Does your contact centre have the CX Factor?
- August 25, 2022
- by: Ingrid Green
It’s the make or break. It’s the cherry on top or the last straw that broke the camel’s back. The customer experience (CX) of your contact centre is what helps your customers decide: should they stay, or should they go?
Customer-centric businesses are 60% more profitable than those who aren’t according to a Forbes article written by Blake Morgan, customer experience futurist, author and keynote speaker.
But the benefits of contact centre CX are no industry secret. Most contact centres have already started their transformation to becoming customer-centric. However, without an expert’s guidance, it can be a little overwhelming trying to gauge the progress of a contact centre against others.
Here are 5 markers of a contact centre that has the CX factor:
1. Conversational experiences that build connections
A contact centre that offers omnichannel experiences that meet their customers where they are is on the right track. Can that be taken a step further?
The delivery and driver service provider, Bolt was able to achieve a 40% increase in their driver registration rate by doing just that by integrating WhatsApp for Business into their existing solution, according to Orediretse Molebaloa from Infobip. There were 3 critical elements to this success: chatbots, the conversations feature and the moments feature. The chatbot kept things conversational, while the conversations feature was able to route drivers looking for more information that a chatbot could provide to an instant messaging or voice channel with a live agent. But here’s where the real value gets unpacked: the moments feature allows the contact centre to trigger specific, segmented messaging based on certain events, creating a truly hyper-personalised customer experience. The close integration of these features enables the agent to understand the customer sentiment by simply viewing the communication history.
Contact centres have an unwritten obligation to create personalised experiences for their customers. But it’s not an all you can eat buffet. It’s about choosing the right solutions. Many contact centres have multiple providers to handle different channels across different functions of their organisation. This makes getting a full view of the customer journey a challenge. Instead, Molebaloa suggested an integrated approach to communication across channels and business functions that is scalable and agile.
2. Making the customer feel heard
Contact centre speech analytics is not a nice to have, it’s essential. If a contact centre is making the effort to record every conversation, it stands to reason that every conversion should be heard and analysed for points of excellence and improvement. The golden data is there, it is simply a matter of implementing the mining process.
The ability to track and trend behaviours over time is the key to unlocking the value of speech analytics. Listening to every conversation gives a concrete, holistic view of which interventions are working, and which are not. Making sure that contact centres can course correct in near real-time.
According to Corey Springett from Callbi Speech Analytics, a contact centre can achieve in three major areas by implementing speech analytics: direct cost savings, revenue generation, customer and agent experience and compliance.
Direct cost savings
One such example of direct cost savings is the ability to reduce dead-air or silent time on calls. Excessive silent time is usually an indication that the agent is searching for information and requires more training.
Revenue generation
A quick example of this is which agents are making use of benefit statements are which are not? Which benefit statement is producing the best results? Increase revenue generation by increasing effectivity.
Customer and agent experience
With speech analytics agents call no longer disguise negative conversations and interactions. Track and trend which agents have a disproportionate amount of negative sentiment. Additionally, high-risk customers, such as those who have threatened legal action or to take to social media can be flagged to be sensitively handled.
According to Springett speech analytics unlocks the difference between information and intelligence – the difference being the ability to quantify.
3. Reaching the customer
The rise of TrueCaller and other call block software has been a challenge for outbound contact centres. Often these call centres will be burning through numbers quickly and have no way to gain insight as to why.
According to Dalton Wilds from BullTech, the best thing for outbound contact centres is the power to manage CLIs, gain insights on those CLIs, and make decisions based on the insights. Overall improvement to answer success rates (ASR) is a testament to this fact. Dalton notes that customers have seen as much as a 30% increase to ASR shortly after the implementation of CLI Manager.
One of the most attractive features of CLI manager is the VIP Fallback function. Should a certain high-value customer be unreachable for a set amount of time, they can be added to the VIP fallback database. This database will then be contacted with the top performing number. This is automated and the database is refreshed at set periods.
Another attractive feature for outbound call centres is the ability to remove numbers that over time have dropping ASRs. For any contact centre, this kind of real-time adaption is critical to CX.
4. Understand customer and employee experience
By understanding customer and employee experiences, contact centres can drive retention, processes, and profitability. Believe it or not, this can be done in a sophisticatedly simple manner.
This can be done through:
- Identifying employee opportunities to boost morale and employee retention
- Closed-loop programmes to boost client retention and reduce cost
- New user feedback to identify pain points, driving process improvement
According to Marcus Thorne from Smoke CI, their product agnostic Voice of the Customer solution was able to deliver outstanding results for Standard Bank. The system provided feedback on agent performance and overall experience to facilitate escalations and recoveries. Through data insights and verbatim response analyses provided by Smoke CI, the bank implemented niche, target interventions which improved all key metrics.
Essentially the goal is to truly understand the sentiment of the customer and the employee – it’s not just about sending surveys out. It’s about actionable data that grows the lifetime and value of customers and employees.
5. The perfect agent
Contact centre agents are the face of the organisation, often being your customer’s first point of contact when a complaint, query or request arises. The impression they create sets the tone for your customer’s experience. Consistently positive experiences go a long way to garnering brand loyalty and trust.
The quality of contact centre agents is pivotal to the performance of a contact centre. The successful recruitment of these specialised agents is therefore imperative. Successful recruitment does not only comprise of selecting the strongest CV. It involves determining which candidates have the correct balance of skills, experience, and cultural fit to maximise efficiency and minimise staff turnover.
Major resource drain can occur while trying to manage the process of recruiting the ideal fit for a contact centre. The cost of not placing the ideal fit for your organisation is time. Induction time and training time. While this is happening the contact centre agent is not performing at their peak, taking longer to resolve queries and understand the client, placing unnecessary pressure on both the contact centre and the agent.
The optimal solution is to assign the task to the most specialised party. According to Jessica Schutte of SelectONE, a comprehensive talent management solution that specialises in contact centre recruitment, it is imperative that your recruiter understand the four strategic pillars of any CX operation, namely, reducing costs, operational agility, increased revenue, and improved customer experience.
The CX factor in a nutshell
If a contact centre has actively pursued conversational experience, the ability to understand their customer, the ability to reach the customer, the ability to gain insights into employee and customer satisfaction, and is recruiting and retaining the right agents, it is well on its way to having the CX factor.
