Customers have expectations when they call for help, as they should. After all, they typically aren’t reaching out to your organisation for any other reason than to get their issue resolved or a question answered quickly.
Most customers would agree that they had a good, productive contact centre experience if they encountered the following 4 situations:
1. Helpful agents
The agent a person speaks with should get to the root of the problem quickly so they can address it. Agents should know where to find any information they don’t have to prevent delays in resolving an issue.
2. Short wait times
Wait time is a significant pain point for many customers, sometimes even causing them to avoid calling for help at all. Generally, customers don’t want to wait more than two minutes before being greeted by an agent.
3. Courtesy
Customers who call for help expect courtesy from an agent when handling their issue, regardless of how minor it may be. Empathy and respectful responses and tones are key for positive call centre experiences.
4. Quick and effective resolution
Once the problem is clear, a resolution should happen quickly. Customers want their questions answered or a solution to their problem within a few minutes of calling.
How to improve contact centre experiences for customers
Each customer’s experience becomes a part of a contact centre’s overall experience. As such, each customer’s case must be handled with care, preventing anyone from falling through the cracks. Contact centres should implement the following steps to ensure a high-quality call centre experience at each part of a customer’s journey.
Spend ample time on training and onboarding (and make it ongoing)
Knowledgeable and caring contact centre agents come from having proper training and onboarding from the start. Spend enough time with each new hire to catch them up on your contact centre software and processes. Complete mock interactions with them using various situations to determine whether they’re ready to handle calls on their own.
Training shouldn’t be considered a one-and-done process. Instead, offer professional development workshops, events, courses, and meetings to keep fine-tuning agent skills.
Listen to your agents as much as your customers
Customer surveys provide helpful feedback that contact centres can use to improve their processes. But as important as customer feedback is, agent feedback is just as handy. Agents interact with customers every day so they understand common pain points and can relay that information to managers in charge of tweaking scripts and processes to assist customers better.
Utilise everything contact centre software offers
Contact centre software offer a number of features that improve customer experiences. When management and agents know how to use contact centre software effectively, they can get the data they need from conversations to continuously make improvements based on sentiment and emotion analysis from conversation intelligence technology.
The role of technology in delivering the best customer contact centre experience
Conversation intelligence analyses conversations between agents and customers to provide data that contact centres can use to enhance overall experience. CallMiner works in the background of every conversation – phone as well as other channels, like emails and social media – to provide the necessary data for driving positive customer experiences and retention.
3 Most Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between a contact centre and a call centre? A call centre is a contact hub for phone calls between a customer and a company. While call centres include only phone contact, contact centres cover multiple contact channels in addition to phone calls, like texts, social media, emails, or live chats.
Why does contact centre experience matter? A negative contact centre experience can cause customers to feel negative toward a brand. Customers typically call to get a problem resolved quickly and respectfully, and when that doesn’t happen, they could decide to seek competing brands instead. Essentially, contact centre experience is a critical part of customer experience, brand management and more.
What’s the best way to improve contact centre experience for customers? Highly skilled agents are necessary for positive contact centre experiences. Therefore, thorough training and onboarding is the number-one way to ensure that agents have the technical and interpersonal skills to satisfy customer needs and improve call centre experience.
Creating a top-performing contact centre doesn’t happen overnight. CallMiner’s latest eBook offers five secrets for how to take your contact centre to the next level, including improving agent performance, delivering better customer experiences and more.