How Contact Centres Can Reduce Customer Churn

According to Forrester, it costs 5 times more to acquire new customers than it does to keep an existing one. Customer churn is a fact of life for almost every organization around the world. While reducing customer churn is not the sole responsibility of the contact centre in an organization, there are techniques that can be applied to reduce the rate.

What Is Customer Churn?

Qualitrics define customer churn as “when someone chooses to stop using your products or services. In effect, it’s when a customer ceases to be a customer.”

The customer churn rate can be calculated by using the formula:

(lost customers ÷ total customers at the start of chosen time period) x 100 = churn rate%

Contact Centres and Customer Churn

We have previously spoken about how latency is one of the most common causes of poor voice quality. Latency is the delay, or lag, someone experiences on a call when speed is not suitable. Latency can have a major impact on your business, your employees, and most importantly, your customers.

Frustration and disappointment in the quality of your call could easily lead to a customer to drop the call and lose faith in the business. You want to make sure the quality of the call is high and is valuable in giving the customer the best experience possible.

Although the call might still go forward with latency, brand reputation could be negatively affected by a dissatisfied customer. You’ve left a bad experience in their mind, spreading from word-of-mouth to other potential customers and ultimately creating the dreaded churn.

5 Ways Contact Centres Can Reduce Customer Churn

1. Embrace a Multi-Channel Approach When Communicating With Customers

Customers don’t see your organization in terms of different departments and communication channels. Technological developments and digital channels can play a major role to reduce customer service issues, but systems that aren’t integrated can cause more problems than they solve.

A CallMiner Index report discovered that consumers will use up to nine channels to contact an organization to try and get the result they want. While web chat, social and website are on the rise for the preferred contact channel, respondents overwhelmingly declared their preference for the telephone as their primary channel.

2. Empower Your Agents to ‘Think Outside the Box’ When Handling Customer Complaints and Issues

It’s important that your agents are empathetic and understanding while on the phone. Genuinely coaching an agent will prove that you are invested in him or her, boosting both motivation and staff attrition rates in your organization. Role-playing and refresher training sessions are just some of the ways you can support your agents and build company culture.

Rather than giving your agents feedback sporadically, why not make it part of your daily or weekly operations? Identify low volume times at your contact centre and put this time to good use. Remember that feedback can be positive or negative, and can come in many forms such as surveys, scorecards and KPIs.

3. Replicate Your Customers’ Experience When They Call Your Organization

A self-serve, cloud-based platform proactively monitors critical business telecommunication services and gives you the peace of mind that your numbers are performing as they should be.

Such products can also give you the option to schedule automated tests at scale, from over 70 countries around the globe.

4. Measure the Amount of Latency Your Customer Experiences on a Call

As mentioned above, latency on a call is a key source of frustration for a customer when on the phone with an agent. Latency tests replicate your customers’ call flow, allowing you to quantify the amount of latency your customer’s experience.

The test allows you to proactively measure and benchmark any delay. With repeated testing, the latency test identifies where there are variations over time.

5. Make It Easy for Your Customers to Give Feedback

The more you know about your customers’ experience, the better. Customers want to know that you’re listening to their wants and needs. One of the best ways to do this is to ask for their feedback to find out what they like and don’t like about your brand, call centre and agents.

Consider asking your customers to fill out a short survey after every call. Another option is to end every call with a question about how you did and what they would improve for next time.