How to improve customer service without hiring more staff
Improving the quality of your customer service often comes with the assumption that you need to spend more time and take more care of each customer. But this additional resource comes with a heavy price tag – hiring additional staff.
The good news is that improving customer service doesn’t require a larger team. You can achieve great results by optimising your processes and making the most of your resources.
Here’s Bizik, the UK’s most trusted call answering and live chat provider, to explain how you can deliver better service without the rigmarole of recruiting and training new hires.
1. Set automations to save your team and customers’ time
Before investing in new staff, see whether setting automations can make your existing processes more efficient.
Consider the simple responses customer service agents churn out repeatedly. This includes answering frequently asked questions, small queries about your products, and providing delivery status updates.
By automating responses to these queries, you can significantly reduce the number of tickets your team needs to handle every day. This also means your customers will receive the information they are looking for instantly rather than waiting for a customer service agent to become available.
Plus, it gives your team more time to focus on complex or sensitive problems that require human input. This will improve your team’s efficiency and customer satisfaction with your service.
2. Prioritise and triage inquiries
Not all inquiries are equally urgent. Customers often don’t mind waiting to hear back on general feedback, but when something is pressing and emotions are heightened, they expect to be heard immediately.
Implementing a triage system allows your team to organise tickets in order of priority and, therefore, manage their tasks more efficiently. Here’s how you can categorise inquiries into different levels:
- High urgency: respond as soon as possible. For example, website outages and security issues.
- Medium urgency: respond within 24 hours. For example, billing questions and shipping status inquiries.
- Low urgency: respond within three days. For example, general feedback and product suggestions.
You can automate a triage system using filters in your customer relationship management (CRM) system to help your team ensure that high-priority issues are addressed promptly while less critical inquiries are queued appropriately. This will cause fewer delays to urgent tasks and leave customers more satisfied with your service.
3. Optimize your existing headcount
Making the most of what you already have is a cost-effective way to boost customer service. Here’s how you can use your current team to maximise efficiency.
Team structure
Dividing your team into specific roles with distinct responsibilities will help everyone know who is in charge of each task and where to escalate issues when necessary. Set at least these three categories of customer support staff:
- Frontline Support Agents: for general inquiries and providing immediate responses
- Technical Support Specialists: to handle complex technical issues
- Customer Success Managers: address any escalated issues and high-value customers
Crosstrain your team
When team members are familiar with multiple roles, they can step in and help other departments during peak times, preventing the chance of one area becoming a bottleneck.
Utilize other teams during periods of high demand
During busy periods, temporarily reassign tasks from other departments to support customer service. For example, team members from sales or marketing can help answer general inquiries or feedback.
Offer overtime to existing staff
If full-time hiring is not an option, consider offering overtime to existing staff. This can help cover peak hours without the commitment of hiring and training new employees.
4. Act on customer feedback
Feedback from customers is a goldmine of information for improving service. When you actively seek and act on feedback, you learn your customers’ expectations and how to meet them.
So, collect feedback through surveys, live chat ratings, and follow-up emails. Make it easy for customers to share their positive or negative thoughts by adding a clear call to action to your preferred review platform.
Also, analyse the feedback for recurring themes. If there are common complaints or suggestions, these areas can have the biggest impact, so make sure they are a priority to fix.
Let customers know that their feedback has been heard and acted upon. This demonstrates your commitment to continuous improvement and strengthens customer loyalty.
5. Outsource your customer service
If your processes are already well-optimised and your team is already working at the most efficient rate possible, it may be time to consider outsourcing. By outsourcing services such as telephone answering or live chat management to third parties, you’ll free up your team to focus on core tasks.
This is often much more cost-effective than hiring new staff, as you don’t have to spend time or money recruiting or training new people. By outsourcing, you get a ready-to-go team of customer service experts to handle the workload and deliver high-quality results.
How Bizik is a cost-effective way of improving your customer service
One of all the providers offering managed live chat and telephone answering services, Bizik is the most professional and trusted.
When you work with Bizik, you’ll get your own team of highly experienced customer service professionals ready to take on your customers’ calls from day one.
The service can scale with you to handle your demand, and there’s transparent pricing, so you only pay per second of calls you receive, giving you the best value for money on the market. Get in touch to learn more and book your seven-day free trial today.
