Even when technology is on the rise, customers overwhelmingly prefer human interaction. Why?
Research reveals that 69% of customers said talking to a live agent via phone is one of their top three preferred modes of communication with a company's customer experience department.
Having said that, a fascinating duality exists in the customer-company relationship in today's time. As much as customers value efficiency, they also appreciate personalized service.
While customers want their needs met as soon as possible, they also want to connect personally with the company. Thus, businesses must balance streamlined and high-touch customer service to meet experience expectations.
In other words, today's digital-first world demands a human strategy simultaneously supported by technology. Success is directly tied to the customer experience provided to callers for all businesses, especially those based out of multiple locations.
For multi-location businesses in automotive, healthcare, financial services, insurance, home services, legal, and other industries, the phone call is the primary way customers contact. Every time agents mishandle a call; they risk losing that appointment or sale.
Thus, a great call experience is good, but a consistently exceptional call experience across every location ultimately drives customer loyalty and trust, leading to revenue growth.
Customer experience management in multi-unit businesses is more complicated than in most single-point-of-contact industries. The number of people involved in these businesses and the geographically distributed nature of these business units makes coaching, monitoring, and communication much more challenging than usual. This, in turn, makes implementing a Customer Experience (CX) program more difficult.
Are you still struggling with the lack of centralized visibility?
Customers' experience on the phone is just as necessary as the online experience that preceded the call. It is undoubtedly the first point of human contact while making a purchase decision. So, a phone call must inspire trust at every step of the customer journey.
In other words, when someone calls to get a quote or a resolution, the agent who answers the call becomes the face of the brand, thus making or breaking the deal & the brand reputation.
In the case of multi-location brands, even if someone could listen to every phone call, it still lacks a centralized view for anyone from managers to the corporate office.
Thus, it is a significant challenge for national & regional customer experience management at multi-location organizations. They are losing revenue because of not being aware of specific parameters, including how well agents answer calls at each location, where customer experience & compliance issues occur & why, and how to coach underperformers to improve results.
When you can't listen to everyone, and you don't all have a shared view on the performance & progress of agents, you can't be consistent in crafting the best B2B customer experience.
Significant issues occur when multi-location brands fail to coordinate & automate caller experiences across various locations. Calls usually go unanswered when they could have been rerouted to an available location or an agent.
Moreover, calls get forwarded to locations that are not well-equipped to assist them when they could have been sent to a call center agent who is well-trained to help, leading to operational inefficiencies.
Want to learn how to ace implementing a successful customer experience management strategy in multi-location businesses? You've landed at the right place!
In this blog, we'll cover seven effective ways to improve customer experience management for multi-location businesses that include:
- Establish & measure core KPIs for handling calls effectively
- Utilize your insights to deflect low-volume calls
- Keep track of calls at all Your locations
- Use automated QA to score 100% of calls
- Empower agents with call center coaching
- Deliver seamless call experience to put the customer first
- Incentivize performance
Establish & Measure Core KPIs for Handling Calls Effectively
While you're on a journey to improve the call experience, it is essential to determine what success looks like to your business. Building a call script that contains all the elements required to create a welcoming experience for the caller is an excellent step to kickstart.
A warm greeting to help customers feel immediately welcomed and cared for when they call is an ideal way to start a fruitful relationship with your customers.
Moreover, referring to the callers by their respective names & giving them information on promotions without being intrusive makes them feel like you care about them as an individual.
Once your call script is up & running, you can begin testing script performance & measuring other important KPIs.
Peter Drucker, an American Business Consultant, has rightly said, "if you can't measure it, you can't improve it."
With any multi-location business, it is crucial to track core customer experience factors like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), or Customer Effort Score (CES). These metrics will help you compare the performance of different locations, touchpoints & processes within your organization.
1. Utilize Your Insights to Deflect Low-Value Calls
Getting insights into why people are calling is an ideal step towards improving the call handling effectiveness at different locations. For example, if customers are calling you to inquire about promotions, you can add required links to your website & make sure it is up to date.
It can thus, help improve your online experiences and reduce the number of low-value calls coming to different business locations.
By making use of these insights, you will eventually reduce the call volume to all your locations. It will, in turn, allow your CX teams to focus more on providing the best customer experience to all the callers instead of other mundane tasks.
2. Keep Track of Calls at All Your Locations
Tracking & measuring the calls to all your locations is a pre-requisite to the best customer experience management.
Convin's conversation intelligence solution transcribes the entire meeting conversation by employing NLP that helps in 100% call recording and analysis of all customer calls.
With 360-degree visibility into call volumes, caller intent, and call outcomes across individual locations, it is easy to get your hands on the post-call analysis and critical moments to fast-track review. You can ditch silos and automatically push call notes and insights to the CRM.
3. Use Automated QA to Score 100% of Calls
In the case of multi-location businesses, the limited visibility of calls is a challenge making it impossible to effectively coach employees to offer better experiences to your customers.
But, QA goes beyond coaching. Convin's automated quality assurance enables you to review and score 100% of customer calls with score calls based on custom parameters.
Thus, automated QA is a cutting-edge strategy to ensure everyone who calls receives a consistently positive experience, leading to efficient conversions of prospects into customers.
4. Empower Agents With Call Center Coaching
The current performance of your business is our reality or where we are. The ideal performance is where you want to be with your goals. The space between these two is known as the target gap. It must be the highest priority for businesses because it always prevents you from fulfilling your business goals.
After you have gathered sufficient insights from QA & scored 100% calls, you can utilize this data to coach your agents.
The era of rapid change to a work-from-home arrangement is very challenging for your business. It could be putting many of your agents out of their comfort zone. To be able to carry out their jobs effectively & deliver an excellent experience, they need to be confident & empowered.
Convin helps your agents upskill their performance & track agent performance. It spots top & subpar performers to identify respective coaching opportunities based on each agent's requirement and turns top performers' calls into coaching programs.
QA leaders & managers can share coaching tips with agents across different locations to ensure seamless collaboration and quick feedback.
Moreover, it helps create tailor-made coaching for each agent's requirement to improve and even self-coach their way to convert prospects into customers.
5. Deliver Seamless Call Experiences to Put The Customer First
A recent study by Microsoft reveals that 90% of Americans use customer service as a factor in deciding whether or not to do business with a company. Thus, creating a customer-first strategy to deliver seamless call experiences is key to improving the call center experience of your customers across different locations.
It is excellent to make use of all the first-party intent data captured during a consumer’s digital journey to report call routing in real-time.
Understanding your callers' intent even before they mention the issue can help the calls to get connected to the correct location, thus improving their experience.
When you make it easy for customers to resolve their issues, they will always continue to do more business with you.
6. Incentivize Performance
One of the best things about using QA to score your calls is that the scoring is performed by AI & is thus, free of all manual errors. It is far more efficient & accurate than using spot-checking calls.
Successful incentive programs help in self-guided improvement. You can even gamify the incentive programs to promote healthy competition across various locations.
Even if you don't have the cash to spare, there are many other ways to recognize your agents to promote collaboration and fun.
Creating leaderboards to track scores, awarding high-scoring agents free lunches or days off, or even conducting monthly meetings to praise and acknowledge your employees are some of the ways that foster team spirit & keep everyone motivated.
Boosting Customer Experience Management Across Several Locations
When juggling multiple onsite and remote contact center locations spread across different regions, ensuring that every agent is fully empowered to deliver on the required expectations is no longer a task.
If you get on top of these seven factors mentioned above, are good at recruitment, and build the right culture, then your CX program is primed to succeed.
At Convin, we aim to help businesses deliver lasting competitive differentiation and increase customer loyalty and advocacy with the best of both worlds - automation & human touch!
Results first, payment later.
