The contact centre has never been more important. Today, company success hinges on how well a business interacts with its customers. For decades, experts in the world of customer management have argued that contact centres should be a central part of the business strategy, thanks to the vital role they play in customer experience. Today, enterprises are beginning to recognise just how valuable their contact centre can be when differentiating them from their competitors.
If you want to make sure that you build the right relationships with your clients, then you need to start with the right cloud-based contact centre system. With a strong focus on CX and the right tools, you can empower your contact centre agents to develop stronger, more customer-centric processes for your organisation.
Embracing the Multichannel Experience
The first thing that contact centres need to do if they want to improve customer experience in 2018, is embrace the fact that customer conversations no longer happen entirely via phone. Research shows that businesses adopting omnichannel strategies achieve a 91% higher year-over-year customer retention rate. That’s because modern customers don’t just want to call a contact centre, they want to be able to talk to agents on web chat, SMS, email, and even social media.
Implementing the right omnichannel experience for your contact centre begins with finding out which tools and applications your customers use, so you can interact with them on the platforms they prefer. Once you know which channels you’re going to use, remember to maintain a consistent and efficient brand experience on every platform, with opportunities for your clients to push their conversations into a call if necessary.
Bringing Context to Conversations
One of the biggest issues that today’s customers have with contact centres, is the fact that they often must repeat their issue to several agents just to get an answer to their question. No-one wants to have to repeat the same details multiple times across different channels. A key part of your CX solution for 2018 should be making sure that your agents have the context they need to serve customers as quickly and effectively as possible.
A multi-channel contact centre experience that uses unified communications technology to give service agents access to customer information in a hurry can be a great way to bring more context to branded conversations. Additionally, AI services can be implemented to automatically find and display customer details during conversations.
Embracing Human Interactions
In today’s digitally-transforming world, it can feel as though human interactions are taking a back seat – particularly in the contact centre. The rise of AI and virtual assistants, as well as chatbots that allow customers to essentially serve themselves, means that some of the more repetitive tasks an agent manages every day are being eliminated. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s no place for the human touch in the contact centre anymore. As the world becomes increasingly virtual, many customers still want a personal, and human approach to the support they get from their brands.
When customer queries are complex, or too difficult for a bot to handle, it’s crucial to make sure that your contact centre has the manpower to serve your clients. Remember that today’s disruptive technologies are first and foremost, a way to support contact centre agents – not replace them. Embrace innovations, but don’t lose your human side.
