Deliver customer service in a contact centre
Overview
This standard is about delivering customer service in a contact centre. It covers the actions you need to take when carrying out contact centre activities. It involves communicating with customers to ensure their expectations are met with main focus to operate on first contact. It is important to follow organisational and regulatory requirements during customer contacts. You will use effective questioning and listening skills to gather customer satisfaction feedback from customers to identify ways to improve customer service. This standard covers monitoring and analysing customer service performance and informing colleagues of the results to identify actions for improvements. It is for contact centre professionals who are responsible for delivering customer service.
Performance criteria
You must be able to:
Communicate with customers and establish rapport to meet their expectations
1. identify and greet customers following organisational guidelines
2. use active listening to identify your customers' queries or requests
3. check you have understood your customers by summarising their queries or requests
4. provide your customer with information about services and products in response to their enquiries and requests
5. explain features and benefits of services and products to customers
6. discuss issues or queries with customers and identify options to resolve them
7. check your customer's understanding of the information you have given
8. close the customer contact following organisational guidelines
9. close the customer contact in a professional, respectful and polite manner
Meet organisational and regulatory requirements during customer contact
10. follow organisational and regulatory guidelines during contact with customers
11. establish and explain the limits of your authority when dealing with customers
12. communicate with customers to resolve difficulties relating to customer identification and validation
13. deal with complex customer contacts referred from colleagues where their levels of competence or authority have been exceeded
14. explain organisational and regulatory constraints to customers when they affect the customer service you can offer to them
15. refer customers to colleagues, when their request exceeds your level of competence or authority
16. use different sources of information to check and update your knowledge and understanding of organisational and regulatory requirements
Gather and use customer satisfaction information to support customer service delivery
17. identify customer satisfaction questions that you are required to ask
18. ensure your customer is satisfied with the information and service you have provided
19. use information collected from customers to adapt and improve your customer service delivery
20. refer customer problems or negative comments to a colleague with appropriate authority where necessary
21. record responses to customer satisfaction questions following organisational guidelines
Monitor and analyse customer service performance
22. identify key performance indicators (KPIs) for customer service delivery in a contact centre
23. implement monitoring activities to assess customer service performance against key performance indicators
24. validate data obtained when monitoring customer service performance and review against other identified sources of evidence
25. identify key organisational and regulatory compliance requirements for customer service delivery
26. inform colleagues of monitoring results, to identify actions for improvement
27. follow current legal, regulatory and data protection requirements, codes of practice and organisational policies and procedures relating to handling personal information
Knowledge and Understanding
You need to know and understand:
- the organisational guidelines on how to greet and identify customers in a contact centre
- the ways to demonstrate active listening when interacting with customers and why this is important
- how to use the conversation techniques to demonstrate your understanding of the customers' queries or requests
- the services and products offered by your contact centre
- the features and benefits of the services and products offered or supported by the contact centre
- the limits of your competence or authority for dealing with customer problems and complaints
- the details of the services and products offered or supported by the contact centre in order to handle more complex queries
- the types of issues or problems that you are able to deal with on first contact and the options available for resolving them
- the importance of supporting colleagues by dealing with customer queries and issues that are outside the limits of their authority
- the organisational procedures and requirements for identification and validation of customers
- how to check the customers' understanding of the information you have provided and why this is important
- the importance of closing a customer contact in a professional way, following organisational guidelines
- the importance of showing respect and politeness when dealing with customer contacts
- the organisational and regulatory guidelines you are required to follow during contact with customers
- the sources of information to check and update your knowledge and understanding of organisational and regulatory requirements
- how customer satisfaction can be influenced by your behaviour towards the customer
- the organisational procedures for checking customer satisfaction during a customer contact
- the questions to ask a customer to check their level of customer satisfaction
- how to monitor and analyse customer service performance
- the key performance indicators (KPIs) for customer service delivery
- the data validation principles
- the actions for improvement as a result of monitoring data reports
- how to use information collected to adapt and improve your customer service delivery
- the relevant members of staff to refer customer problems or negative comments to if they are revealed during customer contact
- the organisational requirements for record-keeping on customer contacts and customer feedback
- the current legal, regulatory and data protection requirements, codes of practice and organisational policies and procedures relating to handling personal information and use of technologies