10 Ways to Improve Customer Experience

Here are 10 ways in which you can improve the customer experience (CX) in your contact centre.

1. Map the customer journey and adjust for emotion and feedback

When you map your customer journey you put the customer at the heart of your business.

Mapping their journey will help you identify the steps, delays and the effort you expect from them. This allows you to make changes and ensure a seamless experience.

2. Map the agent journey. Remove barriers to make it easy for them to succeed

The focus in CX has been on customers.

However, the agent journey affects the conversation and customer outcome. Work with your agents to map steps, processes and back-office links within their journey.

Fixing broken processes for your agents will boost performance and customer satisfaction.

3. Agree on effective processes. Ensure that all stakeholders across your organisation benefit

Review your agents’ journey alongside your customer journey. What issues stand out? Are your back-office processes affecting the journey?

Consider streamlining your processes with automated data entry, reminders and alerts or proactive communication to customers. How could these processes benefit other departments?

4. Your CX strategy – improvement or step change?

A CX focus improves your customer retention by 58% and financial performance by 64%.

However, only 13% of organisations have moved beyond the “start” in their CX journey.

So, how do you achieve your CX vision?

5. Decide what to measure and understand “what” it will achieve

Whatever statistics you choose to measure will drive agent behaviour and performance. However, poor performance could be caused by systems and processes.

Use your metrics to decide how you are currently performing and where you want to get to.

6. Update your queue handling by using customer-focused options

Your customer’s experience starts as they dial and come through to your IVR.

Using ‘press 1 for…’ (DTMF) is no longer a customer-friendly option as many will be using mobiles. Consider using speech recognition instead, so your customers can ask for what they want.

7. Plan for end-to-end technology

With so many technology vendors, it is tempting to add a single-purpose solution.

This is a bit like using technology as a plaster. You may gain small improvements but the lack of integration will affect your customer experience. Take a step back and consider your whole strategy.

8. Improve service and productivity with a 360° agent view

67% of agents use 3 or more applications. This slows speed-to-answer by 73%, call abandonment rises by 34% and wrap-up is 23% longer.

A 360° agent view gives them all the information they need at their fingertips, improving CX and performance.

9. Use Agent Guidance to enable teams to multi-skill and multi-task.

Your contact centre answers many queries on wide-ranging subjects. So, training your agents for every task and outcome takes time.

Agent Guidance makes it easy. It allows you to offer faster, high-quality training and then ongoing support at their desk.

10. Quick wins

Test all contact journeys – Don’t wait until a customer complains. Regularly test your contact journeys and fine-tune the routing. Including prompts in the queue and on the web.

Prioritise messaging by urgency and importance – Use your IVR menu to identify the highest priority, so you can deal with the most urgent customer needs first in the menu.

Use callbacks and web abandonment – Use callbacks to reduce your call abandon rate and avoid keeping your customers on hold for long periods of time. Reducing cart abandonment on your website can also increase your revenue.

Test web forms to avoid complexity – Ensure your web forms are easy to use and only request exactly what you need to know.

Find out more by visiting www.netcall.com

Much of this information was taken from our webinar: 10 Ways to Improve Customer Experience