Five ways to improve customer experience
The contact center plays an important role in building and retaining customers for life. It is one of the first points of contact for customers looking for information, support or advice and that makes a quality customer experience essential every time a customer gets in touch.
Here are five ways you can ensure a quality experience:
- Deal with customers over their preferred channel
- Give agents time to deal effectively with calls
- Manage call transfers to minimize inconvenience for customers
- Provide video sharing to enhance the customer experience
- Integrate contact center records with other customer data
Deal with customers over their preferred channel
It’s clear that customers are now using many different sources outside the traditional voice–based contact center to obtain information. You need to extend the reach of the contact center and proactively support other channels.
- Your contact center must be able to interact with customers through email, text, chat, instant messaging web conferencing, and voice.
- Mobile customers are using apps, text and other tools to interact with organizations. You must respond to the way your customers want to be supported by providing knowledge, resources, email, chat and community site access via mobile.
Give agents time to deal effectively with calls
Traditional contact center metrics focused on minimizing the time agents spent on each call. The aim was to control costs and reduce the number of people needed to staff the center. However, experience indicated that agents under pressure to close the call within a specified time limit were failing to resolve queries. As a result, customers were calling back and satisfaction levels were falling. By giving agents the discretion to spend longer on a call and resolve issues first time, companies found satisfaction levels rising.
Manage call transfers to minimize inconvenience for customers
Improving the quality of call transfers can lower costs, reduce churn and increase lifetime customer value. Unnecessary call transfers frustrate customers, increase costs and tie up contact center resources. An agent is unable to answer a caller’s query; the caller cannot get a suitable response from a self-service facility; or the IVR system directs the caller to an unsuitable agent.
A good transfer can increase satisfaction levels when it puts the caller in contact with a skilled agent competent to deal with the caller’s issue. It can increase revenue when the call is transferred to another agent when there is an opportunity to upsell by meeting the caller’s needs more effectively.
Offer video collaboration to enhance the experience
By enabling video in your contact center, you can move high-value customers to the highest level of interaction and personal contact. Agents and callers can discuss products or support issues via web conferencing, enabling agents to illustrate product information or support processes that would be difficult to explain by voice alone.
Integrate contact center records with other customer data
By integrating contact center records with data in other departments, such as sales, marketing or technical support, you can be confident that anyone who contacts a customer has up-to-date information on all customer issues. Integration with a helpdesk system, for example, means helpdesk teams can check customer records to see if there any open support issues before contacting clients. Integrating sales and marketing records with contact center records gives marketing, sales and contact center teams a single view of all activity with specific clients so they can coordinate activities to improve customer satisfaction.
Evolution pays dividends
The contact center must evolve to stay in line with changing customer preferences. By dealing with customers in the way they want and offering a quality experience on every call, you can help to retain customers for life.