Customer service is not something which will generate you a sales directly, but customer service is something that is really important for any business. Actually, good customer service can generate you a sales as good as a well-trained sales agent does. The question is: how to make a customer serviced that will generate sales?



The answers must focus on measure and control. One must measure and control the performance of call center trying to identify potential problems and good solutions, it's important to find and share both - good and bad experience, it's important to make a training process perfect, it's important to make the control process better than ever, as it's very easy with up today technologies.

Let's talk about technical means people have to access your customer support service. Sometime it's obvious that it's necessary to use a support phone line, but when it comes to solving serious technical problems, then it's much more convenient to use a email or instant massagers.

What is good about email? You always can analyze the results, it's easy to find a message which was discussed last month and find the answer that solved the problem. Also, email is cheaper as you can guaranty a 24 hours response time without keeping your employees in office at night.

What about phone? Today it can be really cheap with VoIP technologies. The trust is that most service-oriented businesses must use the phone support, as people are willing to call rather than write by email. The good news is that questions you will have will repeat from time to time, so you will be able to prepare your support employees to find and respond the problem fast.

There are a lot of web-based solutions that will help to manage customer queries, for instance CRM is not only about "relationship", but it will also help to streamline the customer support process, giving a full, precise answers in a timely manner. Having your CRM system online will enable you to answer questions from all over the word.

But how to manage and control the performance of call center or customer support center? It's a good idea to establish a set of metrics which will help to identify what parts of your customer service work well and what need to be re-engineered. It sounds simple, but collecting metrics of most successful companies will not help you much, unless you will think about your very business and suggest your own metrics to work.

When designing metrics to measure and control the performance of call center you should carefully divide metrics into these which allow to measure the quality of the customer service and these which allows to measure the financial impact of customer support quality on your entire business.

For instance, measuring the average response time will help to measure the quality of your service. But how does your customer service affects your sales? Let's measure the number of customers whose issues were resolved successfully, let's measure the number of customers who leaved or stayed with your company after the problem appeared.

Running a customer service which bases on performance and control procedures, might generate you more leads and sales, just because of you will know what your customers what from your business.