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The contact center and the agents who staff it play no small role in your company’s ability to deliver a great customer experience (CX). Phone calls are often the first interactions customers have with your business, which is why providing a positive contact center customer journey is so critical. To add to the pressure, customers’ expectations about the CX are higher than ever.
In this post, we share basic advice and strategies that can help you elevate your contact center performance so that your business can not only meet, but ideally, exceed customers’ high expectations. We’ll also look at what defines a positive contact center customer experience and the many advantages of creating one. We also highlight how technology can help
A contact center experience encompasses all interactions a customer may have with a company’s contact center, including phone calls, emails, live chats, and social media engagements. The quality and efficiency of the service provided and the ease of communication define the experience and impact the overall satisfaction of the customer. Call response time, agent professionalism, problem resolution, and the use of technology to help streamline processes can all influence the overall quality of the contact center experience.
Investing in optimizing the contact center customer experience can have many benefits for your business. Here are eight reasons to make the effort to help ensure the customer journey is as seamless as possible.
As noted earlier, customer expectations are higher than ever. Research shows just one bad experience will cause two-thirds of customers to desert a brand!
Two tactics that can help drive customer satisfaction in the contact center experience include:
Also, consider that more than half of consumers are forced to repeat their reason for calling when they connect with an agent in the contact center. This is a hassle, and it can undermine their overall satisfaction.
It stands to reason that enhancing customer satisfaction increases customer loyalty. Loyal customers are more likely to transact. What’s more, they often become advocates for your business, referring family and friends, and posting positive online reviews.
How do you know where you stand with customer loyalty, generally? Look to the Net Promoter Score (NPS) for insight. NPS uses a 10-0 sliding scale to define customers as promoters (9-10), passive (7-8), or detractors (6-0). If more than 50% of customers are promoters, it indicates that your brand has strong customer loyalty. Of course, another way to measure whether your customers are loyal to your brand is to look at repeat sales.
Almost nine in 10 consumers say talking to someone on the phone makes them feel more confident about making high-consideration purchases versus purchasing online. In fact, 68% of consumers report that they prefer communicating by phone. That’s more than those who favor email, in-person interactions, live agent chat, or chatbots. Also, three-quarters of consumers say they are at least somewhat likely to buy based on experiences alone.
If your customers already prefer phone communication, providing them with a positive customer experience will generate conversions, leading to more sales. More than one in six consumers will even pay a premium for a great customer experience, further raising the potential for revenue growth for your business.
You rarely, if ever, get a second chance to correct a bad first impression. And as we’ve already noted in this post, the contact center is often the first point of interaction between a customer and a business. It’s not surprising, then, that an efficient contact center experience can help strengthen your company’s reputation.
A strong brand reputation leads to more positive reviews and recommendations. It helps you attract new customers, giving your sales and marketing teams more chances to convert interest into sales. A strong brand reputation also contributes to achieving another goal for any business: retaining customers for the long term.
There may be disagreement as to exactly how much more expensive it is to bring in a new customer than to keep an existing one. But the reality is that to bring in new customers, you need more resources, marketing and advertising, targeted campaigns, and conversions. All of those things cost money.
The bottom line: You can help reduce customer churn and protect your bottom line by ensuring that the contact center experience you provide leaves customers feeling satisfied.
Here’s one advantage of a positive contact center experience you might not have considered: A more efficient contact center improves agent morale, which helps to boost agent productivity.
Supporting agents with timesaving call center technology such as intelligent routing, tools like Invoca PreSense, and insights from call tracking, recording and analysis can help them be more efficient and confident in handling customer calls.
When agents are empowered to do their best work, it will only help to elevate the contact center customer experience.
The contact center can be an invaluable resource for marketers who rely heavily on data from a buyer’s digital journey to make decisions about strategies and spending. Think of all the customer interactions that take place there, from live chat to phone calls.
Every interaction offers data points that, when analyzed, can inform campaigns and marketing strategy. It might be the fact that the data shows callers have mentioned a product, but online data shows they did not make a purchase. Marketing can segment those callers and retarget them with digital ads touting features of the product — or discounts — to tempt them to buy.
Ultimately, the contact center’s customer insights provide marketing with the richest form of data that they can possess: lead data. If callers are taking the time to call from digital ads, they are high-quality leads. Marketing can use this insight to invest more in campaigns driving calls from high-quality leads and cut resources from campaigns that don’t prompt as many calls.
Not every caller reaches out to a contact center to get more information about a product or complete a transaction. Many callers to customer service contact centers typically have an issue to resolve, such as how and where to return an item. How quickly and empathetically the issue is addressed is integral to the contact center customer experience.
An experience that entails a quick response and efficient issue resolution can be a real differentiator — one that drives up customer satisfaction and loyalty. Contact centers with long hold times and low first-call resolution rates can’t compete.
Here’s a look at some basic tactics that many leading contact centers employ to help enhance the customer experience for callers.
Providing agents with the right software to do an effective job truly is an important step toward elevating the contact center customer experience. Agents answer and log numerous calls per day so anything streamlining the process is helpful to them, and callers. Market-leading cloud contact center solutions, like Five9, can help deliver better CX in the call center.
Contact centers can elevate their agents’ productivity and reduce stress while enhancing CX by integrating a conversation analytics tool, like Invoca, into the center’s tech stack. Invoca uses artificial intelligence (AI) to capture and report customer insights from phone calls. Invoca’s digital record and analysis of calls can be used to monitor quality assurance (QA) and automatically score agent performance.
Intelligent call routing is another valuable software tool. It uses information from a caller’s digital journey to route the call to the right agent and avoid the need to transfer the caller. When callers aren’t transferred in the contact center, 37% feel their business is valued and 34% are more likely to make a purchase. AI can also be deployed to improve the call experience by easily configuring Interactive Voice Response (IVR) to assist callers with 24/7 natural, human-like voice interaction.
Call and contact centers are customer-facing, so those who operate and work in them should have a customer-centric mindset. This means prioritizing the customer, not sales.
You can emphasize the importance of a customer-centric approach to your call center staff by underscoring your company’s commitment to it in your values. It should also be a theme in onboarding tools and ongoing training for agents.
You can also reinforce the message that your business is customer-centric by encouraging your customers to provide feedback via surveys, questionnaires, and reviews, and then acting on it.
As you’ve no doubt gleaned by now, the customer journey is a critical component of the overall customer experience. Your business must fully understand it from start to finish, or awareness to advocacy, to optimize the contact center customer experience.
Creating a customer journey map is a helpful exercise. It should contain all the touchpoints, interactions, and channels encountered or used by your customers, along with their pain points. The map makes it easier for contact center agents to understand customers and empathize with their needs and concerns.
Some businesses also encourage their contact center staff to create caller personas, in much the same way that marketing uses buyer personas, to help them better address issues.
Training is the cornerstone of an efficient contact center. You can use AI to boost your training regimen. Know that AI can help call center operations score 100% of conversations from 100% of calls, quickly and accurately. This helps call center managers to:
Personalization is a core expectation among 71% of consumers, according to McKinsey, so you can’t deliver a superior contact center customer experience without it. Nor should you want to. McKinsey goes on to suggest that companies grow 40% faster than their competition when they emphasize personalization. Plus, they get the added advantages of lower customer acquisition costs (CAC) and increased marketing ROI.
Personalization in the call center means agents know who is calling and why they are calling before they even pick up the phone. They can address the caller by name and they know which page the caller was clicking on before they were moved to dial the number.
No crystal ball is needed here to get this insight. You can use Invoca to intelligently route calls to the right agent. And PreSense can provide your agents with real-time insight into who is calling and why by linking up to the online journey.
Part of what defines a customer-centric business is the ability to reduce customer effort and anticipate needs. Again, leveraging technology such as Invoca PreSense empowers customer support agents with detailed information about callers and their interests or needs so they are well-positioned to personalize every interaction.
PreSense provides call center agents with summaries at their fingertips based on the caller’s pre-call digital journey. So, if the caller’s last digital action was to click through to the billing page but they didn’t complete a transaction, the agent can get straight to the point and ask about their billing issue, without having to ask a series of qualifying questions. Improving the speed and quality of resolving customer issues improves CX and brand reputation, lowers hold times for other callers, and reduces agent stress.
Customers are typically happy to provide feedback to a brand or business, especially if they see areas for improvement. They also like to know that their feedback was heard and prompted positive action. For example, if your customer surveys reveal that your website has dead links and that’s why you are getting so many calls into the call center, fix the links quickly!
The modern call center exists in an omnichannel world, so it doesn’t just rely on telephony to support communication with customers. The phone is still the primary channel, but customers may request email or text confirmations or instructions, even the occasional snail mail.
It’s important to provide a consistent and personalized experience for customers across all channels, and using the combination of the right technology and well-trained agents in the contact center will help you achieve that.
You can keep the contact center customer experience on the right track by constantly monitoring and measuring performance using data collection and analysis tools to gather insights and monitor trends for continuous improvement. Here are five key performance indicators (KPIs) you may want to consider tracking:
Contact and call center teams play a significant role in shaping the customer experience and ensuring customer satisfaction. You can elevate performance in your contact center by providing effective training for agents, fostering a customer-centric culture, and equipping everyone in the operation with the right tools to do their jobs well.
Invoca’s AI-powered conversation analytics and automated QA scoring capabilities are prime examples of powerful tools that can help you differentiate your contact center experience in the right way, strengthening your brand reputation, earning customer loyalty, and improving sales.
If you’re searching for more guidance on how to improve the contact center experience, check out these additional resources from Invoca:
You can also book a free demo with our team to learn firsthand how Invoca can help you create a positive contact center customer experience.
A contact center is a virtual, remote, or on-premises customer service hub staffed by agents trained to handle inbound and outbound omnichannel communications with customers. Contact center agents communicate with customers via phone and Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP), text messages, email, live chat, web chat, video, chatbots, virtual assistants, and social media applications.
A call center is a virtual, remote, or on-premises customer services hub focused on providing customer support solely through phone and VoIP telephony communications.
Contact centers, on the other hand, have the capacity to deliver omnichannel communication support by using text messages, email, live chat, web chat, video, chatbots, virtual assistants, and social media apps as well as phone and VoIP telephony, to assist customers.
Contact center agents must be able to clearly and effectively communicate with customers either verbally or in writing. Effective contact center agents are organized problem-solvers who handle pressure well, confidently use basic computer programs, and have basic typing skills.
Contact center agents also require soft skills, such as the ability to practice active listening, exhibit empathy for the customer when necessary, and be patient.
Examples of contact centers include:
Contact centers can also be defined by their physical location. An on-premises contact center is an in-house operation where a business provides its own staff, technology, and premises. An outsourced contact center is a third-party-run operation that provides customer support for a business or businesses. A virtual contact center operates in the cloud and can be accessed by staff in a single location or many locations, including across different time zones and even in different countries.
