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These days, customer trust matters more than ever. With 55% of consumers cutting back spending, people are generally being more cautious than in recent years. As customers become more selective in how they interact with brands, every interaction counts.
This means that your contact center experience is critical. Customers reach out to contact centers as much as 14 times a year and each time is an opportunity to build brand trust and loyalty. Yet too often, suffering through long wait times and being passed off to different agents who are coming into the situation cold leave customers feeling unheard.
To further explore how to improve the contact center experience, CMSWire spoke to Ricki Lang, Vice President of telecommunications, media and entertainment for Quantum Metric. We discussed the importance of getting the contact experience right and how organizations can best achieve that goal with AI-powered tools and a holistic view of the digital customer experience.
Understanding Customers’ Disconnect and Frustration
Quantum Metric research finds that 52% of customers feel powerless in their interactions with brands. Further research shows that 19% of customers are transferred to another agent. This negatively affects both first contact resolution and customer satisfaction — particularly if the new agent asks the customer to repeat themselves. “Too often, your customers are left feeling trapped instead of supported,” said Lang.
Sometimes, agents don’t know who to escalate an issue to. This is one area where AI-powered intelligent escalation can reduce customer frustration. By using AI to route calls to the best available agent, customers can get their issues resolved with fewer handoffs.
AI-powered tools that relay key information to the next agent go a long way toward making customers feel supported. “Businesses who are receiving negative customer satisfaction scores need to take a hard look at what digital experiences they’re providing their customers and figure out ways to remove that friction, or at the very least empower agents so that they understand what the customer was trying to do, instead of having that customer trying to explain that to them,” said Lang.
Lang noted how Quantum Metric’s work involves providing their customers with context-aware assistance. “We’re empowering agents with the knowledge of what those customers did before they got to that agent. This makes the agents happier because they can move forward with the customer instead of making the customer start over every time they’re re-routed.”
Context-aware assistance, including intelligent escalation, significantly enhances the agent's digital experience, directly translating to a better customer experience. “Some of the companies we’ve helped with their digital experiences have seen their call times reduced by as much as three minutes while improving customer satisfaction scores at the same time,” Lang said. “All thanks to empowering agents with data and meeting customers where they are.”
Empowering Customers and Digital Teams with Continuous Optimization
It’s important to look at CX holistically, by not just providing insights from the digital team to the call center, but also transforming the call center into an insights resource of its own, passing data on frequent call needs back to the digital team. This helps the digital team identify what drives calls. With this knowledge, the digital team can then improve their experience and self-service tools. This then reduces calls to the contact center, opening more space for the most complex issues that need human attention.
Lang gave an example of a healthcare company that was working with Quantum Metric to unify their data this way. “What was driving volume into the contact center was that certain pages weren’t loading and customers couldn’t complete their digital task. But customers weren’t telling the company this information — they were calling out of frustration and weren’t interested in filling out surveys. By linking their contact center data to digital user sessions data the company discovered and fixed the problem, which reduced call center volume.”
Looking beyond the call center and finding ways to build continuous optimization into the customer experience should improve the customer journey. “Too often, organizations have fragmented data, meaning even though customers are moving from channel to channel, agents don’t always get that context,” Lang said. “Being able to pull these data points together is really important. The organizations who will see the greatest impact on customer satisfaction are the ones who are building those connected, cohesive experiences for customers.”
Reaping the Rewards: Outcomes to Successful Contact Center Improvements
Improving the contact center experience can deliver a wealth of positive customer and agent metrics. Companies improving their digital experiences can reduce average handle time by as much as 60%, further making customers feel seen and appreciated.
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For customers, getting better experiences from contact centers will raise their satisfaction and improve brand loyalty and retention. “Our research shows that 48% of people we surveyed said that good support would boost their loyalty,” Lang said. “While on the other hand, 61% said they’d stopped purchasing from a brand because they had poor support experiences. Since the goal is to prevent customers from leaving due to bad experiences, you can use the contact center to build these insights to continue to grow and optimize your flows and improve that intersection between automation and human empathy.”
Then, there’s the agent side. The agent experience is just as important as the customer experience, as happier agents can also improve the customer experience. Empowering agents with the knowledge to solve customer issues not only reduces customer frustration, but creates new opportunities for efficiency. Operational effectiveness is another positive outcome to an improved agent experience, which can further reduce contact center’s perception as a cost center.
Conclusion
With consumers cutting back spending and being more selective, brands must ensure every touchpoint builds trust and loyalty. “Every customer interaction is an opportunity to build trust, build loyalty, build a relationship,” said Lang. “And if you meet those moments with empathy and accuracy, it will do wonders for your customer satisfaction.”
It’s important to think of the customer experience as a full cycle, where the digital experience fuels operational efficiencies and technology improvements empower agents to address customer issues quicker with less time spent explaining (or reexplaining) oneself to an agent. “Understanding your tech pain points and taking steps to address them really allows companies to meet customers where they are,” Lang said. ”And when agents feel more empowered to do the right thing it becomes easier to solve issues and move forward.”
Learn how Quantum Metric can boost your contact center experience at quantummetric.com.
