6 Steps To Improve Customer Experience in a Contact Center

Competition is fierce and it’s getting harder for businesses to stand out. Customers aren’t only looking for the best price or convenience anymore. Customer experience is now the lifeblood for many businesses. 

Customer experience, or CX, is the overall impression that customers have of your brand and product or services. Ultimately, you want that impression to be positive to boost your customer retention and revenue. Happy customers are more likely to recommend your business to others. 

Why Should You Improve Customer Experience In Your Contact Center?

A positive customer experience is key to success. Whether it’s a sales team doing client outreach or a customer support team helping clients solve problems, a positive experience can make a huge difference.

What is Customer Experience in a Contact Center?

Customer experience is about relationships between businesses and their customers. Every interaction customers have with your team or your product plays a part in shaping their overall experience. Customers will take all this into account when they choose to buy your product, stay with your business, or, if it comes down to it, go to a competitor.

Contact centers are central points through which businesses can communicate and interact with clients. These interactions can happen via various channels like phone calls, text messages, emails, social media direct messages, and more. In a contact center, a customer support agent may be able to provide assistance to a client through an online chat or message on Facebook rather than being limited to a phone call.

As you can probably imagine, contact center agents handle a lot of client interactions, up to 50 calls per day in fact. Ensuring all of those interactions are positive and that issues are resolved quickly and efficiently is no small feat.

There are many different factors that can come into play when creating a solid customer experience that lasts throughout the buyer journey.

• How long did a client wait on hold or in the queue to speak to an agent?
• Was the problem resolved within the first contact?
• How long did it take to solve an issue from beginning to end?
• How many times has a client contacted your company overall and what was their experience like each time?
• How easy is your product or service to use?

All of these aspects and more are important and can contribute to your overall customer satisfaction scores, so creating a solid and consistent CX strategy is vital to ensuring long-term success for your business. 

Why Does Customer Experience Matter?

If you’re not looking for ways to level up your customer experience, you’re doing it wrong. Your customers want to feel that you genuinely care for them and their needs. In fact, 80% of consumers are willing to pay more to get a better experience. New studies even show that 76% of consumers would stop doing business with a company altogether after just one bad experience.

CX isn't just about attracting customers; it's about retaining them. Acquiring a new customer costs approximately five times more than retaining an existing one. While there are many reasons customers may stay loyal to businesses, customer experience is a big one.

Prioritizing CX as part of your company culture will ultimately keep your customers happy so they keep coming back for more, which will increase your customer lifetime value. It’s a win-win. 

How to Provide Excellent Customer Service in a Contact Center 

Truly white-glove customer service experience is about not only meeting client expectations, but exceeding them to prioritize customer success in the long run.

Good customer service is also about anticipating problems before they occur. For example, if a client’s term is coming to an end, it may be a good idea to proactively reach out to go over their contract with them instead of going ahead and just billing again.

Another example is a customer mentioning another service they may be looking for that isn’t currently part of their package with a company. Agents can make good use of this information and perhaps provide a better deal that bundles these services together. Again, this is all about prioritizing the customer experience to deliver top-notch service.

These aspects demonstrate a company’s commitment to CX, putting the needs and desires of customers front and center. All this to say, a good experience with a brand is about building trust and showing customers that you're their ally.

6 Ways To Improve Customer Experience in Contact Center

On the surface, creating a strong customer experience seems simple. Just solve customer problems quickly and make your customers feel valued. But when you have so many customers and so little time, it can be difficult to manage a high volume of requests and exceed expectations. Here are 6 ways to proactively enhance and improve the customer experience in a contact center.

1. Personalize the Customer Experience

Today’s decision-makers want to feel valued and over 70% of them expect you to deliver a personalized experience. Focusing on customer personalization and measuring customer experience metrics is one example of how you can prioritize building a stronger CX strategy. Customer personalization goes beyond remembering a customer’s name.

To personalize the customer experience, you need to target each customer by providing marketing messaging, recommendations, offers, etc. specifically tailored to them. With personalization, customers may establish a stronger relationship with your business and may have more trust in your brand overall.

Of course, you will need to develop an organized data collection and analysis process so that your team has all the information they need to build curated experiences that make an impact on your customers.

2. Provide Multiple Ways to Communicate

It’s important to meet customers where they’re at. And today’s customers use a lot of different channels to communicate. Customers expect to have multiple ways to contact you for support and want to communicate on their preferred channel, whether it be through a phone call, email, a social media message, or even a WhatsApp message. In fact, for a research survey, 40% of customers said providing multiple options for communicating was the most important element when contacting a company’s customer service department.

About 88% of consumers even expect companies to have an online self-service support option, which can save a lot of time and energy for both customers and your agents!

For example, automated solutions in the form of chatbots that can answer commonly asked questions allow customers to not only help themselves, but enhance the overall customer experience with shortened response times.

3. Streamline Customer Service

Have you ever contacted a business and been passed off to multiple different departments before speaking to the appropriate representative who could actually solve your issue? How many times did you have to explain the same issue to the different representatives you spoke to?

This experience was probably frustrating, and maybe your own customers have experienced a similar situation when contacting your business.

It’s vital that businesses have specific teams and agents dedicated to solving different issues and that there is a clear and streamlined process to provide customers with the help and support they need. For example, automated attendants and welcome menus when customers call your business over the phone can guide your customers to the right path to get the support they need.

You may also consider assigning different contact center agents to resolve specific customer queries and divide them between frequently asked questions versus more complex issues. Many contact center softwares have skills-based routing features to manage this easily.

4. Identify Common Pain Points in the Customer Journey

It’s important to proactively stop issues in their tracks by anticipating where customers may experience pain points throughout their journey with your products or services. With a proactive approach, you can truly elevate your overall customer experience to the next level.

Detailed analytics and reports can help you do this. Many tools allow you to build customized dashboards and reports so you can improve your internal operations and processes.

For example, you may identify that several customers experience similar challenges during the onboarding process. You can work with your team to create more resources and customer training around those problems. Or if your business model consists of an ongoing payment plan, you may identify that customers stop actively using your products at the 3-month mark and you can create a process where your team reaches out to customers at that time to highlight more features and developments.

Proactive customer support will keep customers happy and inclined to continue supporting your business, and potentially even provide positive feedback.

5. Use an Omnichannel Solution

Contact center as a service (CCaaS) solutions are cloud-based systems designed to help agents manage customer interactions through multiple channels like voice interactions, emails, online chats, social media, and text messages.

While multichannel CCaaS solutions offer multiple ways for customers to interact with businesses, omnichannel solutions like uContact take it a step further, allowing for consistent and seamless interactions. Omnichannel CCaaS systems allow for integrated touchpoints across all channels and help agents boost their productivity with a single snapshot view of each individual customer journey.

Related: Contact Center Vs Call Center: Why it matters

Let’s say a customer reaches out to your company via a direct message on social media. With an Omnichannel CCaaS solution, your agents would be able to not only reply to that message, but would be able to pull up all interactions that particular customer has had with your company and view it all on a single dashboard.

Agents can quickly determine if this is a repeated issue, if the customer has been reaching out a lot lately, or if there are other services that could be offered to solve the customer’s problem or enhance their current package. Knowing these pain points can help with training or identify problem areas for other teams for proactive maintenance and transforming customer experience.

6. Improve the Experience for your Contact Center Agents

Sometimes providing a good customer experience goes hand in hand with keeping your own team happy. An omnichannel solution can improve your contact center agents’ work experience by providing a unified inbox for all their interactions. No more tab switching.

You can also empower your agents with proper coaching to help them improve their interactions with customers. Ultimately, you can help make your team more productive, which is a win-win for your business.

Workforce management tools can help you track your team’s performance to develop personalized coaching and unlock agent potential. You can also track call volumes so you can determine if your team needs more resources and perhaps more agents to help them better serve and support customers.

Level Up Your CX with an All-In-One CCaaS Solution

The bottom line is that as you scale or grow your business, you can’t afford to leave your customer experience in the dust. Your customers expect and deserve a consistent experience to reward their loyalty and keep their trust. The good news is, there are innovative customer experience tools and technologies like contact center platforms, to help you enhance your CX.

At net2phone, we understand that every client is unique and has their own expectations and needs. That's why we take the time to get to know them and provide them with the best experience possible. With uContact, our all-in-one solution for contact center management, we give you the tools to deliver a personalized experience with every interaction, across every channel.

Ready to meet the next generation of contact center software? Book a demo for uContact today!