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Why exactly are contact centers emphasizing customer experience management?
In this ever-evolving digital world, your existing and would-be customers will always be one of your most valuable stakeholders.
Did you know that 80% of customers say a company's experience is just as important as its products or services?
In fact, the purchase decisions of today's customers revolve around buying into an idea & an experience. Thus, customer experience has become a critical differentiator for all kinds of businesses in this competitive marketplace.
Getting customers' queries answered with ease of use, personalized experiences, and increased satisfaction leads to a rewarding relationship with the brand. Hence, creating a holistic customer experience doesn't just make good business sense, it is the key to long-term business growth.
Remember when you tried dialing a customer care number only to experience a never-ending hold time & a support executive who would read his script in an almost robotic tone?
Though phone support has evolved over the years, we are still far from creating efficient customer experience management that delivers personalized experiences & drives satisfaction.
When it comes to customer experience, "quality" is the name of the game. In other words, effective customer experience management is more than just good PR. By considering your customers' experiences and making technology feel more human, you create win-win scenarios for you and your customers alike.
So, how do you take your customer experience management from "average" to "awesome?"
Today we’ll be discussing five actionable strategies to make all your support calls count, from the first hello to the final goodbye! We’ll cover;
- Understand Customer's Journey
- Gather Customer Feedback
- Minimize Customer Effort
- Reduce On-Hold Time
- Optimize Call Flow Management
5 Tips to Improve Customer Experience in Contact Centers
1. Understand Customer's Journey
Building a compelling customer experience stems from a strong understanding of your customers. You need to have a clear idea of their journey & what they want.
This knowledge forms the basis for personalized service that can meet customer expectations. The customer journey encompasses phases like;
- How you engage customers,
- The experiences you deliver during those engagements,
- And the loyalty and retention you cultivate via those engaging experiences.
A study by McKinsey & Company reveals that data-driven organizations are not only 23 times more likely to acquire customers, but they’re also six times as likely to retain customers and 19 times more likely to be profitable.
In this case, Business Intelligence can help you thoroughly understand the customer experience. It leverages customer experience management software, services & data to transform them into actionable insights that drive better business decisions. It is about removing the guesswork & putting your business on a path that is result-oriented & led by evidence.
To leverage valuable customer journey data to make smarter business decisions through a call center, making a call tracking and conversational analytics platform a part of your tech stack is imperative. It allows you to automatically track and manage inbound phone calls from existing and prospective customers to determine the call outcome.
This can help the sales team strengthen follow-up calls by listening to cold calls and developing the most acceptable follow-up call strategy.
Marketers, too, can leverage this data to score leads and spot patterns without even listening to calls. Thus, it lets you know the source (website, social media, paid search) & optimizes the channels to help your business stay ahead of change.
2. Gather Customer Feedback
Taking a proactive approach to gathering valuable customer feedback keeps you informed of the needs of your consumer community, even as those needs keep evolving.
Client feedbacks are the most potent guide that can give your leadership team insights to build a way ahead for every part of a company, from product through UX and customer support.
Since the real learning for the best customer experience management begins after the termination of the call, the easiest way to go about it is to develop a post-interaction customer survey.
While you may ask your customers many questions, it is best to keep the surveys short & precise. The results can be used to understand the customer pain points, agent performance, and further scope for improvement.
It doesn't stop here. After gathering insightful data and determining the KPIs most essential to your company’s goals, it is important to begin tracking & implementing actions based on the data. This will help you provide a better service by enhancing the customer experience in the call center leading to improved conversion rates, thus, helping your business stand out from the rest.
3. Minimize Customer Effort
The easier it is to contact your business and resolve a concern for a customer, the more customers will feel seen and valued by your company and, in turn, become loyal advocates of your brand.
A unified communications solution opens many new avenues for your customer service provision by making it easier for your company to communicate effectively.
Whenever a customer contacts you, they’re looking for a swift reaction. Since an effective UC solution draws together communications from all channels, it gets easier to respond to out-of-hours queries.
Moreover, the solution helps agents provide a fast & informed response to the questions by accessing all the prior customer information in no time, making the entire process seamless.
Customer experience management tools also offer insightful analytics into what is driving customers to respond to your call-to-action on the website & ways to make it better. Thus, an omnichannel contact center strategy must be in place to allow customers to reach you on more channels with minimal effort.
4. Reduce On-Hold Time
Nobody enjoys the idea of being put on hold. The overuse of the hold function can indicate a knowledge or training gap among your agents. Research suggests that almost 60% of customers placed on hold hang up, and 30% of those who hang up, never call back.
An ideal B2B customer experience management platform can help reduce on-hold times by providing efficient call routing to reduce on-hold time and gather & analyze data while also monitoring the agent's performance.
Thus, equipping your agents with enough resources & customer experience management tools that help them retrieve accurate information within seconds is a great way to tackle this situation. In cases where the issue might require additional probing, the agent/representative must offer a callback service wherein customers receive a call of rigorously waiting on hold for a solution.
All of us have experienced waiting times that feel like an eternity, only to be connected to an agent who can't even help. This leads to more callbacks, a lower resolution rate & a lot more frustration. Implementing call routing & skill-based routing to make sure the customers connect with the most qualified agent to help them on the first try helps reduce on-hold time.
Moreover, offering an omnichannel communication experience (business text messaging, website chat messaging, or social media communication) to your customers lowers the likelihood of any of these channels getting overwhelmed. This also benefits reaching out to customers how they prefer, leading to a much higher engagement rate.
5. Optimize Call Flow Management
The importance of drafting a comprehensive call flow process cannot be underrated. A failure in call flow management may look like missed calls, customers being landed in voicemails, or extended ringing times before the call is answered. Each of these scenarios can impact your brand reputation leading to poor feedback, lost clients & sub-par sales.
Small and growing businesses often struggle to keep up with their customer's expectations, as do their support agents. When working independently, support agents may not be as efficient & timely in resolving complex issues.
An efficient IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system can help direct all callers to the most suitable agent for a caller’s question or problem. If set up correctly, the IVR can significantly benefit your customer management experience by improving the first call resolution rate & increasing your agents' efficiency by being a massive timesaver.
Needless to say, agents must be trained to answer every call with great enthusiasm and energy. They should introduce themselves & the brand, making the most out of a human-to-human conversation.
This, in turn, makes the interaction more fulfilling for both the caller and the agent.
Moreover, conducting frequent call-management checkups can spot bottlenecks and help deliver solutions at the right time.
Future of Customer Experience Management is Now
Investing in customer experience management is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Studies reveal that businesses prioritize customer experience to grow their revenue 1.7 times faster than businesses that don't.
When prospects/customers reach out to your business, they seek more than just a resolution to their problem. They want to be guided by a polite agent who values their time & doesn't hesitate to empathize with them. Business longevity relies on satisfied customers.
The most important thing to consider is that, for customers, a single conversation can make or break their experience. Word of mouth is the best way for a business to grow sustainably. Excellent customer service leads to happy customers who talk about your product or service and become loyal advocates for your brand.
The good news is that Convin has a full suite of customer experience management solutions that can be tailored to address business problems like yours.
If you’re ready to level up your B2B customer experience management with automated call center solutions, try out our product free trial to get the hang of the competitive edge your business deserves!
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