Customer call centers have traditionally focused on dealing with customer issues and concerns. Whether it’s a support issue or question about a product after the sale, it’s been reactive. Often, customers are frustrated when they call. It’s time to be proactive about your approach to your contact center and improve your customer experience.
Go beyond problem-solving and become a customer engagement center.
Offer More Personalization
You can leverage databases and artificial intelligence to help you personalize the service you provide customers. When customers call, you can instantly know who they are, what products they own, and have a complete record of past interactions. This can make the first call much more personal and actionable. Rather than having the customer have to answer many questions, the customer support member can get straight to solutioning.
Michael Rahm, of Appian, discusses the importance a personalized customer experience, “there needs to be a fundamental change not only in the way organizations think about the contact center, but also in the technology leveraged to make Customer Experience (CX) the central focus in every facet of engagement. Forrester recently stated that “”the revenue impact of a 1-point improvement in CX Index scores can help a company increase revenue by $175 million annually.”” That’s a major impact to any business, and that impact starts inside the contact center.”
Having this information readily available also helps for complicated problems. In case you need to escalate a ticket, it prevents customers from being handed off from agent to agent and having to repeat their information.
AI can also help answer customers questions faster. By connecting to a deep knowledge base, agents can quickly find the information you need by searching a few keywords. AI can suggest options and help agents to frame conversations by providing optimal responses.
Manage The Customer Experience
The contact center needs to be viewed not just as trouble-shooters, but a strategic resource that helps shape and manage the customer experience. Studies show that improving customer experience translates to the bottom line.
Maximizing customer experience can improve satisfaction scores by 20%, increase revenue by 15%, and cut the cost of serving customers by 20%, according to a study done by McKinsey. To top it off, 86 percent of customers say they are willing to pay more for great customer experience.
In fact, today’s B2C and B2B buyers say that customer experience is more important than price or product when it comes to differentiating brands. It’s no longer enough to provide good customer support. You have to provide an engaging, personalized customer experience throughout their entire customer journey.
Less Wait Time
Another way to improve the customer experience is to reduce the amount of time spent on hold, or listening to multiple options. For example, as companies use technology to collect and analyze rich data on customers, problems, and products, they can identify trends and repeat problems. You can give a special help line for these issues and address them quickly.
Additionally, organizations can use technology to help speed up the internal processes of customer care as well. Businesses should look into incorporating real-time messaging that helps agents to get immediate answers from supervisors or specialists without long hold times. Also, AI can suggest potential ways to improve your workflow, improve agent performance, and identify patterns that product development teams need to address. This allows for the continuous improvement of both product and customer care.
Call Routing Services
The importance of managing the entire customer experience has risen dramatically in the past few years. Customers now expect answers in near real-time with a personalized approach.
The right customer support software will provide advanced routing to connect customers and support teams wherever they are. Ticket routing can get the person with the required skill level to handle the call. Instead of having to employ specialists at each location or keep customers on hold, you can route calls to the first available specialist.
Advanced call routing software allows you to manage your call routing systems for every business phone number from a single interface. Customizable forwarding and routing can be vital to handle multiple calls at one time. Call recordings and playbacks can help during training and also ensure customers get the best possible help. Depending on the call routing system, you may also have the following features:
- Ability to set up multiple numbers
- Integration with your on-site PBX or cloud PBX
- Reporting and metrics on call length, number of calls and others.
These tools can help you improve your engagement with customers and measure agent performance.
In addition to increased technology, there are several ways your organization can improve the customer experience and change your contact center into a customer engagement center.
Additional Sales Opportunities
Your customer support team can also suggest upsell and cross-sell opportunities using data-driven tools. Call centers can connect to CRM (customer relationship management) systems and marketing efforts to provide a 360 view of the customer. Your support agents can act more as consultants and suggest additional products or service that may enhance the customer experience.
AI integration can suggest cross-sell and upsell opportunities based on tickets and interactions.
By improving your engagement, you can improve your relationship with customers. With an ever-expanding number of choices consumers have today, customer experience can truly be a significant differentiator.
