OCC Blogs

  W hat skills should leaders look out for when hiring employees for customer service roles? Well, the good thing about skills is that they are easily observable and can be honed and developed.  In this guide, we discuss the most important skills that customer service professionals should exhibit to achieve success with their duties and responsibilities.   Knowledge of the Product/Service   Without a deep knowledge of how the product or service works, it will be quite difficult to help customers with their challenges with such a product or service. You must be willing to get to know the product or service much like the customer who uses the product regularly.   Patience Patience is an important virtue. Too many times, customers reach out to support teams, often confused and frustrated. Listening to these clients as they pour out their frustrations requires a great deal of patience. Take your time to understand the customer’s challenges to effectively solve their problems.   Time Manage

  B usiness is growing and customers are unlimited. The telecommunications system has made the world small, information is at your fingertips, and customers on the other side of the world are just a phone call away. The market is expanding and opportunities keep on knocking.  While telemarketing provides a solution to these challenges, will outsourcing telemarketing requirements provide an advantage to the business?  Here are some of the many advantages your business can get when you outsource all your call center needs:   1.  Cost-Effective Services It is a known fact that call center services from low-cost destinations like the Philippines, India, and South Africa are very in demand. This is because the services they provide are not only efficient but also cost-effective. In addition, outsourcing your call center needs is a more cost-effective solution than hiring and maintaining an entire call center workforce in-house. You don’t have to spend money on IT equipment, call center soft

  E mail is no doubt a life-saver in customer service especially when time is of great essence. But what do you do when everything seems crazy and you have too much that needs to be done right away? Here are some tips that will help you deliver effective customer service even when time may not be in your favor.   Invest in self-service You have to give customers the power to solve their problems because they want to. Focus on providing on-demand self-service support such as a robust knowledge base so they can solve some of their most common problems without having to join or lengthen the queue.   Under-promise but over-deliver Auto replies are great. But when you send auto-replies that you’ll respond to their queries or requests within 24 hours, you should make a follow-up and respond within about three hours. Customers like it when you do this!   Be proactive and anticipatory with service delivery You don’t have to wait until you’re asked, saved replies, tagging, triage, and other too

  E very opportunity you have to engage your customers should be spent to improve their experience. This is regardless of the size of your business or the industry you’re in. Here are the seven (7) tips that can improve the experience of your customers:   1. Know your product inside-out.   This will prove key to customer service as well as the ability to help customers resolve whatever issue they may have to deal with.   2. Learn to listen.   Your listening skills should be top-notch to win at customer service. Don’t lose focus trying to push forward your own or your agency’s agenda. It’s vital to understand your customers’ real problems. This understanding as well will be vital as you strive to problem-solve.   3. Solve problems creatively.   Once customers have their challenges, strive to listen and creatively devise or advise them on the best ways to get over these challenges.     4. Responsiveness matters.   Your customer service team should adopt responsiveness at the core of our

  I n this blog, we’ll touch on key strategies to help you solidify customer relationships during these troubled times. This will no doubt reflect on your customer loyalty and retention metrics. In a similar discussion today, we’ll touch on five key strategies to help you solidify customer relationships during these troubled times. This will no doubt reflect on your customer loyalty and retention metrics.   Focus more on what customers value most about your brand.   According to statistics from  Small Biz Trends , while 65 percent of your company’s sales will come from existing customers, the probability of landing sales from new customers is only about 5% to 20%. If this is true, then you need to up your customer retention game. How do you boost customer loyalty and retention? Simply by building on your current strengths and minimizing your weaknesses. It’s simple. Identify what current customers value most about your brand and commit more efforts towards improving on these features a

  C ustomer satisfaction and brand image are two things every business wants to keep at a high point. As it turns out, nothing would impact these two things as much as the way you communicate and relay info to your clientele.   More than splashy logos and percentage-off discounts, consistently delightful communication would bring about greater results than most other business tricks and tips you can think of. How then should you be talking to your customers?   This article will discuss the simple strategies behind effective communication. To consistently engage your customers in successful conversations that will result in superb customer experience, it will first start with you treating your customers as humans. Aren’t they humans after all? Even then, let’s see everything there is to   1. Develop and implement the right “tone” An off-tone will make the whole piece flat just as in music. Consider both of these sentences; “What else can I help you with?” AND “Anything else?”   While bo

  E mail is no doubt a lifesaver in customer service especially when time is of great essence. But what do you do when everything seems crazy and you have too much that needs to be done right away? In this post, we discuss some tips that will help you deliver fast customer service when time is of great essence.    1. Invest in self-service. If by now your customer support strategy is yet to incorporate self-service, then you’re missing out on a great opportunity. You have to give customers the power to solve their problems because they want to.  Focus on providing on-demand self-service support such as a robust knowledge base so they can solve some of their most common problems without having to join or lengthen the queue.   2. Under-promise but over-deliver Auto replies are great. We use them as well to reply to our clients whenever we get a receipt of their messages. When we send auto-replies that we’ll respond to their queries or requests within 24 hours, we usually follow up and re

  C ustomer service is such a big deal that it could make or break your business. Poor customer can cost you both current and prospective customers and the ROI on  great customer service  can mean a lot to your business’s bottom line.   While we’ll agree that customer service continues to evolve at an incredibly high pace, there are three main pillars of excellent customer service that will determine what the customer experience feels like. These are;     Your staff   Your products/services, and   Your customers   1: Hiring for Customer Service   Your staff is the bridge linking your customers with your products and services. If the bridge is broken, you sure know that customers will find it difficult to come on board.   From the receptionists at the counter to the contact center agents handling customer complaints and inquiries, everyone must be working on the same page to achieve the same end goal of delighting customers and prospects with excellent customer service experiences. Your