5 Contact Center Best Practices to Improve Your Customer Experience

Do you find that your Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSAT) and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) are not telling the full story of the customer experience? While these methods are commonly used to understand how customers feel about your products, services, and company overall, leaders often find that they may not be painting the whole picture. As it turns out, these scoring techniques do not provide the depth needed for accurate decision making.

The question we need to get to the heart of is: where are the breakdowns and gaps within the customer journey? How do you solicit more direct customer feedback to better understand their pain-points and uncover areas for improvement? As it turns out, the most telling insights come from customer’s omni-channel experience with your contact center and social media marketing channels.

Contact centers and social media sites act as the eyes and ears in discovering faults within your customer’s experience of your products and services. Traditionally, large-scale call centers were the primary source of interactions between you and your customers. However, new technology has allowed customers to reach organizations much easier, instantly, and through multiple channels including calls, chat, email, and social media posts/comment sections.

To read more about how to implement this omni-channel experience, click here to read our ebook “The Shift Left: What It Means & How It’s Done”.

Customers will generally reach out with one of these four scenarios:

1. General Questions: These apply to all customers, ranging from operation hours to pricing inquiries.
   Example: “What time do you open?”, “How much does this cost?”
2. Nuanced Questions: They are customer-specific, based on their unique use case.
   Example: “Because I am (x), does (y) apply to me?”
3. Technical Issues: When customers encounter problems during their digital experience, and typically need help troubleshooting.
   Example: “I cannot download (x), can you help me trouble shoot?”, “I cannot sign into my account, can you help me?”
4. Complaints and Praise: These are customers who want to give feedback on their perceived good or bad experience.
   Example: “I absolutely loved my experience!” or “$#@%!”

Think of these customer contact channels as the “intelligence agency” of your organization (minus the drones) to figure out where the customer experience is weak, and what needs to be improved. For example, reoccurring General Questions may indicate confusion at a specific touchpoint along the journey. Did you provide enough information to the customer upfront? Or is the language in a specific step unclear? Regardless of whether the feedback is positive or negative, this is highly informative and actionable under the right circumstances. So, let’s dive into what you can do about it!

Contact Center Best Practices to Leverage Your Business Intelligence

Now that you’ve collected business intelligence data from your contact channels, how do you apply this information to improve your customer experience? You can leverage several tools and tactics to improve their experience, reduce human resource intensive inquiries, and raise your overall CSAT and NPS. With thoughtfully- and purposefully-designed CX, you can transform interactions with your customer and the way you efficiently allocate internal support resources:

1. Identify the Customer Journey Touchpoints

If you haven’t built them already, creating customer journey maps will help identify which touchpoints are ‘hiccups’ in an otherwise seamless customer experience. Are there specific channels or steps in the journey that create issues? Are there solutions you can provide at that touchpoint to mitigate confusion? Detect potential roadblocks that your customer may face and address them preemptively!

2. Make Sure Each Stage of Your Customer Journey is Purpose-Driven

: Are you getting the results you were hoping for? If not, it may be because the experience wasn’t properly designed to elicit the exact actions you were expecting. To do this, your customer journey map should be informed by and designed around behavioral economics. Learn more how to deploy this tactic in our CX vlog “What is Behavioral Economics in the World of Customer Experience?” here. At this stage, define the exact action you want your customers to take to provide clarity on the end goal and the required actions taken by the customer to get there.

3. Prioritize Your Customer Persona Development

Do your customer personas hold up to reality? Are they aligned with your actual target market? Have you used market segmentation techniques? If you are sensing discrepancies between your target persona and the actions your customers are actually taking, you may want to re-evaluate those personas. There may be language barriers. This could mean truly linguistically or in your customer’s unfamiliarity with industry jargon from poor phrasing or a lack of prompts that that prevents your customer from taking the ideal next step. To improve your personas, use psychographic segmentation rather than simple, traditional demographics to fully understand your customers and better inform your customer experience design.

4. Review the Customer Journey with Your IT Team

Is there a technical issue with your digital experience? If so, you will want to relay that back to your IT team. Perhaps your customer is frustrated that your digital experience is lacking in key functionality. Or even worse, maybe there is a touchpoint along their journey that is not digitized appropriately. These issues can be easily communicated with your IT team through design and delivery tools like service blueprints that map out exactly where the issue is, or where new functionality could be used to improve the digital customer experience.

When customers make the effort in reaching out, they offer important insights that shouldn’t be dismissed. Often, these customer contact channels are owned by differing functional departments, which can lead to departmental silos and an overall lack of communication and cohesiveness. This can cause the customer to have to deal with multiple departments in order to have their issues addressed, which is very frustrating for them. Using Purpose-Driven Customer Experience business leaders can work together to see the bigger picture and better understand why your customers are reaching out, determine if there are certain trends, and problem-solve reoccurring issues.

Accelare's approach leverages the best practices for your platform technology using CX as our guiding light. Talk to a CX expert to create a level of structure around your contact center design to improve your customer experience.

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