Cut routine enquiries by up to 50% – Spring clean your CX strategy

The days are finally getting longer, and the anticipation of spring is in the air. It’s that time of the year which has us dusting off the winter blues, and for many businesses, the time to clean up their customer contact strategy to deliver the best customer experience ever.

According to Capgemini, 81% of consumers prefer to pay more for better customer experience.

Now doesn’t that make you want to make you want to polish your customer engagement offering? Businesses that strategically allocate resources to strengthen their customer experience focus, stand to gain an edge over the competition, boosting profitability and brand reputation.

Your contact centre is the central point of customer contact through channels of their choice. Contact centres, like the seasons, need to continually change and evolve to deliver on customer expectations, because customer expectations have changed. The once placid customer is now active in driving changes in customer service, and the contact centre.

About 10 years ago, if a customer had experienced unsatisfactory service, on an average, they would tell about 7 people about it. Today that number has now grown to 100s, thanks to social media.

The challenge is clear. Customers want seamless experiences from one channel to another – whether over live chat,  email, self-service or a phone call, and in-channel query resolution is more important than ever. They want to contact you through channels of their choice and expect you to respond as promptly during busy periods as quieter ones.

Omni-channel, the bud that could blossom customer experience into fruitful pickings. However, with customers demanding more channels, more complexity is added in creating channel-routing intelligence.
Recent research by ICIMI suggests that no single KPI has a bigger impact on customer satisfaction than first-call resolution (FCR). And the Service Quality Measurement (SQM) Group found that for every 1% improvement in FCR, you get a 1% improvement in customer satisfaction.

Unfortunately, many contact centre agents still aren’t equipped with the right tools to help them achieve challenges set to them.

Reports from Dimension Data reveal that around 40% of contact centres don’t have data analysis tools, despite analytics being voted the top factor to change the shape of the industry in the next five years. And that more than half (57.2%) of contact centres managing email to not have technology solutions in place to maximise efficiency levels. Despite omni-channel being a hot topic for years, only 8.4% of businesses have all contact channels connected.

So why are contact centres not sweeping new strategies into action? Why do they find it difficult to introduce new technology, technologies that integrate with multiple systems that could offer a single view from customers?

Legacy systems and integration issues remain the top challenge affecting CX technology. Another challenge here is being able to secure budget for technology systems. Executives are quick to see the end-game benefits of a customer-centric strategy: more satisfied customers, increased loyalty, a lower cost to serve, and more engaged employees. But they often fail to understand clearly what a superior customer experience is worth and exactly how it will generate value.

Patiently building a business case that shows how technology solutions will meet user needs, and therefore encourage the uptake of digital channels, will help to allay fears of making poor decisions or going down the wrong path.

Visit the resource section of our site for more information, and access to pragmatic calculators to assist in quantifying the economic outcomes of differences in customer experiences.