As you’re sitting down to your favorite meal, have you ever stopped to think: how did each of these items get to my plate? As a company that provides support to the food product companies we rely on to stay fed and happy every day, Frontline Call Center has a better idea into all the work that goes into your daily meals than perhaps even the person who prepares them! But what is food support – and how does Frontline Call Center play a role in it?

Consider the amount of time we spend preparing food, thinking about food, or considering the various ways we can use food products. There are countless purchase options these days, and how we interact with our food increasingly depends on how they are branded.

Today’s food consumer wants quick access to information, on-demand responses to questions about ingredients, or and locations where certain items can be purchased. The ability to open a ticket for escalated issues, capturing details specific to a particular scenario, and setting expectations of clear communication lets the consumer know we care about the quality of their experience. Frontline Call Center provides support to food producers that builds trust across the food system, and it helps consumers stay connected to the food products they love.

Our method of providing end-to-end support using one team of representatives requires both guided processes and knowledgeable baseline support people. But because we are a close-knit team, we can achieve nearly any programmatic goal. For example, supporting either the wholesale or retail side of the food industry can include consumer support and information tasks that require additional compliance, such as franchise or vendor approvals.

We customize our approach to client communications, offering customized process paths built to support each stage of a particular client’s order process. Using our powerful shared CRM technology and shared databases, we can resolve most challenges on the very first call. Using technology and data, our team identifies immediate resolutions and tracks emerging trends in consumer preferences or product quality quickly and easily. These aren’t the only delightful offerings we serve up to our food clients – let’s dig in for more!

In any food, the ingredients are the stars. Ingredients make a food product unique, and there are many support conversations that happen around them. Ingredients are important enough that they are subject to countless packaging laws, quality regulations, and consumer warning requirements.

On average, questions about ingredients make up approximately 8.75% of a typical inbound call volume. The questions asked can be as simple as, “what it is made of?” or they can be as complex as “are the ingredients sourced sustainably?” Regardless of the depth of inquiry, one thing is for sure: today’s consumers are curious about other aspects of the ingredients. As it turns out, this is even more true when it comes to our pets. Quality and general ingredient questions make up 42.62% of a typical inbound volume of calls for pet food – and sometimes, it’s harder than you’d think to find the answers.

There are several approaches to food support. It is an industry where groups of products are often sold, or product lines expanded, across nations and continents. Food, in its variety of forms, is part of a complex supply chain that makes “where is this from?” a harder question to answer than it should be.

Frontline Call Center has the knowhow and skill to answer precise questions about your company’s food products and solve real customer problems. Here’s an example: a parent calls in to the support line because she bought a bag of mini candy bars for her daughter to take to an event. She is upset because many of the individual bar wrappers are unsealed. The quick fix would be to send her a digital coupon to replace the opened product or direct her back to the store she purchased it at for a replacement or refund.

But if this happened to your business, how would you go about remedying the complaint?

With the right support process, there is information that can quickly be captured during the call that can then be relayed back to the company for internal follow up. In this instance, by taking a moment to explain to the caller where she can find the lot code on the product and documenting it in the case history along with the other information from the call, we can know where it was sourced, packaged, which batch and have the contact information from the caller for additional follow up as needed.

Frontline Call Center knows that great support meets more than one need at a time. In this example, both the consumer’s and the company’s needs were met through a single point of contact. This is how Frontline Call Center improves the quality of your company’s customer service, and we maintain our success through a commitment to quality.

We treat and handle complaints and compliments – which make up about one-fifth of our average call volume – with equal importance. After all, customer complaints are learning opportunities for our clients and important challenges to solve for their customers. We regularly handle complaint calls where the callers’ end goal is to be compensated or receive a resolution to their problem. Rather than get irritated, it is important that the representative handling the contact understands that they wouldn’t take the time to call if they didn’t care about the food product or their experience with the food product. They are fans, and they want to love the product they purchase. We advocate for handling processes that allow the representative to both acknowledge and resolve any complaint, which helps build brand loyalty over the long-term.

At the end of the day, we understand that it is all about your brand. We ensure that all Frontline Call Center representatives have a clear understanding of who the company is and what you do. This means tailoring our support to meet your customer experience goals, corporate culture, and operational goals. This may involve engaging with customers through social media or otherwise making sure that if there is a recall or incident, mass communications are handled quickly and properly.

We would love to have a conversation with you to explore what a custom support solution for your food products would look like. A quality support solution may include using both dedicated and/or blended agent support to keep it both cost effective and scalable – but at the end of the day, we’re here to build a solution that works for you. Contact us to learn more.