The Customer Experience ‘To Don’t’ List for 2019

Part three of ‘three little pigs’

January is finally over. What feels like the longest month of the year – not that it’s really been 2019 that long – has many of us glad that the party season and New Year’s resolution making and breaking over and done with for many months, 5 February, marks another festive celebration. Little pig, little pig let me in … Happy Chinese New Year, the Lunar Year of the Pig! As the last blog in our series about the Customer Experience ‘To Don’t’ list, we hope to shed light on the heart of customer support, the contact centre.

Contact centres are the backbone to happy and satisfied customers. However, today’s contact centre is a complex environment that can lead to excessive agent training needs, increased levels of agent frustration and thus attrition, increased average call handling times and, worst of all, customer frustration, waiting for agents to resolve their issue.

Like bacon and eggs

If contact centre agents aren’t equipped with the right tools to help them achieve these challenges set to them, they will become frustrated and less engaged – a growing concern for organisations as it affects both brand perception and revenue.

For sales and support channels to work synergistically – to seamlessly deliver a on a brand’s promise to each customer segment – the contact centre customer service platform in turn, needs to deliver on a consistent experience at every customer interaction.

Feast your eyes on how digital service channels can assist contact centres to address these four challenging customer service expectations.

1. Credibility

A centralised and shared knowledge management solution will ensure that the same information is given to customers across all contact channels, helping to improve satisfaction rates. Clearly sign-posted on a home and contact page, this will enable customers to find answers to their own questions. An extended knowledge-base into a brand’s contact centre will ensure that agents give customers consistent, accurate and timely answers to their questions. This will help to reduce agent-training times and increase conversions, whilst improving the overall customer experience.

2. Reliability

Providing an opportunity for those customers with more complex enquiries to be seamlessly escalated to one-on-one dialogue with a contact centre agent, saves them the frustrating experience of having to call the contact centre and wait on hold for minutes at a time. These live chat sessions can be automatically triggered to help reduce abandonment rates.

3. Intimacy

Offering the same level of customer service and extending the FAQ knowledge-base onto mobile or social media sites, can help to meet customer’s expectations for instant, 24/7 customer service. Investment in the right online customer service technology can provide a cost-effective service across whichever channels customers choose to contact a company.

4. Focus

Customer complaints and feedback provide vital insight into areas for improvement. Offering customers and staff on the frontline dealing with customer complaints a mechanism to suggest improvement, and regularly analysing this information, enables organisations to optimise their service offering, helping towards meeting regulatory guidelines. Responding and acting on feedback lets customers and team members know that their opinions are valued.

Delivering exceptional customer experience in the contact centre is vital to retain customers, reduce costs and increase sales to live happily ever after. For more thought leadership, insights and proven business cases (to far exceed surviving just by the hair on one’s chinny chin chin) visit the resource page on our website or request a demo of our award-winning customer support software.