Delivering a great customer experience (CX) is the ultimate aim of contact centres but how do organisations stand out from the crowd? In this article, Magnus Geverts at Calabrio shows how to WOW customers in five easy steps and then invites you to test your knowledge in the Big CX Quiz on 5 May 2021.
CX is the most important aim of contact centres today and many professionals in the industry believe the customer service experience will impact brand loyalty even more than before the pandemic. As businesses prepare to transition from survive to thrive mode, now is the perfect time to look back on lessons learned and come up with a plan to re-invigorate your contact centre strategy and test your current CX knowledge.
5 ways to WOW customers
Delivering exceptional customer experiences comes down to giving more – including ensuring agents receive the same level of TLC as customers, introducing best practice processes and deploying the right technology. Here are a few ideas for inspiration:
1. Power your super agents – the journey to wowing customers starts with wowing frontline staff. No doubt, many agents are feeling far from super after the challenges of the past year. It’s time to re-invigorate everyone with a fresh approach. Maintain honest and open communications and encourage agents to continue with new learning. Introduce self-service scheduling to allow agents to create a better work/life balance. Then, give them the tools to drive exceptional CX with technology that blends desktop applications and customer interactions in one simple, intuitive interface.
2. Hold the right customer conversations – by truly understanding how customers want to interact with your brand and then providing them with the channels of their choice. While the pandemic has accelerated digital expansion including the introduction of new channels such as social media, Calabrio’s own research reveals that customers expect a fast and efficient service with the human touch. While 57% of contact centre professionals say customers expect ‘multiple channels for communication’, 68% express a desire for ‘human agent availability over bots. The focus going forward is to invest wisely, namely in technology that enriches the customer experience by being meaningful. If you don’t know what channels matter to your customers, simply ask them. Then, save the clever stuff for improving customer service such as uncovering bottlenecks or using automated analytics to reveal which channel is trending on a customer’s wish list.
3. Aim for analytics-driven service – advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) provide contact centres with the valuable insights they need to give more to agents and customers. AI-driven speech analytics capture 100% of customer interactions while quality management (QM) helps identify the one word that keeps cropping up in customer conversations to flag up issues, categorise calls and then prioritise them. Meanwhile, the latest Chatbots for agents and sentiment analysis identify potential cries for help in the contact centre from identifying agents who are struggling to cope to picking up on the mood of the customer.
4. Introduce operational best practices for a competitive edge – using important operational and managerial insights that come directly from the contact centre. Forward-thinking organisations are utilising this valuable intelligence to change their ways of working and boost productivity. Take the example of Thomson Reuters. By acting on data, the company has dramatically improved efficiencies, increasing new agents’ utilisation of knowledge assets to better answer customer questions and accelerate resolution times. A 6.4% increase in CSAT and expected 3% saving in operating costs are just the icing on the cake!
5. Invest in technology with the ‘Give More’ gene – the best solutions are designed to ensure stellar customer and agent experiences. Built with ‘give more’ in their DNA, they combine ease of use with the latest analytics and business intelligence (BI) to readily anticipate and respond to customer enquiries while empowering agents to reach their full potential. Look out for vendors who value partnership, innovating alongside their user community to build products that help organisations stay connected to customers and one step ahead of the competition.
Save the date for Calabrio’s Big CX Quiz at 10am on Wednesday 5 May 2021
At Calabrio, we have joined forces with James Dodkins, the Customer Experience Rockstar and host of Amazon Prime’s ‘This Week in CX’ to present our first annual quiz, giving contact centre professionals the opportunity to test their customer experience expertise and learn new strategies on how to achieve CXcellence.
As James says, “CX makes the world go round but how much do you really know about making it memorable and impactful for your company? True CXcellence is about giving more, and in the 2021 Big CX Quiz we are focusing on improving experiences for customers, teams and organisations alike. We promise you’ll walk away recharged, reinspired and reconnected.”
With the focus on giving more, the top four winners of Calabrio’s ‘Big CX Quiz’ will each receive cash prizes that can be donated to the charity of their choice. For more information and to register, click here.
For additional ideas and inspiration on how to improve CX, download Calabrio’s latest survey “State of the Contact Centre 2021: Cloud is here. What’s next?”
About the Author
Magnus Geverts is VP, Product Marketing and Management at Calabrio
Calabrio is the customer experience intelligence company that empowers organisations to enrich human interactions. The scalability of our cloud platform allows for quick deployment of remote work models—and it gives our customers precise control over both operating costs and customer satisfaction levels. Through AI-driven analytics, Calabrio uncovers customer behaviour and sentiment and derives compelling insights from the contact centre. Organisations choose Calabrio for its ability to understand customer needs and the overall experience it provides, from implementation to ongoing support. Find more at calabrio.com and follow @Calabrio on Twitter.
