By Oliver Appleby, 3C Online | TellMeNow
Customer service is an art form becoming lost in transactional necessity.
We believe there’s more to serving customers than first contact resolution and handling times, there’s insight brewing in the genuine interactions and relationships customers have with your product and brand – an opportunity to learn what draws your customers to you, and what makes them stick: Whether it is that necessity, or use case, or a genuine love for your brand and what you stand for – it is surfaced in their interactions with you every day and can be expanded upon into all areas of your business, be it product growth or expansion of your proposition, or simply in serving them better, refining and defining processes or minimising churn.
Customer service is the key touchpoint between business and consumer.
It is worthwhile spending some time to reveal what’s hiding in these everyday interactions and what they mean for your business. Signals that point the way forward and generate insight that improves how customers see and feel about you – as people may remember what you did for them or what service you provided, but they will always remember how their experience made them feel.
Here are the five conversations worth going back to.
1. The customer who asked whether you do something you already do (or could do with a tweak)
Can you handle a larger order? Is there a premium option? I want x, can you offer it with y? If I pay more can you guarantee x?
This is a clear buying signal which some customer service functions may miss, any time a customer attempts to make their own deal, they’re looking to expand your proposition, and are willing to pay for it, because it is what they want. It’s service suggestions masquerading as an issue to be resolved.
Research into contact centre behaviour consistently shows that a significant share of inbound contacts contain upsell or cross-sell intent that goes unrecognised because agents are trained to resolve, not to listen commercially.
There’s an opportunity once these are surfaced to tweak your offer and generate more sales – as if some customers want it, there’s a strong likelihood that it’s not a one off, and that this drip becomes a flood of new business.
2. Customer Complaints
This one could’ve been number one and is very close to my heart. Having spent time in sales and retentions, one of the strongest lessons I’ve learned is that no one tells you what they want faster than someone making a complaint.
A well-handled complaint is one of the most undervalued commercial events in a small business. What academics call the service recovery paradox is real: customers whose problems are resolved with genuine skill and attention frequently show greater loyalty than those who never had an issue at all. The recovery moment, handled well, builds more trust faster than any smooth transaction.
Well drilled customer service agents with a commercial outlook will both drive and retain revenue, generate referrals and marketing content when customers are treated well and handled effectively. It demonstrates you are listening in the first instance and there for customers in their time of need – but it also helps you prepare for the next time, by pro-actively building something through genuine user insight and feedback. The customer becomes an advocate for and a real part of business improvement.
3. Consistently repeated queries
If you receive the same question or chase all the time, it will usually point towards a process that isn’t working somewhere along the line.
While this seems obvious and may not always be something that can be fixed quickly, it is better to get ahead of it and either remove the obstacle, clarify the situation or add transparency and set expectations where they’re needed to pave the way for an optimsed customer experience.
Analysts at Feelingstream find that between ten and twenty-five percent of all inbound contacts are entirely avoidable – not because customers are difficult, but because something in the business created unnecessary friction. As they put it, each avoidable contact is money and time the business could have kept.
Every unnecessary contact is time not spent selling, improving, or building. Fix the root cause – through clearer emails, sharper FAQs, better onboarding – and two things happen: contact volume drops, and so does the friction that was quietly stopping other customers from converting in the first place.
4. The customer your team resolved fast – and the one they didn’t
Track your resolution times. Work with them, dive into why they’re happening and you’ll find trends and opportunities to refine processes you weren’t aware were broken.
Lasting improvement doesn’t always come from expensive transformation programmes. It comes from disciplined sequences: one recurring contact type resolved, one reduction measured, one freed resource reinvested. Small businesses don’t always need to overhaul their entire service operations. They need to start the sequence – test, measure, learn – and then do it again, and again, and again…
This is the definition of refinement, and the key to operational excellence.
5. The conversation nobody wrote down
This is the most expensive one. Your team will know things your systems don’t: the objection that keeps happening, the competitor that always rears it’s head, the feature everyone asks about and nobody can find.
Qualtrics makes the point directly, the opportunity is not just in agent productivity, it is in what they call ‘enterprise intelligence’: the unfiltered insight sitting inside your conversations that never makes it to a dashboard.
By definition, patterns don’t always appear in a sample. Reviewing a handful of calls gives you anecdotes. Analysing every interaction gives you strategy. Conversation intelligence tools have demonstrated uplifts of thirty percent in sales conversion simply by identifying consistent patterns in what customers were already saying. The insight was always there, it’s just not always visible – and finding it can be expensive both in terms of resource and application.
A standing question at your next team meeting will surface more useful intelligence than most formal reviews: What keeps coming up that we haven’t fixed?
The dividing line between service and sales can often be just a management convention, or a training gap, it doesn’t have to be a commercial reality. Everything can be a sales conversation. The only question is whether anyone was listening, and whether they were supported and adequately incentivised to make the most of the opportunity it presented.
If any of these patterns feel familiar, they are worth examining properly. At 3C Online, we work with growing businesses to turn contact volume into commercial intelligence. Striving to identify what your customer conversations are already telling you, and building the capability to act on it. TellMeNow, our demand intelligence platform, makes that analysis systematic.
If you would like to explore what that looks like for your business, visit 3conline.co.uk or tellmenow.ai, or connect with us on LinkedIn.
The first conversation is always straightforward, always free. And always useful as we’ll provide you with genuine insight from data you’ve already captured – and the ability to find more. Put us, and your service, to the test.
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