If your organization has a contact center that does not provide a great customer with experience, it can damage customer relationships. This will result in lost customers and revenue.
No organization can afford to deliver a poor experience through your contact center. Contact centers are often strategically important and the main way organizations communicate with customers.
If your customers have a poor contact center experience this will leave them with a negative viewpoint of your company and impact their overall customer experience. It is important to understand how to improve your customers’ contact center experience to avoid these challenges.
Coeo understands how important the contact center is and has provided thousands of organizations with solutions to improve communication with customers while enhancing the overall customer experience.
By the end of this article, you will understand some of the poor experiences customers may have had, the ways to improve the contact center experience, and whether a contact center solution would be beneficial for your organization.
Poor contact center experiences your customers may run into
To identify how to improve your customers’ contact center experience, it is important to first understand the poor contact center experiences your customers may be having. Some of the poor contact center experiences your customers may have include:
High agent turnover
One of the main problems with contact centers is high agent turnover. High-stress environments and low wages often lead to employee burnout and employees quitting.
As a result, your customer's experience with the contact center may suffer with frequent new hires and endless training cycles. All of these issues can reduce service consistency and lead to poor contact center experience.
Long wait times
If your contact center is understaffed, especially during peak hours of operation, it can lead to long wait times for callers.
If your customers are constantly waiting to speak with a representative, it can lead to customers abandoning calls altogether which will result in customer dissatisfaction and lost business.
Repetitively asked questions
If your organization constantly has high call agent turnover or call agents lack access to customer history, it can lead to agents asking customers the same questions about their business on every call.
These repetitive questions can frustrate your customers and prospects leading to damaged relationships. Poor CRM integration also results in disjointed customer experiences.
Poor AI experience
Most contact centers use AI technology for their auto attendant and chatbot features. However, robotic call scripts in the auto attendant menu can make interactions feel impersonal for customers and prospects.
Additionally, your contact center may have poor Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems which can frustrate customers. Poor IVR performance can result in calls being transferred several times before reaching the right agent.
Most customers expect omni-channel support from their providers and carriers including chatbots, email, phone, and social media messages. However, most organizations struggle to provide a seamless experience across all platforms.
The inability to speak to a person is one of the most frustrating experiences that customers face when trying to contact their provider or carrier. For this reason, reliable AI experience is crucial for customers.
Some of the ways to improve the contact center experience
Now you understand some of the poor contact center experiences your organization may be guilty of. Therefore, it is important to understand the ways to improve the contact center experience to mitigate these challenges for your customers. Some of the ways to improve the contact center experience include:
Provide call agent incentives
If your organization is experiencing high agent turnover, it can negatively impact your customers’ experience with reduced customer service consistency and long wait times due to understaffed contact centers.
To improve the high agent turnover, it is important that organizations treat its call center agents professionally and improve their morale.
Some of the ways to improve agent morale include providing training, paying competitive salaries with incentive pay, and offering career progression paths.
Implement intelligent call routing and queuing systems
Implementing highly intelligent call routing and queuing systems improves customer wait times by getting callers to the right agent based on their needs.
This can also eliminate calls having to be transferred several times before getting the caller to the correct agent that meets their needs.
Easy access to customer information by integrating CRM
Another way to improve the contact center experience is to integrate a CRM system that enables agents to access customer information during the call.
Enabling agents to easily access customer information from the CRM system such as the name of the company, account details, and past interactions, prevents agents from asking repetitive questions.
Is a contact center solution beneficial for your organization?
Now you understand the poor contact center experiences your customers may run into and the ways to improve the contact center experience to avoid these issues.
However, it is also important to understand whether a contact center solution could be beneficial to improve the customer experience.
If your organization receives a significant number of calls from external users each day, you may want to invest in a contact center solution to enable customers to better communicate with your organization.
A contact center can help by providing more channels for customers to contact your organization via chatbot, email, or text message thereby taking pressure off your phone agents.
However, if your organization receives limited communication attempts from external users, you may not need a contact center solution.
In these situations, your organization may be capable of handling calls with a few phone agents without having to invest in an entire solution when multiple communication channels are not necessary.
Determining whether a contact center solution could be beneficial for your organization
Now you understand more about the poor contact center experiences your customers may have, some of the ways to improve the contact center experience, and whether a contact center solution could be beneficial for your organization.
No organization can be successful when providing a poor customer experience. If your customers are experiencing poor customer service because of their interaction with your contact center, this can result in lost business.
For this reason, it is important to fully understand the experiences your customers are having with your contact center as well as the ways to improve the contact center experience.
Understanding this will help you determine whether your organization would benefit from a contact center solution such as CCaaS.
Coeo understands how important the contact center experience is for customers and has delivered thousands of CCaaS solutions to improve the contact center experience.
We want you to understand the poor experiences customers may run into as well as how to improve these experiences so you can improve your relationships with customers.
If you would like to speak with our team to learn more about how to improve your contact center or ask any questions you may have you can schedule an appointment.
Now that you understand how to improve the contact center experience and whether a contact center solution could be beneficial for your organization, read this article to understand what a CCaaS solution is and how it works:
