Elevating Your Customers’ Contact Centre Experience

The experience your customers have with your contact centre or customer service centre can impact your business – positively or negatively.

Positive contact centre experiences occur when customers get the help they need in a timely fashion, while negative call centre experiences can result from rude or dismissive agents, long wait times, or an insufficient resolution to a problem.

This guide outlines what customers expect from their contact centre experiences, including:

• What is contact centre experience?
• Four features of a good contact centre experience
• How to improve contact centre experience
• The role of conversation intelligence in contact centre experience
• Frequently asked questions

What Is Contact Centre Experience?

Contact centre experience is the feeling a customer has toward their overarching experience with a contact centre or customer service centre.

The contact centre experience includes interactions with agents, steps toward resolution, the actual resolution, wait times, and the customer’s overall treatment throughout the process.

Contact centres also use several key performance indicators (KPIs) to track performance using call centre software.

The most helpful KPIs include average handling time, which tracks the total time it takes to resolve the customer’s problem, and customer satisfaction, which is typically measured using customer survey feedback.

Four Features of a Good Contact Centre Experience

Customers have expectations when they call for help, as they should. After all, they typically aren’t reaching out to your organization for any other reason than to get their issue resolved or a question answered quickly.

Most customers would agree that they had a good, productive contact centre experience if they encountered the following:

Helpful Agents

The agent a person speaks with should get to the root of the problem quickly so they can address it. Agents should know where to find any information they don’t have to prevent delays in resolving an issue.

Short Wait Times

Wait time is a significant pain point for many customers, sometimes even causing them to avoid calling for help at all. Generally, customers don’t want to wait more than two minutes before being greeted by an agent.

Courtesy

Customers who call for help expect courtesy from an agent when handling their issue, regardless of how minor it may be. Empathy and respectful responses and tones are key for positive call centre experiences.

Quick and Effective Resolution

Once the problem is clear, a resolution should happen quickly. Customers want their questions answered or a solution to their problem within a few minutes of calling.

How to Improve Contact Centre Experience for Customers

Each customer’s experience becomes a part of a contact centre’s overall experience. As such, each customer’s case must be handled with care, preventing anyone from falling through the cracks.

Contact centres should implement the following steps to ensure a high-quality call centre experience at each part of a customer’s journey.

Spend Ample Time on Training and Onboarding (and Make It Ongoing)

Knowledgeable and caring contact centre agents come from having proper training and onboarding from the start.

Spend enough time with each new hire to catch them up on your contact centre software and processes. Complete mock interactions with them using various situations to determine whether they’re ready to handle calls on their own.

Training shouldn’t be considered a one-and-done process. Instead, offer professional development workshops, events, courses, and meetings to keep fine-tuning agent skills.

Listen to Your Agents as Much as Your Customers

Customer surveys provide helpful feedback that contact centres can use to improve their processes.

But as important as customer feedback is, agent feedback is just as handy. Agents interact with customers every day so they understand common pain points and can relay that information to managers in charge of tweaking scripts and processes to assist customers better.

Utilize Everything Contact Centre Software Offers

Contact centre software offers a number of features that improve customer experiences. When management and agents know how to use contact centre software effectively, they can get the data they need from conversations to continuously make improvements based on sentiment and emotion analysis from conversation intelligence technology.

The Role of Conversation Intelligence in Contact Centre Experience

Conversation intelligence analyzes conversations between agents and customers to provide data that contact centres can use to enhance overall experience.

It works in the background of every conversation – phone as well as other channels, like emails and social media – to provide the necessary data for driving positive customer experiences and retention.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is the Difference Between a Contact Centre and a Call Centre?

A call centre is a contact hub for phone calls between a customer and a company. While call centres include only phone contact, contact centres cover multiple contact channels in addition to phone calls, like texts, social media, emails, or live chats.

Why Does Contact Centre Experience Matter?

A negative contact centre experience can cause customers to feel negative toward a brand. Customers typically call to get a problem resolved quickly and respectfully, and when that doesn’t happen, they could decide to seek competing brands instead.

Essentially, contact centre experience is a critical part of customer experience, brand management and more.

What’s the Best Way to Improve Contact Centre Experience for Customers?

Highly skilled agents are necessary for positive contact centre experiences. Therefore, thorough training and onboarding is the number-one way to ensure that agents have the technical and interpersonal skills to satisfy customer needs and improve call centre experience.

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

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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.