Today’s businesses are losing $75 billion per year on poor customer experiences according to insights from Forbes. This shouldn’t be much of a surprise for many of today’s companies, who have begun to realise that the only way to stay ahead in the competitive marketplace is to deliver the meaningful moments their customers are looking for.
However, many businesses don’t know which aspects of their customer experience and contact centre strategies need additional work to become more effective. That’s why RingCentral launched their new study into the changing nature of the contact centre environment. I spoke to Sunny Dhami, Senior Director of Product Marketing and GTM at RingCentral, to discuss the findings of the latest reports.
Why Did You Decide to Launch This Research?
According to RingCentral’s own research, the contact centre processes in place today could be restricting businesses from achieving better customer relationships. Many companies are simply throwing together disjointed tools in an attempt to make their environments more efficient. However, this is leading to disjointed experiences where information is difficult to access.
According to Sunny, their latest research allowed them to figure out exactly what kind of pain points their customers were facing so that they could offer suggestions on how they might improve. “We wanted to find out what the real contact centre issues were, what problems our customers need to solve, and how we can help.”
As digital transformation continues to change the way that businesses and customers engage, presenting new opportunities and challenges for professionals across the communication landscape, RingCentral’s research shows that there’s a lot of room for improvement in today’s processes.
What is the Biggest Challenge for Today’s Contact Centres?
The RingCentral report found that one of the biggest challenges for contact centres today is trying to manage customer conversations with access to inaccurate data and information. Customers are becoming increasingly demanding in the consumer marketplace, and businesses are under a lot of pressure to serve the changing needs of their clients.
“People need help understanding what’s going on in their business, but the reporting and analytics they have access to aren’t connected enough.”
“There’s a serious need for better analytics so that customer-facing employees can deliver the contextual experiences that consumers are looking for; in fact, it was the second most in-demand priority in our report”
37.6% of survey respondents said that accurate reporting and analytics was essential to improve the customer service experience. Additionally, 58.7% of the people surveyed chose precise analytics and reporting as their biggest headache in communications.
Some of the biggest challenges included inaccurate reporting and analytics (58.7%), inability to integrate with other business apps (39.1%), and poor system reliability (31.5%).
Why is Reporting and Analytics Such an Issue?
For RingCentral, the fact that analytics and reporting are such a significant issue was no surprise, as reporting is often provided as an add-on service by many contact centres. “The problem is that issues are being caused by add-on services that don’t connect to the contact centre. Companies are adding tools into their network that only report on a single channel, not the whole communication network. This means that you don’t have a full picture.”
Problems with poorly-integrated tools in the workplace environment were another major concern for the respondents in the RingCentral survey. Sunny told me that people are struggling to get basic integrations between their contact centre and CRM, but those small connections could make a huge difference.
“Another thing we found was that people were only accessing analytics after their call had been answered. This means that they weren’t seeing how many people were leaving the IVR or responding poorly to the IVR experience.”
What are the Main priorities for Contact Centres?
While it’s crucial for today’s contact centres to consider things like omni-channel communications, it doesn’t help if those channels aren’t appropriately joined up.
Survey respondents said that 64.7% of their contact centre solutions support multi-channel interactions, but only around 32.6% support omni-channel.
Now that customers are growing increasingly demanding, it’s safe to say that delivering customer satisfaction is a high priority for any business. The recent RingCentral research found that 60.2% named improving customer engagement as their biggest priority, followed by things like improving accurate reporting and analytics at 58.7%.
“Improving customer satisfaction was the number one aim for respondents, but improving reporting and agent experience was crucial too. Improving agent experience and increasing the accuracy of reporting are two things that work together hand-in-hand. It ensures that agents can access the information they need to be more efficient and productive at work.”
A solution that allows agents to access the context they need in customer conversations through in-depth integrations and accurate reporting can also help to cut costs in the business space. The less time that agents need to waste on jumping between apps, the more productive they can be. What’s more, when agents are more satisfied and informed, the customer experience benefits too.
What’s Crucial to Contact Centres Going Forward?
The consumer environment has changed drastically in recent years. Businesses are rapidly starting to embrace new opportunities that allow them to connect with their audience on various channels. However, it’s not enough to just implement the latest tools. If there are issues with the underlying communication solutions and integrations, then companies won’t be able to make the most of new tech.
Businesses need to consolidate their workflows and deliver a more seamless user experience for agents, to ensure that they can provide a better customer experience as a result. As Sunny told me, companies don’t need to think just about their agents or their customers, but how all of those experiences tie together. In closing, Sunny noted:
“Contact centres need to think about how they can make the most of the underlying tools they have right now. It’s not just about rushing to AI and other disruptive tools. Getting the basics right first is essential before you can begin to grow and develop further”
