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Small businesses can have everything nailed down, from product or service to their branding, but if they don’t have reliable support from their emerging customer base, it’s more than likely they will struggle. Outsourcing your contact centre will give you the expertise you need for success.

Outsourcing your customer service will also give you more time to concentrate on growing your business. Start-ups that implement an outsourced contact centre solution during the initial phases of their business development will see significant benefits.

Customer service has long been what makes or breaks a business. A business can have a great service or product, but if it’s not offering an experience that its customers are delighted with, it could soon find itself losing revenue.

Making the most of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots, is a vital step to not just surviving, but thriving.

Any business that has, or still does, use the traditional call centre will be aware of its problems. No matter how much training a representative is given, it’s near impossible for them to meet the ever changing demands of the consumer.

As customer effort is in the spotlight, there is a lot you can do to deliver effortless experiences by designing services for your customers that are easier to understand and use – including taking advantage of the latest AI tools.

Previously, in Predicting Customer Loyalty Using Customer Service Metrics, we looked at a few customer service metrics including Customer Effort Score (CES), and how studies show that CES is a strong predictor of customer loyalty. Many customer service organizations now include a measure of customer effort in their follow-up surveys and polls.

Along with the trend to optimize CES, millennials are now becoming the most important customers for the business industry, making up the largest demographic group in the workforce. This tech savvy demographic demands effortless experiences – quick, slick, and often in the nick of time.

How does your business define and measure customer loyalty? Do you try to gauge a customer’s intention to keep doing business with you, look at how much they increase spend, or try evaluate a customer’s potential for advocacy? Loyalty can be mean different things to different organizations, as customer lifecycle goals vary widely across a myriad of products and services.

Just as the definition of customer loyalty varies, so do the metrics associated with prediction and management. A traditional way to predict loyalty is to generate a customer satisfaction score (CSAT), using post-sale and post-service survey / poll questions. A CSAT score puts a number to how a customer feels about a recent transaction with your brand or organization. How did we do today? How would you rate your experience with your recent support call? – are typical questions. A CSAT score is a useful measure of customer satisfaction, and allows for a wide range of questions to evaluate specific areas of a transaction. It may not be the best predictor of customer loyalty because it is narrowly focused on single experiences.

 Have you heard about Design Thinking? It’s an approach to innovation that puts the customer at the center of design for any solution. Developed by IDEO founder David Kelley, it focuses on three main elements: people, technology, and business, all evolving around the customer.

Depending on your business, customers can be a diverse lot, but there are large scale trends impacting customer service that SMEs should be aware of, and responding to. Planning your customer’s brand experience from awareness, to purchasing and advocacy, will create that customer centric approach that is at the core of Design Thinking.

Charlottetown, PE, Canada, June 16, 2017 --(PR.com)--Advantage Communications Inc.(ACI), a leading Canadian provider of on-shore and nearshore outsourced customer support, announces that Randy Clapp has been hired as Vice-President of Business Development. Clapp will oversee ACI’s business development strategies in the North American market with a focus on establishing new partnerships that leverage the workforce strengths and regional efficiencies of outsourced customer support in Eastern Canada and Kingston, Jamaica. The appointment is effective immediately.Clapp has sold over $1 Billion in the services industry working with leaders such as Hewlett-Packard, Electronic Data Systems, CompuCom and Avis Rental Car. He received EDS’ Inner Circle Award as one of the company’s top 100 performers, as well as the Top Leader Award with CompuCom. Clapp earned his Bachelor Degree in Business Management and Economics from Northwood University. He spent the last three years establishing innovative contact centre service partnerships as Vice-President of Sales for The Results Companies.