benefits that you are going to get by lowering customer support costs.
- Great savings
- Reduced turnover rates
- Quality support standards
- High efficiency and timely solutions to clients’ issues and
- Prevents customer frustration thereby increasing customer confidence to your company.
Conclusion
As already mentioned, customer care is a very important department that enables companies to interact and know customers’ mind. However, it is very expensive to maintain a steady customer service department which calls for the need to chip in right measure to reduce costs.
You may achieve this by using the social media to chat with customer for free and investing on training to increase productivity and efficiency. In addition, investing in a self-service portal program will ensure that your customer issues are addressed 24/7 without the need of customer agents. Lastly, you can also lower customer service costs by identifying areas of weakness in your service team and putting the right strategies to optimize efficiency.
