How to Build a Customer Experience-Driven Contact Centre

“Although your customers won’t love you if you give bad service, your competitors will,” warns Kate Zabriskie, author of Customer Service Excellence.

We’re all very aware that delivering great customer experience (CX) is no longer optional. For most companies — likely yours among them — great customer experience is essential for continued success. According to the Temkin Group, if a customer sees an experience as “good,” there’s a 33% increase in spending. But when the experience is a negative one, there’s a 65% decrease in money spent.

Clearly, negative experiences damage your brand – and your bottom line. If ever there were a time for urgent, swift change, it’s now.

Customers aren’t that hard to read. They want consistent, effortless interactions using the touchpoints they prefer. In fact, 77% say valuing their time is a sure way to earn their loyalty. The problem is the disparity between how customers view their journeys and how those journeys are typically handled. So how do you create a contact centre environment that provides a consistent, world-class customer experience with every interaction?

Orchestrate journeys across all channels

More than just interaction routing, orchestration fully manages the state of each interaction while preserving customer context across all touchpoints and channels. If a customer initiates a webchat and then decides to reach out to the call centre, the full context of that chat (as well as the history of past interactions) is preserved and visible to the agent. When the call ends, maybe the customer receives an SMS message confirming their order or issue resolution.

From the customer’s point of view, all three communications are related. A customer experience-driven contact centre solution enables you to see the big picture and orchestrate customer interactions holistically.

Personalise interactions using context

With context preserved across channels, this information can be leveraged in real time along with context from CRM and other systems to predict customer intent and connect them with the best self-service and assisted-service resources to help them reach their goals.

Empower your agents

Agents should be able to focus on the customer conversation rather than struggling with their systems. Give your agents the tools they need to generate revenue and boost customer satisfaction. When agents see a customer’s profile, order history, website activity, and behavioural attributes in advance, customers don’t have to wait for them to research their accounts.

Additionally, continuous workforce optimisation can automatically trigger optimisation workflows that notify a supervisor of issues, identify agents for training, adjust schedules, or guide routing – all without human intervention.

Of course, it’s not just about the technology. It’s about creating a culture of customer-centric behaviour and rewarding it regularly. It’s no secret that happy, productive agents create happy, satisfied customers.

Why should you focus on customer experience now?

The key to great CX is orchestrating interactions across touchpoints and channels, which allows you to:

• Preserve customer context and interaction history across each touchpoint
• Personalise interactions so your best customers get the best service
• Anticipate customers’ needs to maximise revenue
• Simplify processes to reduce the number of customer interactions
• Optimise future customer interactions based on historical ones

It’s time to build a customer experience-driven contact centre to gain the benefits of higher customer loyalty, increased revenue, and better business outcomes.

With thanks to Chris Horne at Genesys