A phone call from a customer is now the last resort for that customer. Choosing to speak with a live person often means the customer has searched the Web, perused your FAQs, chatted with a Web-based assistant, and attempted to self-serve in an IVR system. Pounding on the "0" key is a symptom of frustration.
The hard part of traditional contact center models and customer service solutions has been collecting and displaying data that can encourage repeat customers in a cost-effective way. By recognizing the shift in how customers seek assistance, businesses can not only improve customer satisfaction, but potentially boost revenue as well. By considering the customer support process as a journey, organizations can identify opportunities within that process to make systemic changes and ultimately serve their customers better.
Organizational changes aren't always easy, but by utilizing these five actionable tips, your company can be quickly on its way to growing its repeat customer base.
Measure Happiness
The top priority for contact centers is to evolve from the standards in tactical key performance indicators, such as resolution time, call answer time, and verbal confirmation of a resolution, to strategic indications that the customer experience has been improved holistically.
For example, companies should analyze not only the solution for a customer but also why that customer is calling in the first place, by presenting a unified view of every interaction that customer has had. Businesses need to be able to pull metadata from within a call and do it easily. This can enable call center managers to move away from evaluating calls, which can be arduous, toward integrating with product teams, marketing teams, and engineering teams to solve the issues that face customers.
Dig into the Details
Gathering customer data can help identify and measure important trends as well as provide a view of what topics are appearing in real time, such as recurring complaints or inquiries. Once you've identified these trends, you can make strategic decisions to get ahead and improve the customer experience. Whether the action is revamping a product based on customers' feedback or improving the overall sales process, the actions taken by a company all affect the customers' perception of the business.
Coach to Best Practices
Best practices used to be based on anecdotal evidence at best. Now, recording and sharing best practice customer experiences take the ambiguity out of coaching. Sending coaching directly to agents based on measurable metrics such as utilization of support materials, dead air, and other tactics enables managers to provide teaching materials based on facts and not assumptions. The ability to continuously mentor