If you lead a team in a contact centre, you’ll already understand the importance of customer experience (CX). Good CX boosts business success and profitability. A Salesforce study found that 91% of customers were more likely to purchase again from companies providing positive experiences.
But just how do you provide those positive experiences today? Unified and integrated technology is key because it can simplify communications and boost employee knowledge and productivity. Read on to discover how and why this leads to a winning, customer-centric team.
Focus on first contact resolution (FCR)
Ensuring customers can get answers to their queries the first time, should be the priority of any customer-centric team. We know it leads to more satisfied customers.
If you have capabilities like skills-based routing, it’s much easier to achieve FCR, because customers are automatically directed to the expert best matched to their query.
Without these features, FCR is much harder to achieve – especially if you have a traditional phone system. Let’s say a customer calls your contact centre with a technical question that the agent can’t answer. They either have to route the call to an expert, or call an expert themselves then call the customer back. Either way, the CX would be poor.
However, if you have a unified communications as a service platform (UCaaS), which is integrated with your contact centre as a service platform (CCaaS), this problem vanishes. You’ll have a unified directory and messaging app, so your
agents can keep customers on the line while they instant message the expert for the answer. FCR is achieved and the customer leaves happy.
Improve your employees’ tools
Often, employees just don’t have the right tools to be fully customer centric. For example, if you’re trying to be available to customers on the channel of their choice, but are asking your agents to switch between different tools for different channels, the CX will suffer.
But if your employees can interact with customers across all channels and switch between them seamlessly, they can do a much better job. We’re talking phone, messaging, video calls, social media, live chat, email, and more. An integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solution like RingCentral makes this easy.
Another example is CRM integration. If agents can see customer profiles and call histories from your CRM, without having to switch between apps and windows, they can provide a better, more personalised customer experience.
Support and empower your employees
Staff attrition rates in contact centres can be as high as 40% annually. This is a big problem, which leads to lost knowledge and high recruitment and training costs. The link between EX and CX is well-documented, so improving EX should be a priority for any team aiming to be customer centric.
Cloud-based technology can help you do this, even when agents are working remotely. For instance, video-based online training and onboarding helps new agents get up to speed quickly. Enabling agents to instantly communicate with anyone in the business through an intuitive, multi-channel app makes them feel connected. And real-time supervisor tools, such as ‘monitor’ and ‘whisper’, means that support is always on hand.
Team leaders can also feel empowered by modern workforce management tools, such as agent scheduling and timeline management. With these, they can easily ensure customer wait times are minimised during peak times, and that agents aren’t left idle during quiet times.
Make the most of analytics and insights
Customer-centric teams measure customer satisfaction and look for ways to improve. They use analytics tools to do this, which can measure KPIs such as average handling time, first contact resolution, and Net Promoter Score.
The best tools offer automated call insights and analytics in real time, so that you can monitor agent performance and customer experiences, and act quickly if needed.
Maximise AI and self-service tools
Enabling customers to quickly resolve basic issues themselves is a win-win – it boosts both CX and agent productivity. Chatbots are now used routinely to handle common questions, or gather information before transferring customers to a human agent.
At a more advanced level, speech and text analytics can now recognise not only what a conversation is about, but also what the emotions, sentiments and intent are. This enables automatic routing (and routing with full context) and can be used to suggest the best answer to agents in real-time.
AI and machine learning are rapidly evolving, so customer-centric teams should always be looking for new capabilities that can take their CX to the next level.
Get started building a customer-centric team
We’ve highlighted some of the main features of a customer-centric team, and shown how better technology is a key enabler – particularly an integrated UCaaS and CCaaS. But there’s lots more to learn. Download our eBook, ‘The key to building a customer-centric team’, to dive deeper.
Originally published 26 Nov, 2022, updated 21 Dec, 2022
