How Do You Delight Your Customers? Use Speech Analytics to Find Out!

The customer experience is a trending topic right now.   Companies compete to go above and beyond when it comes to delivering outstanding service. In order to do this, companies must stand out to consumers, generate positive vibes in the social sphere, and maintain an edge.

In a book written by Steve Curtin, the author outlines seven critical touch points that make up a customer relationship. We’ve listed them here, along with ways your employees can add their special touch.

Express genuine interest. Using customers’ names and listening closely to them is the baseline. Ask more questions about what interests them – from your products to their favorite sports teams. Then remember those interests and refer back to them.

Offer sincere and specific compliments. Telling customers their product or service choice is a good one is the baseline. Compliment their knowledge or insight that led them to the buying choice. Refer to something you remember from a past interaction – because being remembered is a form of flattery.

Share unique knowledge. Explaining how a product, service, or process works is the baseline. Captivate customers with bits of inside information – perhaps a special ingredient, a peek at a new product, or a sample of an exclusive service. When you share a “secret,” customers will pass it along and make your business more interesting to others, too.

Show authentic enthusiasm. Smiling and being cordial is the baseline. What’s better is using words that convey enthusiasm: “This is really exciting,” or “I can’t wait to show this to you,” or “I’m excited for you to try this,” or “You won’t believe how great this is.”

Use appropriate humor. Being friendly and building rapport is the baseline. Employees can choose to use humor at the appropriate time. One type that can work is self-effacing humor. Off-limits topics always include politics, sex, religion, and race. Period.

Provide pleasant surprises. Thanking customers and an occasional coupon are the baseline. Planning to give customers unexpected extras is a better approach. Any pleasant surprise is something that exceeds customers’ expectations. Find something they don’t expect and deliver it for a while. Then stop that, and start something else.

Deliver service heroics. The baseline is solving the issue at hand. An employee who does something that is beyond what customers think is his or her job role is doing something heroic. Handle exceptional situations in exceptional ways. Take on ordinary issues as if they were the most important thing at hand.

Do you know how your company rates in the customer experience/customer service realm? Are you recording your calls with customers and analyzing them for quality assurance and customer service measures? And are you using that data to evolve your customer experience programs?

If not, you’re not alone, and you have access to technology to get you there. Simply recording your calls with customers is one small piece of the puzzle. Managers are required to listen to and analyze call recordings to extract business insights. This is the only way to effectively improve the customer experience. Manually listening to and identifying insights is insanely time-consuming and impossible even for small businesses, never mind medium to large-sized businesses.

This is where advancements in technology will be a tremendous help. Speech analytics solutions automatically scan every call recording in seconds. This technology searches for all calls including keywords and phrases that are most relevant to your business. And, you can create an unlimited number of searches.  

You can scan calls for mentions of specific marketing promotions, upsell programs, and it can search for specific phrases from a company-mandated script. All of this helps companies gauge whether their sales and service reps can follow a script.

Contact us to book a demo and learn how to monitor customer-employee interactions using our cloud-based, AI-fueled speech analytics technology.