Captain your contact centre into the deeper waters of customer delight
Still puzzling over the key performance metrics in your contact centre? Below we discuss techniques and technology that will help you to confidently captain your contact centre from the shallows of mere customer satisfaction into the deeper waters of customer delight.
Navigating techniques and technology that will improve C-SAT scores
As discussed in our previous blogs: Charting a Course to Contact centre Success with C-SAT Scores and Speech Analytics and Harnessing Speech Analytics to Boost Call centre C-SAT improving customer satisfaction (C-SAT) is a true art that starts by measuring certain general values in the contact centre and that will include various other techniques.
Some of these techniques feel as logical and easy as tying knots and dropping anchors. This first set of techniques to improve C-SAT will be discussed in this blog:
- Focus on personal interaction with your customers
- Implement advanced call routing strategies
- Reduce customer effort
- Enhance agent job satisfaction
- Improve customer experience
- Monitor and meet customer expectations
It is extremely important to keep on measuring and improving C-SAT to enable you to navigate safely in tricky situations.
1. There is nothing like the real thing
Focus on personal interaction with your customers. Interactive voice response (IVR) technology in contact centres is used to manage inbound calls, route calls to correct agents and provide IVR information. This provides call centres with incredible cost savings and efficiency if used in the right manner.
However, if call flows get complicated and customers struggle to speak to a live agent, this will decrease C-SAT scores.
More live agents will cost more in the short term, but in the long run, these live agents will retain customers and upsell existing customers thereby increasing revenue.
Studies show that more real-time, personal interaction leads to significantly higher C-SAT scores in call centres. Work smarter.
2. Implement advanced call routing strategies
Improving KPI parameters such as call centre Average Holding Time (AHT) and Average Transfer Rate (ATR) has a significant impact on call centre C-SAT scores. Customers are kept engaged, speaking to the most relevant agent on board, rather than being left stranded (and dissatisfied) with unanswered queries.
Customers’ engagement is improved by using advanced call routing strategies like geographical routing or skills-based routing. Advanced call routing ensures that your callers are sent to the agent that is best equipped to handle their needs. This software enables businesses to reduce average hold time and cut down on unnecessary transfers.
3. Reduce customer effort
Many organisations make a strategic decision to achieve silent service: thinking proactively and removing potential problems before they occur and customers phone to report them. In this manner, the customer experience (and -satisfaction) is inherently improved..
Some ways to achieve this include:
- The agent needs to do most of the thinking and proactively contact the customer.
- Giving agents customer history (then the customer does not need to explain themselves every time).
- Use caller ID and route customers to the agent that they spoke to previously.
- Design an environment that will meet the expectations of your customers, to encourage less effort during interactions.
- Create “How to” videos to help customers online before they even try to make contact with an agent to assist with their specific query.
4. Enhance agent job satisfaction
Monitor agent job satisfaction as closely as you monitor your customer satisfaction. Agents are the face of the organisation and their sentiment or attitude will be conveyed directly to customers in their interactions. Therefore, the more satisfied an agent is, the more initiative and energy that will go into interactions to resolve queries, ensuring the increased satisfaction of customers.
Provide agent training and feedback via formal and informal channels frequently. Also, empower agents to feel like they have a large amount of control over their work lives to make them feel that they can reach their full potential. In return, they will keep on ensuring that KPIs such as AHT and ATR are decreased, increasing customer satisfaction. Therefore, agent empowerment has a significant impact on C-SAT scores.
Ideas to empower agents (and therefore C-SAT scores) may include:
- Let agents apply for special roles, and subsequently increase their knowledge in a subject matter that will help delight customers
- Lower script adherence (while increasing training) so that agents are not as restricted in how they can support customers.
- Give agents a say in how they are assessed, so that they might have more space for innovation.
- Show appreciation to agents who have gone the extra mile to help a customer
- Allow agents to- as much as is possible- set their own working hours, increasing employee engagement (and subsequent customer satisfaction)
5. Improve customer experience
Improved customer experience leads to greater customer satisfaction. When customers’ expectations of an interaction are met or exceeded, they will respond more positively when asked to assess their experience, compared to experiences where their expectations are not met.
Several strategies can help with improving the customer experience:
- Become customer-obsessed – make sure that you understand them and use their feedback from your research to enhance their experience.
- Get emotional – define what emotion you want to evoke in them.
- Involve your whole team so that they can be united behind a universal goal.
- Think proactively and improve and simplify customer experience that will reduce effort from them.
- Personalise things by developing customer profiles – work with marketing to find the four or five groupings of people that use your service. Train agents to spot the different types of customers and deliver different ways service each of them.
When customers experience this level of effort to tailor the experience to their needs, they are highly likely to respond positively to any assessment of their interaction with the organisation. The end result, is higher satisfaction and C-Sat scores.
5. Monitor and meet customer expectations
Customer expectations, unfortunately, grows sometimes – and meeting higher expectations can become tricky, it is therefore important to
- Train your team to manage expectations – rather under promise and then over-deliver.
- Mind your language – don’t set unrealistic expectations while marketing, for the agent in the contact centre to live up to.
- Prepare for vulnerable customers and set yourself apart by how you handle them.
- Share best practice of agents that exceeded customer expectations.
- Turn around negative experiences by apologising and taking ownership
Ultimately, it is important for the customer’s expectation to be managed appropriately, with marketing communication not exceeding the serviceability. In this way, customer satisfaction can be realistically achieved.
Other quick methods to enhance C-SAT
The list of strategies and techniques to enhance satisfaction is endless. However, a few more worth mentioning are listed below.
- Support channels a customer wants to use (WhatsApp, e-mail etc), increasing convenience, and ultimately the user’s experience
- Resolve customer requests at first contact, saving them valuable time wasted on additional interactions
- Handle customer requests as quickly as possible, preventing frustration from perceived wasted time on behalf of the customer
- Handle your customers up close and personal as far as possible.
These techniques are an exhaustive list and will work for the majority of contact centres. However, there is a large scope for critical thinking inside your organisation to determine which techniques will work best to improve customer satisfaction.
Final thoughts
With the above techniques and technology, your horizons have been broadened and you are ready to sail into the deeper waters of customer delight rather than mere satisfaction. It is easy to see that implementing contact centre technology makes for smoother sailing. By using cost-effective technologies such as speech analytics, operators can monitor 100% of all customer interactions for content, quality and compliance and surface deep insights; the true Voice of the Customer. These insights provide management with clear indicators for the deployment of tactical and strategic interventions to drive agent behaviours and overall performance improvements.
A second set of techniques to improve C-SAT will be discussed in the next blog: More techniques to make sure all hands are on deck.
