As ample opportunities present themselves for global brands like your own to reach internationals with products/services, it’s vital to enhance customer engagement in a way that global customers enjoy stellar customer experiences (CX), influencing long-term sales permanence/growth while ensuring strong brand ambassadorship. As Callnovo Contact Center’s recent article on customer support manager skills / customer service manager skills mentioned:

• “Stellar customer service (CS) that goes beyond customer expectations is crucial to customer retention, leading to a stronger brand reputation, securing global sales success.” *

Stellar CS via strong customer engagement that leads to excellent CX ensures you build rapport/trust with customers, improving overall customer loyalty margins over the long-run while ensuring a greater competitive drive in the global market and securing market dominance, building a global brand legacy.

To capitalize on the above, Callnovo wrote an article entitled, “Expert Tips: How to Improve Customer Retention via Top-tier Customer Service,” mentioning: successful customer retention increases sales market competition, ensuring vital long-term sales benefits, bringing improved ROI/customer loyalty growth. Comparably, customer loyalty growth offers vital short-and-long-term advantages that improve global sales success:

Increased Share-of-Wallet

Referring to how much customers spend through your brand as opposed — and in comparison — to how much they spend through competitors, share-of-wallet (SOW) highly-correlates with brand loyalty; the higher the customer loyalty, the more distinct their SOW — and the more they spend through your corporation as opposed to your competition. As such, higher SOW means greater customer lifetime value (CLV), leading to higher sales revenue/long-term sales growth.

Brand Ambassadorship

Brand ambassadorship — the idea that loyal, repeat customers voice to others their experienced CX — benefits overall brand loyalty growth. Positive/negative CX spread like wildfire; by ensuring customers enjoy their CX, you can increase customer acquisition, leading to customer loyalty & brand reputation growth.

Increased Trust

Customer loyalty indirectly results from/fosters strong rapport/trust; when customers frequently-return for repeat purchases, their felt brand value highly-outweighs potential benefits from competitors. As Callnovo stated in their customer retention article: new customer acquisition is 5–10 times more costly than existing customer sales.

Let’s get into how your global brand can build stellar customer loyalty, brand reputation, and global sales market permanence/success; we’ll touch on:

- 10 best customer service practices / best customer support practices, and
- how Callnovo’s superb customer-centric, multilingual & omnichannel call center outsourcing / contact center outsourcing solutions help take your brand success to the next level.

10 Best Customer Service & Support Practices

While integrating a crucial CS strategy aligns you with a vision/mission of/for brand growth that secures greater sales dividends, leading to a stride in the race for brand domination, such a vision/mission means you need concrete, actionable, tangible best customer service practices / best customer support practices to create superb customer engagement that creates lasting loyalty.

The Right Tools

An essential best practice within this list of best customer service practices / best customer support practices, the right set of tools ensures top productivity/performance ,meaning you should replace old tools with modern alternatives; for example, the Private Branch Exchange System (PBX) phone system must be replaced with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) — as, (1) it’s very limited, hindering customer service representatives (CSRs)’ ability to properly-serve customers, and (2) new-age solutions offer more powerful features at a fraction of the cost. To take advantage of this best practice:

• • audit your existing infrastructure to identify service feature upgrade opportunities,
• • empower CSRs with effective tools, and
• • invest in modern tools with features such as:
    interactive voice response / integrated voice response (IVR),
    Session Initiation Protocol (SIP),
    Short Message Service (SMS) bots,
    analytics,
    conference calling,
    call notes & recordings, and
    voicemail drop.

CSR Training Based on Real Data

Due to dynamic market trends and constantly-evolving consumer behavior, CS teams must leverage real-world data in their CSR coaching/training; if your training programs don’t tap into hard data, this must be addressed. New-age solutions (conversation intelligence (CI) for example) are viable; CI, for instance, can extract insights from a customer interactions to guide your support reps to adapt/implement more fruitful approaches. In short, upgrade your CSR training regimen; integrate real data in your training/coaching process, eliminating opinion-based/intuition-based recommendations. You’ll provide customers with just the right experience.

Leverage AI

To gain ahead on the competition, leverage AI platform support opportunities. CI — software that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze speech/tone to produce insights — is a big piece of the puzzle here. Conversational AI helps identify common customer challenges — a great way for consumers to assess CSR performance. To give some examples:

• • conversational AI analytics measure the number of times CSRs go off script,
• • they measure how many times approved words/phrases are correctly used, and
• • they offer real-time coaching so CSRs can adapt when/if needed.

By analyzing customer/brand comm., you can improve customer engagement for customers and your internal CS team(s) alike.

A One-point Solution Provider

A 3rd party mentioned: 70 percent of customers/end-users require that global businesses collaborate within, ensuring customer journey info. doesn’t have to be repeated to different reps. As such — though traditionally-rouletting customers between departments/reps to others was traditionally-considered as “acceptable” — this is no longer the case — as customer expectations have become more complex. To meet high expectations/service standards, ensure customers chat with the right CSRs right away so inquiries/complaints can be resolved at initial contact. An IVR system & menu goes a long way; based on customers’ specific selections, they can be automatically-directed to the department/CSR in charge of each customer case.

Simple Customer Connection

A top-elemental step to delivering great CX is ensuring customers can reach you smoothly/quickly; they shouldn’t have to hunt for contact info. Keep your business phone number, email address, and social media pages up-front-and-personal on your company website; distribute such details/info. on other viable platforms likewise. Additionally, install an AI chatbot on your website, as well as encourage consumers/end-users to contact you on your/their preferred social media platforms.

Conversation Personalization

Though difficult, this best practice in the non-exhaustive list of best customer service practices / best customer support practices is the ultimate answer for better customer conversion/customer delight; it requires thorough planning, the right tools, and data-driven execution. Integrate your cloud-based phone system/VoIP system with your utilized customer relationship management (CRM) platform, using AI to drive meaningful insights from your mix of data sets. For example:

• • integrating contact center software with your CRM platform centralizes customer data so you can attach comm. notes/channel dispositions to every customer contact — as well as call recordings, and
• • you can contextualize contacts with additional details.

The end result: the next time contacts re-connect with your team, you’ll have all necessary info. — including info. on previous interactions — before CSRs even interact with customers.

Empathy & Understanding

As mentioned elsewhere, “empathy & understanding are fundamental to customer support — as they ensure customers feel valued and more likely to receive their product/service solutions.” To demonstrate empathy & understanding, have your CS team(s) utilize phrases — like: “I completely understand what you’re going through” and “I’m very sorry you had to deal with this,” etc. — using personal pronouns when they speak. Additionally, your service team can reiterate to customers what they know already about their support needs, talking about the situation, how the issue(s) occurred, and why they’re significant to the customer. The above is very effective in building rapport/trust, calming consumers during conflict, serving positive CX.

Prompt Responses

As a best customer service practices / customer support practices basic, rapid customer response/ticket resolution is an absolute must — and a major key to long-term brand loyalty. According to a 3rd party, approx. 90% of customers hold high immediate service responses as essential to excellent CS — meaning 10 minutes or less per initial response. Responses that take longer than 10 minutes to provide — no matter the service channel — is a grand disappointment to consumers. Ensure an established system is in place to prioritize the offering of rapid responses — one that fluently-routes inquiries to the right CSR quickly so customers’ pre-sales/post-sales requests/concerns can be handled promptly.

Tracking of Key KPIs

Your business should be tracking other key performance indicators (KPIs) — such as:

• • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT),
• • Net Promoter Score (NPS),
• • Customer Effort Score (CES),
• • Customer Retention Rate,
• • Time to Resolution,
• • and others.

These KPIs reveal your CS performance state/effectiveness — so, define a KPI measurement system to track these metrics, and gain insight on how you’re going to constantly-track them, as well as how to re-adjust your strategy if needed.

Situational Playbook

It’s evident that global businesses receive the same customer inquiries over-and-over — and over — again; for such recurrences, a situational playbook is vital — as it clearly-outlines a gameplan so your CSRs can face/handle such recurring events. Have that playbook explain how common inquiries/issues can be dealt with efficiently; doing so increases productivity, minimizes time gaps in time to resolution, and improves overall CSAT.

Callnovo’s Customer-centric Outsourcing Solutions for Strong Brand Loyalty Growth

Callnovo Contact Center enhances CS team(s) with excellent, customer-centric contact center outsourcing/call center outsourcing solutions that ensure strong, long-term brand loyalty growth globally in accordance with the above-mentioned best customer service & support practices.

Some key advantages are:

• - High-quality Expertise — quality service via personnel skilled in such areas as:

• customer-centric enthusiasm/service attitude,
• strong communication skills,
• customer service soft-skills,
• intuitive logical thinking skills,
• complex product/service/troubleshooting knowledge/skills, and
• acute management/operations skills.

• - Always-available Service — maximizing customer satisfaction/CX by continually meeting customers’ needs without limits.

• **- Omnichannel Support **— accessible, rapid contact solutions through all comm. channels — guaranteeing always-ready support, leading to enhanced CX, influencing long-term customer brand ambassadorship/customer loyalty.

• - Native Language Support — meeting customers’ needs efficiently, conforming to cultural expectations, improving customer loyalty.

Conclusion

To ensure you take advantage of the before-mentioned customer loyalty benefits to build a brand legacy while surpassing competitors’ success efforts and gaining a hold on the global sales market for strong, long-term brand success, you must proportion stellar CS that goes beyond customer expectations, creating brand ambassadorship. To support you, Callnovo offers a customer-centric multilingual, omnichannel call & contact center outsourcing solution to meet customer expectations, improving customer retention, augmenting brand reputation, securing global sales success.