In the business world, reputation is everything. If a brand is known for having poor support and customer service, it will experience greater difficulties on the path to success. For this reason, decision-makers need to prioritize projects that enable employees and executives to optimize the way they interact with and manage prospective and existing clients.

While there are a number of methods that can improve brand awareness and trust, there are three tactics that often deliver particularly positive returns.

1. Stay available
Nobody knows when a technological project or solution will simply stop working. This means that companies must have employees who are available at all times, regardless of the way customers choose to interact with those representatives. This puts a lot of pressure on the contact center.

Fortunately, the outsourcing landscape has introduced cloud and other technologies that allow organizations to shift client care processes to another team. If businesses utilize these services effectively, they can maintain 24/7 contact with consumers, improving end-user experience and satisfaction.

2. Prioritize problem resolution
While the contact center is often considered to be among the most important customer-facing departments in the business world, many of these teams are inefficient. This is not necessarily because workers are incompetent or organizations do not care about their clients, but more often because executives emphasize the wrong metrics.

In the past, call time was often the most critical measurement in the contact center. The thought was that organizations that are able to burn through queries quicker would be able to deal with more clients, allowing for a happier customer base in general. However, this also meant that many firms did not fully resolve issues, which would backfire with the proliferation of second-time callers who were not happy with the way they were managed. This suggests that customer care teams need to focus more on resolving problems.

3. Don’t make empty promises
Nobody likes a liar. Unfortunately, many employees will often make false promises to clients in the effort to end the interaction on a positive note. This is a bad practice because when the client finds out that the company did not deliver on the guarantees that were made, corporate reputations can be tarnished and stained forever, impairing those businesses from expanding in the future.

Decision-makers need to emphasize the importance of providing the support and services needed to keep prospective and existing customers happy, as failing to do so will only invite new obstacles that may permanently tarnish a brand.