Beyond Contact Center Metrics: Customer (and Agent) Experience

CEOs think big. They want to find and retain new customers, drive revenues, and create efficiencies that flow down to the bottom line and EBITDA. In the process of leading their teams, those visions get drilled down into measurables — metrics. Before you know it, operations and call center leaders are all focused on numbers: call abandonment, talk times, calls per day, etc. What gets lost is a focus that achieves that first goal above — find and retain new customers. Metrics are great, but in the end, it’s all about customer experience. A happy customer stays — and brings along their friends and family.

Call Centers And The Customer Experience

How can your call center create a great customer experience? Customer experience — or “CX” — is the process by which a company stays engaged with its customers throughout the entire buyer’s cycle, from sales and marketing to billing and support (source). It’s the proverbial chain that it only as strong as its weakest link. Have you seen customers disengage or go elsewhere because of one bad experience somewhere along that chain?

The key to great CX is to stay engaged and create a truly unique (in a good way) journey for your customer as they navigate through the buyer’s journey you’ve created.

Here’s how a good Contact Center will help with CX:

1. Listen: Customers want to be heard. From prompt responses and escalations to interactive tools that allow customers to share their needs and expectations, a call center solution gives your customers a voice and your team ears.
2. Be where they are: Customers have many ways they want to connect with you, including phone, chat, text, social media, and fax (no, not fax, but you get what I mean). A call center solution offering multi-channel (or Omnichannel) communications will put your agents right where your customers want to engage.
3. One-call resolutions: Okay, I’m going to combine this one with “Data”. Customers want their problems fixed…now. And they don’t want to have to keep feeding your team information every time they get transferred. This is a great opportunity to WOW your customer and creates a great experience.
4. Automation and Intelligence: These interactions with your customers are great opportunities for your team to get even better. Each call/conversation has the potential to feed your team — sales, marketing, manufacturing, fulfillment, billing — ideas on ways to improve. Therein lies the magic of call centers with built-in intelligence and automation. Create analytics, reports, and live feedback, moving information to where it needs to be NOW in order to make continuous improvements to that CX.
5. Get personal (but not creepy): When I call USAA, they call me “Lieutenant Preston” which feels nice and personal (heck, the soldiers I worked with didn’t even call me that — “Hey LT!”). When your customers get that personal touch, they know you care about them. Here’s that data again. Your agents need key data and then all of the data available as soon as a customer is engaged with them. Make it personal. Take create care of them. 

Build Your Contact Center Around Your Customer’s Journey

Are you ready to create an amazing experience for your customers? It’s a win-win situation. They’ll love your business, buy more, and send referrals. Oh, and when you create this great customer experience, you’ll start to notice your agents’ morale improve and turnover might not be such a concern.

Let’s set up a time to review how your company makes money, and I’ll find some call center solutions that will enable that flow. Call me at 480-801-7471 or (even better) email me at stuart@mountainpathsolutions.com.

Downloadable Resources, including How To Start Your First Cloud Call Center

Further reading:

What Is Needed To Build A Call Center From Scratch?

Best Call Centers For Salesforce

Wait, Do You Already Have A Call Center?