Customer Experience for Contact Centres – A Practical Guide

Dick Bourke of Scorebuddy shares his insight on how best to measure and improve the customer experience.

Customer experience (CX) is often classified as an intangible concept; a concept from which it can be difficult to extract actionable insight.

Sometimes organisations which don’t have a systematic method of measuring the quality of CX in the contact centre can fall into the trap of perceiving their customer experience as one of three rankings, good, bad, or indifferent.

For companies that recognise the importance of CX, an abstract concept deeming success or failure just isn’t good enough. These companies want quantifiable results that can be measured and managed with one goal in mind: to improve customer experience.

How Great CX Is Effected

A company cannot build a call centre, staff it, train it, and then ‘walk away’ hoping that everything simply works out for the best. Success (or failure) must be measured at every level so that improvements can be made, and results need to be reviewed regularly to ensure that customers are satisfied, and that revenue continues to grow..

By not measuring the level of CX in the organisation in a consistent and systematic manner, the company is essentially blind to whether they are serving their customers properly or not. Worse yet, without a solid system and process in place, it’s impossible for compliance managers to know if the company is compliant with the relevant regulations – something that can cost a company in hefty fines or even bar them from continuing to operate.

In our current, fast-growing economy where many companies are delivering quality products and services, CX can become the key differentiator between two competitors. It’s the make-or-break factor that increasingly impacts a company’s success.

Did you know that in the US alone, according to NewVoiceMedia, companies lose more than $62 million a year due to poor customer service?

A positive customer experience is crucial to business success and can be especially important when looking at CX for contact centres where customers might have their first interaction with a live person in the customer journey. It’s that simple.

Measuring CX for Success

So, what are some ways in which CX can be measured specifically for optimal success?

1. Set Measurement Goals

Companies like Scorebuddy firmly believe that good decisions can only be made with consistent data. It’s necessary to step back and look at your call centre holistically. How does it fit into the larger company’s operations? What is the company’s mission and objective? What are the contact centre’s goals? Then begin to drill down into how each phase of the customer journey ties into a measurable experience.

Possible measurable areas of consideration might include:

• Abandon rate, Call wait time, Length of call, Number of calls answered, First-call resolution, Customer satisfaction
• Rapport, Tone, Effective questioning, Careful listening

You know your company, your call centre, and your goals. It is essential that you map out a plan for what success in the contact centre should look like before moving forward.

2. Quality Starts in the Home

Companies with call centres are automatically in the business of communication. It is impossible to expect that agents will clearly communicate with customers if you are not clearly communicating with your agents first.

Now that you have your goals in place, you must actively and consistently share those goals with your call centre agents. This transparency will earn their trust and support. Let them know what you’re aiming to accomplish and why you are measuring the moments you’ve chosen in the customer journey.

Consider empowering your employees by suggesting they suggest what should be measured. Ask them: what metrics matter most to your success?

3. Perform Quality Assurance Monitoring

If you’ve communicated your goals, and your agents understand and support them, quality assurance monitoring should be a more seamless process. Either way, QA monitoring is essential, but it will prove a far more successful measurement tool if you have employee buy-in.

Evaluators should receive regular training on how to interpret the data, customer interactions, and agent messaging. They need to have a thorough understanding of the company’s and call centre’s goals so that they know what to listen for and measure. Evaluators should be encouraged to annotate their evaluations with coaching tips and to remain flexible and open to discussion.

Although some grey areas exist when it comes to contact centre quality, open dialogues and iterative process development will give evaluators and agents more ownership of the process.

4. Invite Agents to Self-Score Their Experiences

Want measurable results? Invite your call centre agents to self-score each call’s success. Enable your team to own this part of the process.

This does not need to replace the manager’s QA scorecard for the call, but it can be used as a supplementary resource; these self-assessments naturally lead to more impactful dialogues between managers and call centre employees. They shed light on discrepancies and help to tighten up those seemingly less tangible, or quantifiable, parts of the business.

Perhaps, most importantly, they give call centre agents a voice, an opportunity to express their ideas and thoughts in a formal, efficient, and productive manner. Something that can only help an organisation’s CX improve.

Many call centre success strategies focus on their own call centre agents. But keep in mind that the focus ultimately isn’t on the agents, managers, or even business leaders. The objective is to make and keep satisfied customers. Happier, more effective call centre agents lead to satisfied customers, and happier customers ultimately lead to greater revenue, especially when looking at the lifetime value of a customer.

Key Takeaways for Contact Centre CX

If your company is truly motivated to push the needle in favour of a quality customer experience, take the following actions:

• Set goals
• Determine and share what success means for your call centre and to your company
• Empower your evaluators and call centre agents, and communicate frequently with consistent messaging
• Be sure to invite your agents to be part of the decision-making and scoring process

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Scorebuddy – View the Original Article

For more information about Scorebuddy - visit the Scorebuddy Website

Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.