How to make customers feel like a VIP

How to ensure premium customer care for high-value customers.

Because exceptional customers should be made to feel special on every call (or chat)

Platinum, gold, silver.

It sounds great when you award these titles to customers. But if they still have a tough time getting through your customer service helplines, these feel-good distinctions will seem pointless.

We all know that certain customers are very valuable. But consider this: How does a loyal promoter feel when s/he calls customer support and has to wait endlessly in a queue? Or what experience are you giving a regular customer when you connect them to a newbie agent? Or what happens when a high average order value (AOV) customer connects to a trainee agent and gets poor service?

These snafus can cost you customer loyalty. So what can we do to ensure prevent mismanagement of our loyal or premium customers? How can we give them the VIP treatment they deserve when they call?

Here are 3 foolproof ways:

Don’t ask, deliver.

Does your customer need to state whether they are platinum, gold or silver customers? If they do, then you’ve already started on the wrong footing. Your system should recognize your important customers the instant they call. How? Any good CRM integration can ensure this.  Your telephone system can dip into your CRM data to draw out caller information.

Then according to the caller category, they should prioritize queuing, offer self-service or connect to an agent.

For example, consider our solution for a Top Rated Budget Hotel Chain. Their customer support gets calls from customers with prior bookings, as well as casual inquiries into their hotel policies and locations.  Do they want customers with bookings to wait on hold while an agent is busy reciting hotel policies to a casual inquiry? Definitely not. That’s why they implemented a self-service system for all causal inquiries. If a customer with an existing booking calls, the system instantly recognizes the customer and routes them to a live agent. All unrecognized numbers get routed to self service IVR. (Read case study details here)

Answer the call, do it quick

Nobody wants to hear “All our agents are busy…” or that on-hold music that says “Keep waiting, we don’t know when we’ll find the time to answer your call”. Never be too busy for a premium customer.
Dynamic Queue Reprioritization can be used to bump certain callers up in the queue, whenever they call. For example, let’s say you decide that calls from premium subscriptions and customers with prior complaints should be given priority. Then your telephony system can use Dynamic Queue Reprioritisation to recognize these callers and move them to the top of the call queue.
(Read the case study to find out about how an e-commerce company used Dynamic Queue Reprioritization to ensure their important customers never had to wait more than 10 seconds in the queue)

Skillfully connect

Categorizing customers into various buckets can help you manage your agent workforce too. For example, one of our clients creates a tier system within their workforce. The best agents rise to a specialized group that handles only Very Important Customers.  Using a feature called Skill Hunting, along with their CRM integration, they ensure that calls from their premium customers automatically route only to this group. Exceptions will be in cases when all lines are busy. In that case, using the Dynamic Queue reprioritization, they will be diverted to ensure that within 10 seconds of calling, they get to hear a human voice.

(Read more about how to use skill-based routing here)

In conclusion: Ensuring high customer satisfaction for everyone calling our support center is important. However, time and skill are both premium resources. When there is a heavy demand, we may need to prioritize some callers over others. Once businesses have decided on what basis this priority should be given, CRM integrations, Dynamic Queue Reprioritisation, And Skill Hunting can be used to ensure a premium customer experience for these customers.