Problems can occur anywhere along the customer journey. Customer service improvement strategies are the best way to ensure your call center or collection team is prepared for any issue that may arise.
Striving for excellent customer service with high-quality standards will help your company build trust and brand loyalty.
Ways to Improve Customer Service Skills
Don't Overpromise
Your front-line staff should not make promises to customers that your company can’t keep. They may leave a good review based on that call, but this opens the door to more escalations and complaints once they realize you can not deliver.
Call scripting, training, role playing, and call audits are all ways to help staff navigate hard calls.
Offer Solutions
Customers don’t always understand the processes your company follows or what actions your staff can take to help if something goes wrong. It’s common to receive requests that aren’t achievable. And that’s ok!
Train associates to listen to the end goal a customer has in mind. Understanding what customers want allows agents to create their own list of options to help.
Listen to Bad Reviews
There will always be difficult customers from time to time. Depending on the nature of your business or the department in question, bad reviews may or may not be a concern. Effective strategies to improve customer service quality will vary depending on these factors.
However, negative feedback should not be dismissed. Bad reviews can travel fast by word of mouth and create a negative image.
More importantly, they teach you where you can improve the customer experience or where your policies and procedures are failing.
Most customers are just looking for solutions to their problems. If you take the time to listen to complaints through a proper escalation process, customer satisfaction will increase.
Characteristics of Quality Customer Service
Are you in tune with customer expectations and perceptions of service quality? Do you know what happy customers rely on during interactions with your staff?
These customer service improvement strategies boost customer retention and should be used during every interaction.
Empathy
Understanding how customers are feeling is the key to knowing what they want and need. Customers who reach out because they can’t pay a bill or there is something wrong with their product may be in a heightened emotional state.
Showing empathy to customers is the key to de-escalation, resolution, and great customer service. Remember, we are all just people.
Tell them you understand how they feel and that you will both work together toward a solution. Validation and teamwork put people at ease and build trust and rapport with customer service agents.
Proactive Follow-ups
Not every interaction is an incoming call, web chat, or email. Good customer service means employees are proactively contacting customers before issues arise.
You may find yourself needing to reach out for many reasons. Here are just a few examples:
- Follow up on unsigned invoices, contracts, or paperwork
- Calling about an unpaid bill before it becomes delinquent
- Sending payment reminders on recurring payment schedules
PDCflow’s esignature and payment software lets businesses set up automated email and SMS reminders with each request.
- Your company can send a nudge for an unpaid balance or unsigned paperwork
- Customers get a gentle reminder
- Your agents save time on manual reminder phone calls
CATERING TO CUSTOMER PREFERENCE
Do you listen to customers about how they want to interact with your business? Do you know how to deliver quality customer service to groups with different preferences?
The easier an interaction is, the better. Phone calls might still be a necessary part of your strategy, but more people expect email, text message, and chat communications.
Explore ways to improve customer service with email and SMS, automated reminders, or self-serve payment options.
Administrative Strategies to Improve Customer Service Quality
PERSONNEL IMPROVEMENTS
The best way to improve your customer service is to update your systems for finding and developing staff.
Focus on call center training efforts and improvements in workplace culture. Once these are in place, many problem behaviors tend to correct themselves.
- Hiring and resume reviews: A more thoughtful approach to reviewing resumes and conducting interviews can help you uncover better information about candidates.
- Positive language: Eliminate negative language. Provide positive phrasing alternatives in call scripts and during ongoing training. This simple change reframes conversations with customers to highlight your interest in helping them.
- Company culture: Employees can only do so much on their own. Lead by example. Emphasize customer-centric practices in your own interactions with customers. Also, reinforce positive examples publicly as a team and during one-on-ones with individuals.
SOFTWARE IMPROVEMENTS
Better one-on-one interactions will boost survey scores, increase repeat business, and reduce complaints.
To influence far more customers at a faster pace, update to an all-in-one sign and pay software like PDCflow.
Many call centers and retail collection departments rely on PDCflow to provide simple ways for customers to pay, better admin controls, and faster, more reliable methods of contacting people.
PDCflow Software for Better Customer Service
PDCflow helps call centers and collection departments improve customer service through simple, secure email and SMS payment and signature requests, and self-serve payment portals.
With PDCflow, staff can even overcome objections in real time. Sending supporting documents or invoices to an inbox or mobile number during a conversation for added transparency.
- Increase payment volume and speed up payments
- Standardize workflows to meet payment and industry compliance requirements
- Reduce friction and improve customer experience
USER-FRIENDLY INTERFACE
A confusing process leads to errors, unpaid balances, and bad experiences. Payments and other customer requests should be simple for customers to follow and for employees to execute.
PDCflow’s requests are simple to send and easy to complete with minimal training.
- Easy for customers: Customers receive an email or text with their request. The message can contain signature and payment requests together, and easily direct them through the steps.
- Easy to train staff: Pre-made templates allow staff to select the exact workflow they need. Don’t create new processes for every interaction. Everything is available on one platform to make training simple.
- Easy to collaborate: No per-user costs make collaboration across departments easy. Everyone gets their own login, and event notifications and reporting make it easy to check in on important transactions.
NATIVE PAYMENTS
Many companies are either one or the other: esignature requests or payments. If you need both in one place, you often need a plugin to make it work.
PDCflow is different because we offer digital requests and payments in one user interface without a plugin.
Our payments are perfect for call centers and collection departments. Transactions can be run on a virtual terminal, an online payment portal, or through an email or SMS request.
- Payment portals: These online payment options cater to customers who want to pay without talking to a representative.
- Recurring payment schedules: Agents can create recurring schedules, or you can add a payer-created schedule option to your payment portal, for customers to make one themselves.
- Digital payment request channels: Send a payment request via email or SMS. Or, create a link and share through your customer service chat channel. If your company still sends paper bills, create a QR code link to a payment.
- PCI compliance: PDCflow is secure and PCI compliant. When you send email or SMS requests, there’s no need to ask for card details, because customers type them in. This cuts down PCI scope even further.
DIGITAL REQUESTS
Mail is a slow, ineffective way to interact with customers. Digital communication helps to send invoices and payment requests, or get approvals faster.
PDCflow lets you cater to customer preferences and simplify the ways you reach people:
- Send by email and SMS
- Multi-recipient messages let you get signatures from more than one party
- Generate a link to share in your chat system
- Send requests in bulk for large lists of unpaid balances
AUTOMATION
Automations help teams collaborate on accounts and reduce manual work. PDCflow offers several types of automation to make work simple and organized, while reducing errors and missed follow-ups.
- Event notifications: Sign up to get notified when a request moves through each stage of the process (like opened, completed, disputed, or failed). Reduce stalled payments and make cross-department collaboration easier.
- Automated reminders: Sometimes, customers need another nudge to make their payment. Set up an auto reminder, and PDCflow does the work. No manual phone calls. No more forgetting to follow up.
- Recurring payments: Set up automatic payments for customers. The schedules run by themselves, and customers automatically receive notices of the transaction with a receipt.
REPORTING
When your payments, signatures, and document management are all housed in one platform, reporting gets a lot better.
- Comprehensive reporting: PDCflow offers comprehensive reporting, so you can see an overview of transactions and requests.
- Detailed reporting and audit trail: To see the details of a specific request, access the audit report, and see the signed document, multi-factor authentication, geolocation, date/time stamp, and delivery method.
- Filter and download reports: Filter reports by category to see exactly what you need, or download as a CSV file to view offline and share with your team.
PDCflow is the perfect companion to your call center’s customer service improvement strategies. Learn more about our offerings and see the system for yourself.
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- ABOUT THE AUTHOR -
Hannah Huerta, Marketing Specialist
Hannah Huerta is a Marketing Specialist at PDCflow. She creates content for the accounts receivable and payment industry.
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