How To Make Customers Happy

At Zoom, not only do we answer the phone many (MANY!!) times a day in our virtual receptionist and call answering roles, we also offer a variety of call centre services. Often, people calling call centres are either already upset as they have a problem, or they do not expect anything other than adequate service. We like to prove them wrong! Here are a few tips to exceeding your customers' expectations.

• Empathise with the customer
• Putting yourself in the customer's shoes and treating them how you would like to be treated in the same situation is an easy way to keep the customer's interests in mind. If you manage to give the customer the impression that you truly understand, they are more likely to trust you. 
• Take ownership
• Customers hate being passed from pillar to post, so wherever possible you should aim to help them without transferring the call to several other people. If they have a problem you can solve, don't pass the buck just because it's easier for you.
• Don't follow a script
• Customers can tell when you are reading from a script rather than just using your own words, and they don't like it. It's not hard, just tell them what you will do and when you will do it (then make sure you do what you've promised!).
• Review things with your colleagues
• If you have had a difficult call, talk about it with your colleagues and manager. Perhaps you handled it really well, in which case other members of the team can learn from you, or perhaps other people could suggest different ways you could have dealt with it. Either way, learning from each other is good for the whole team, and the customer.
• Make things easy for the customer
• Whatever the reason for their call, the customer wants it dealt with as quickly as possible, and with as little effort required from them as possible. It's pointless to spend all your time trying to be the best call centre operator, delivering excellent customer service, if the customer gets frustrated at how long it takes for anything to get done.

Moozings from Zoom - Some interesting Phone Facts

Today the telephone is an integral part of all our lives wherever we are but only a hundred years ago it was struggling to secure a foothold anywhere. So here are ten interesting facts on its development:


1. Alexander Graham Bell thought the phone should be answered with ‘Hoy Hoy’ instead of Hello.

2. The first telephone exchanges were built in 1877//78 and Automatic exchanges, or dial service, came into existence in the early 1900s - eliminating the need for human telephone operators.

3. There are 149,084,370 phone lines in the world and thousands more are being added every day. (wiki lists 1.27 billion lines and over 5 billion mobile devices)

4. The first telephone answering service was created in 1923, when a bedridden woman named Margaret Smith realized that she could make money by taking calls for busy doctors from her bed.

5. Telephone operators predominately used to be young men; however they were prone to prank calling and chatting up female callers.

6. The concept of allocating telephone numbers to individual phone lines was invented by a doctor.

7. In 1667 a string telephone conveyed sounds over an extended wire but it wasn’t until March 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell transmitted the sentence: "Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you!" using a liquid transmitter and an electromagnetic receiver – the basis of the modern telephone system.

8. An operator in Milan was once fined for contacting a wrong number.

9. While the concept for hexagonal cells for mobile phones was conceived in December 1947 the first handheld cellular mobile call wasn’t made until April 1973

10. One of the early cable operators in the UK, Cable London, connected its first cable telephone customer around 1990