Customer experience is the key to success in today’s competitive landscape.
According to Salesforce, 74% of business buyers, and 67% of consumers say that they would happily pay more for an excellent experience from their chosen company. What’s more, now that today’s clients have more choices available to them than ever before, the businesses that fail to deliver on great experiences could end up losing the loyalty of their target audience entirely.
In a world where it’s no longer enough to compete on product features and prices alone, today’s enterprises need to think carefully about the thing that bridges the gap between them, and their customers: the contact centre.
With the right contact centre strategy, it’s possible to deliver faster resolutions to customer problems, delight your target audience, and create happier, more efficient workers at the same time. The following three tips will give you all the information you need to create an upgraded contact centre environment.
1. Help Customers Help Themselves
50% of today’s customers say that it’s essential to at least try and solve service or product issues on their own before seeking help from a professional. As millennials emerge as the largest consumer base in the world, they’re introducing companies to a new type of experience. These digital natives have grown up using the internet to find the answers to all of their questions. They feel comfortable searching for solutions using chatbots and other digital apps. Around 70% of consumers even say that they expect to find a self-service application on a company’s website.
To help your customers help themselves, it’s crucial for businesses to invest in the right technology, from intelligent IVR systems that guide customers to the right answer to their issues, to online self-support apps. Chatbots, artificial intelligence, and even online knowledgebases help to support your customers and take unnecessary pressure off your agents’ shoulders.
2. Enhance Your Communication Channels
Another crucial thing to remember in today’s customer service environment is that there are more channels to consider than just voice. It used to be that if a customer wanted help with an issue, they would either need to open a support ticket over email or make a phone call. While both of these options are still popular among today’s consumers, there are other channels available too, such as instant messaging, social and video conversations.
Crucially, there’s more to giving your customers more service options than merely adding things like video, social and messaging to your portfolio. You’ll also need to ensure that agents are trained to use those channels and that they can access the contextual information required to serve their customers as they move from one platform to another. For instance, 89% of customers say that they get frustrated when they have to repeat their issues to multiple representatives.
Connecting all of your communication channels in the same environment will help agents to provide a more consistent overall experience.
3. Listen to Your Customers
Finally, if you want to deliver the kind of experiences that your customers are looking for, one of the best things you can do is listen to what your people need. Provide your clients with options to give you feedback on the conversations that they have with your agents, and act on the information that you gather.
If your customers tell you that it takes too long for them to get through to a support agent when they call your contact centre, figure out where the bottle necks are. You may be having an issue with your automatic routing strategy, or you may not be sending the right customers to the correct agent first time around. You can also use the analytics systems built into your communication channels to gather additional insights into your communication strategy. For instance, if you notice that more customers prefer to contact you via Instant Chat, you can push more agents over into that area.
Originally published Oct 01, 2019, updated Jan 16, 2023
