Learning how to improve customer experience in your call center and create a perfect customer experience is an ongoing process that you should check in with early and often. As you reach the next level of exceeding your customers’ expectations, you’ll then want to exceed them even further. You’ve got to keep going up!
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There are literally thousands of ways you can enhance the customer experience in your contact center, and the four tips mentioned below are great starting points.
Strong customer experiences start with your agents
Customers are your most valuable asset, and although they should be your biggest focus, you can’t forget about the people who come into contact with your customers on a daily basis — your agents!
Everyone has a bad day from time to time, but if morale is consistently low in your work environment, that bad juju is likely to translate into a poor tone with customers. And no one likes speaking with an agent who is in a bad mood or worse unhelpful and unmotivated.
Research indicates that when a customer is speaking with a representative, the message is influenced and interpreted in part by the tone in which it was given. In fact, 38% of the way the message is interpreted is influenced by the tone in which it was spoken. Other factors influencing the way the message is received include body language and facial expressions.
For call center agents, though, they don’t have the luxury of being able to communicate through body language and facial expressions over the phone,email, and chat. This means it is their tone that represents 100% of the way the message is received by your customers, making it all the more important to keep them happy, cheerful, and engaged.
Without high levels of agent satisfaction, your customer experience is going to suffer and any attempts to improve it will likely be a losing battle.
Improve call center quality assurance with a scorecard system
Performance from your agents is key to great service.
Many call centers view agent scorecards as tedious, but the truth of the matter is, scorecards enhance quality assurance by using qualitative and quantitative data to pinpoint deficits in agent duties. The scorecards enable supervisors to obtain a comprehensive understanding of each agent’s mastery and shortcomings, allowing tailored training to be provided to each agent on an individualized basis.
Take for example scorecards that provide a supervisor with valuable insight regarding a specific agent who fails to meet customers’ expectations when taking calls relating to order refunds. In all other areas and types of calls the agent exceeds customers’ expectations, though. Knowing this information means the supervisor can direct the agent toward training modules that specifically aim to improve their ability to handle calls that have a focus on order replacements and refunds.
Nip friction points across customer journeys in the bud
Who hasn’t experienced a time where it was difficult to find what you were looking for on a web site, mobile app, or while sitting in an IVR menu maze? These types of friction points undo all your customer service team’s hard work by causing frustration and a negative sentiment toward your brand – especially in crowded verticals like retail or financial services that differentiate on customer service. If your competition alleviates the frustrations you cause and provides an easier path to a customer’s needs then you’re DOA. Looking at your overall customer support strategy, identify and eliminate the points where your customers are getting snagged when trying to find a solution.
Common customer experience friction points include:
- Web forms are too complex
- Wait times are too long
- It’s hard to navigate to the right person through your IVR
- Re-entering information multiple times
- Challenges when using multiple channels.
Last but not least, regularly collect customer feedback
Customer feedback lets you know how your customers feel about your product, service, or brand. Collecting customer feedback via CSAT scores is one avenue for aggregating this data, but another is through analyzing actual customer sentiment using a tool like speech analytics which provides customer sentiment insight. Customer sentiment is the view or attitude that your customers have about your product and/or company.
You don’t have to wait until you have a high customer churn rate or skyrocketing agent attrition because there are many customers that are dissatisfied with your customer service). You can stay in the loop with advance notice of their thoughts and emotions and take quick action by simply asking your customers for feedback in advance.
Seeking customer feedback will help you uncover those who are pleased with your customer experience and journey and those who are not. And what should follow up next is discovery regarding the what, why, and how of that success.
The most direct way to improve your call center’s customer experience is to conduct customer satisfaction surveys while also checking in on your agent satisfaction. Engaging with your customers and agents in this way will allow insight directly from the most vital points of view that you can use to better your service and improve customer satisfaction.