You have to spend money to make money: We’re told that. While that’s true in a lot of cases, it’s not always an absolute requirement. With the right tips, you can improve sales and efficiency at your call center by just spending smarter rather than spending more.

The main issue

The research indicates that 70 percent of people switch to a business rival not because they didn’t like your products or services, but because they didn’t like the customer experience. Increase your customer satisfaction and you will see sales go up accordingly. Here’s how to spend smarter to do just that:

Go omnichannel

Change out your multichannel call center software for omnichannel. Omnichannel seamlessly coordinates communications from your customers across all possible platforms. In practicality, that means your agents can communicate via IVR calls, video or audio calls, messaging, live chat, emails, and more.

Imagine this scenario: You have an issue with a business, so you navigate to their website and pull up the live chat. After a brief conversation, a chat agent advises you to call. You do so, and now you’re talking with a whole new person.

This new person knows nothing about your issue, so you have to explain the whole thing again. Once they hear the issue, they give you another number or an email because they aren’t actually the one who can deal with your issue.

This scenario is exactly how you lose customers to other businesses, even if you have a superior product. Omnichannel call center software is how you integrate all your channels for service that customers will love.

Train your people well

All the software in the world won’t help you get sales if you don’t have the best people on the job. Too many call centers make the mistake of thinking that training is all about scripts, questions, and answers. If you’re wasting money on this sort of training, it’s time to redirect your resources.

Great call center agents need to keep their cool with an irate caller. They need to be good listeners. They need to be smart and capable with the kind of cognitive skills that make it possible to really understand and solve problems.

Great call center agents also need to know how to make good decisions. They need to be warm, polite, and understanding. Some of these traits are natural; others can be taught. Spending your money in recruiting the right people and then training them in these skills is money well-spent.

Set up as many self-service options as you can

Some people always want to talk with a live person when they have a question or issue; but many of your customers would prefer to fix their problems by themselves whenever possible.

Redesign your website by improving your FAQ section and making it easy to find. Provide a search bar that’s easy to spot and returns useful answers. Rewrite technical pages and information in layman’s terms.

You should also get good IVR call software capable of doing more with voice recognition. You want as many callers as possible to get the answer they need early on in a call. Chatbots on your website can provide a similar helpful function.

It will cost a bit to set this all up, but you make it all back, and more, quickly as customers get their questions answered fast. Better yet, pleased customers will start spending more and talk about their good experience on social media.

The bottom line

You can do lots of things to slash costs here and there; but nothing will make such a profound difference in the end as excellent service. To improve your customer service, you don’t need to make drastic, expensive changes. Instead just spend your money wisely, and then watch your profits grow as satisfied customers come back again and again.