The best contact centers continually evaluate their progress and find new and better ways to serve ... [+]
- Contact centers substantially impact the customer experience, but many companies avoid giving them the right resources.
- Transforming the contact center requires involving the entire company and continually evolving.
- Empower contact center agents with a strong culture and streamlined technology.
- Combining AI and self-service options with a human agent creates a solid omnichannel experience.
For being one of the most crucial parts of a successful CX strategy, contact centers sure have a bad reputation.
In fact, the majority (59%) of customers avoid calling customer service as much as possible.
78% of consumers permanently change how they feel about a company based on a single interaction with the contact center, meaning the contact center can literally make or break the entire customer experience.
In many companies, the contact center is viewed as a necessary evil—something required to serve customers but a thorn in the side of everyone involved. But the contact center has the power to be much more and the foundation of a strong customer-centric culture.
Here are five best practices to improve contact centers and make them central to your CX efforts:
1 . Involve The Entire Company
The contact center isn't an isolated entity from the rest of the company; it's the center of customer experience. The entire company should understand what happens in the contact center and why it matters.
Many leading companies regularly have their executives work in the contact center to see CX on the front lines. It's one thing to talk about customer service in a boardroom, but it's another thing to see it firsthand in the contact center and speak to customers.
Jeff Bezos required every manager and executive at Amazon—including himself—to spend two days in contact center training every two years. Other companies, large and small, encourage leaders to take calls in the contact center to understand customers better.
But it’s more than just executives who should be involved. At Lyft, members of the technology team regularly shadow customer service to fully understand what customers need and what is and isn't working with the app so they can make proactive changes.
2 . Create A Strong Agent Experience
As frontline employees, working in a contact center isn't easy. New research found that 96% of contact center agents feel stressed weekly and are taking more calls than ever. Calls rated as "difficult" by customer service agents increased by 100% over the past two years. At the same time, contact center workers are plagued with stress, overwhelm and a lack of engagement. It's challenging to provide excellent customer service when the agents can barely keep their heads above water.
Tom Goodmanson, president and CEO of Calabrio, put it this way: "If the agent is taken care of, the end customer will win."
A successful contact center prioritizes employees and provides them with training, tools and resources—plus a strong culture and recognition—to do their jobs well. Agents need to feel supported and have a high-quality employee experience.
3 . Streamline Internal Systems
Going hand in hand with improving the agent experience is streamlining internal systems. It's not uncommon for agents to work through 10 or more screens to solve customer problems. Instead of listening to customers and building relationships, agents are often too busy moving between tabs.
Providing agents with customer data in a single system makes it easier for them to have context about the customer's issue, which improves the experience for everyone and makes it more likely to solve the problem quickly.
Cosimo Spera, Founder and CEO of Minerva CQ, calls it collaborative intelligence, or combining the efficiency of AI algorithms with the emotions of humans. Streamlining systems and augmenting them with AI and real-time customer data allows for faster resolution.
4 . Combine Self-service Options With Human Agents
Self-service has seen significant growth in the last few years, as customers crave convenient solutions and brands aim to create more efficient operations. But self-service is only half the puzzle and still requires human agents. The contact center plays a crucial role.
85% of customers expect customer service conversations to move seamlessly and in real-time between channels. When customers need help with complex issues or personal recommendations, they should be automatically transferred from a bot to a human agent. And with the right technology, the agent will already have the context they need to resolve the issue quickly.
Ben Rigby, VP, Global Head of Product & Engineering, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Talkdesk, says putting contact center agents in the middle of machine learning is the best way to continually update the system. After all, retraining a bot is like talking to customers, which contact center agents do every day.
5 . Continually Evolve
Every aspect of customer service should be continually evolving, especially the contact center. It used to be that customers only talked to brands on the phone after wading through a complex phone tree, but now technology has added more channels and opportunities to interact with customers.
The need to evolve is particularly great after the pandemic, which changed customers' priorities and how they want to contact brands.
Companies can't ignore their contact centers and stick to doing things the way they've always been done. The best contact centers continually evaluate their progress and find new and better ways to serve customers.
Find the contact center KPIs that matter to your company. For some organizations, it's NPS. Others prioritize CSAT or Customer Effort. Tracking metrics and listening to customer feedback helps brands update the experience and find new and better ways to connect with customers.
The contact center is the hub of the customer experience and deserves attention and resources. These five best practices can significantly improve your contact center and brand presence.
Blake Morgan was called The Queen of Customer Experience by Meta. She is a globally recognized keynote speaker and the author of the bestselling book The Customer Of The Future. Read her free ebook: Digital Transformation In A Post-COVID World - 5 Key CX Strategies.
