Achieving great customer experience (CX) is harder than ever – consumers have become more demanding and more unwilling to suffer a poor customer service experience. These expectations must carry through into contact center operations – but reaching these levels is not as simple as it may seem. Businesses must power back-end operations to drive the connected contact center of the future.
Senior Partner Director at ContactCenter4ALL.
1. It’s more than just omnichannel – the technology powering the back end
When it comes to customer delight, friction must be kept minimal. Customers want choices, whether its to contact via live chat, research the website Q&A, or pick up the phone and speak to an agent, today’s consumers expect to be able to use every channel possible with the confidence their issue is being dealt with. Research found that over 82% of customers will likely trust and remain loyal to a business that offers first-rate customer service.
A great customer journey is not rushed but efficient – and it’s why a quick answer or first-time fix are crucial when it comes to resolving customer issues. Time to resolution matters both ways – the quicker the resolution, the happier the customer and the quicker agents can turn to other consumers and help resolve their issues.
Real-time insights and historical reporting give agents the ability to act fast and correctly!
Achieving first-rate customer delight isn’t easy, but it’s where technology can play a huge supporting role – and in one area, it can help keep wait times minimal. Being left on hold, or transferred to the wrong department is one of the biggest friction areas for consumers within the contact center. The path to fixing this friction begins with intelligent call routing, a workflow management tool linking multiple disparate contact centers and agents together in one unified system to ensure customers are directed to the agent best placed to deal with their issue.
Using real-time dashboards for example paired with historical reporting ensures all contact center activity is readily available. Service level metrics, including average waiting times, number of customers currently in calls, average call durations, and number of agents available, can be accessed in real time to map employee competencies, find the best available agent and manage call traffic.
2. The power of data to ensure sure the customer is seen, and heard – at all times
First-time fixes in CX are not always possible – perhaps an issue needs further investigation, or the correct agent to deal with the query is unavailable. No matter what, this should not detract from a positive customer journey. Customers want to be heard, and expect a response that understands their needs.
The more you know, the better the service – its time to get personal
Gone are the days of driving blind into customer service and hoping for the best. Customers want businesses to know their names, information about their recent interactions with the company, and they don’t want to repeat information they have already provided. This is where contact center software integration into Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions provide the benefit from full visibility into logged calls and customer data/history. The more data contact center agents have access to, the better the experience – and increased chance of achieving a timely fix.
An advanced recording solution will power contact centers to have all the intel needed from supporting business solutions in one place. It enables supervisors and agents to see precisely what has happened without having to manually investigate or ask other agents – serving up the required data right in front of them.
3. CX and EX on steroids – AI means agents can react in real-time
To create the ideal customer journey, CX and EX must work together. Agents need the correct tools, technology, and guidance to act in real-time, respond to customer questions and queries, all in a timely and well-informed manner. It’s where AI mechanisms within the supporting contact center software can assist. Powered by Copilot, conversations and suggested responses are automated to provide agents with real-time support.
An advanced contact center recording solution that harnesses the advanced data analytics and visualization capabilities of Power BI can help to help provide a real-time analysis of the conversation to offer dialogue suggestion, while analyzing all interactions to improve performance in the future.
Security included! Ensuring customer data is stored correctly and safely
Whenever customer data and new technologies are around, security is paramount. But for contact centers, particularly for those dealing with sensitive customer information, putting all information, call recordings and personal data in a safe and secure environment, provides the ultimate peace of mind that all correct guidelines and regulations are adhered to.
Research found that over 42% of customers have stopped doing business with a company because of a hack that exposed customer data. So, putting security at the top of the priority list must be an ongoing priority. End-to-end customer delight must be a two-way process.
It’s easy for companies to focus solely on powering the great CX that only consumers will see – forgetting to drive the back-end operations that make great customer contact enablement possible.
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