We’re in the era of putting the customer first and doing everything we can to provide memorable experiences with our business.
Be it support, sales, or something else (we see you IVRs!), the ultimate goal for every customer interaction is to look after the folks who pay our wages and grow our businesses.
But are we doing enough?
It’s impossible to quantify.
What we can do, however, is a deep dive into your attitude to customer centricity. Ask the awkward questions we often shy away from.
That’s exactly what we’re going to do now…
1 - Are you focused on solving problems or ending calls?
If you prioritise metrics like average handle time and number of calls handled, you’re focused on ending calls.
That may sound harsh but it’s also probably not your fault.
The call centre industry has long relied on time-based key performance indicators to measure success.
Reality is, however, that fast customer calls don’t correlate with happy customers.
In fact, when a call centre has a low average handle time, it often has a low first call resolution time too.
This means that while your agents are skilled in wrapping up calls quickly, customers must call back soon after to seek a resolution for the rest of their problem.
To shift focus onto solving customer problems, move away from time-based call centre metrics and prioritise quality metrics like CSAT and NPS.
2 - What’s your contact centre mission statement?
If you don’t have one, now’s the time to start working on it.
The benefit of a mission statement is it aligns all your staff (agents, supervisors, managers) with a common goal.
Everybody knows what they’re working towards and are reminded why they are important. With each staff member playing a small part of a larger mission, a team only really becomes a team when it has something to work towards.
Contact centre mission statements include:
- OnBrand24: To create a call center environment and culture that empowers our agents and management team to passionately represent our client’s brands.
- Michael, anonymous: Customer care is dedicated to providing “world class” customer service through problem ownership, actions, and accountability to the continuous improvement process.
- EatSleepWander: To continuously work on strengthening the relationship with our clients and their customers. Our committed team of customer support specialists are devoted to exceeding expectations and facilitating all of your business outsourcing needs.
3 - How do I know if customers are happy?
Assumptions based on data and metrics are one thing. But nothing beats genuine answers from customers.
The best way to find out how happy your customers are is to ask them.
Novel, right?
Do this by running CSAT surveys once or twice a year. Include easy-to-answer questions and give them an option to provide freehand comments too.
💡 Tip: Use multiple-choice answers to get a higher response rate. Think about how to incentivise customers to respond too. Almost everybody is more likely to spend five minutes if there’s a monetary or moral reason to do so.
Introduce Net Promoter Score surveys after each customer interaction too. By asking, “How did we do on our last call?”, you get feedback on recent conversations and can correlate them with specific agent experiences.
One final thing you can start doing is using sentiment analysis. Modern contact centre solutions now offer the ability to highlight keywords and emotions during customer calls and text-based conversations.
If a customer is getting angry, sentiment analysis detects this. As a supervisor, you can join the call to diffuse the situation or choose to flag it for manual quality monitoring after the event.
4 - What’s the most important part of the customer journey?
In many cases, those running a contact centre will answer something completely different from those contacting a contact centre.
One assumption is time. The faster you resolve the query, the better, right?
Wrong. What customers really want is a thorough resolution.
They want no need to call you back or follow up their live chat with an email.
Customers also demand immediate access.
Now, this is impossible without hiring an agent per customer and operating 24/7. But you can lean on technology to make your company as available as possible to customers.
If access is a problem for your business, consider technologies like:
- Self-service IVRs
- Online ticketing systems
- Knowledge bases and portals
- Interactive virtual agents (smart chatbots)
In summary, the most important parts of a customer journey are:
Access + Genuine Resolution
5 - What causes bottlenecks in the customer journey?
Where are your blockers?
What causes the biggest delay (and pain) for your customers?
Once a call is answered, nobody likes being put on hold. Yet, it’s become an expectation every time we phone a call centre. We don’t like it but we’re accustomed to it.
This hold period usually happens for one of two reasons:
- Slow technology: agents don’t like to make small talk while waiting for systems to load and information to appear.
- Lack of knowledge: agents must seek help from back office experts, often needing to track down these people in person.
When customers are holding, agents get tied up and are unable to field incoming calls. Here, we're creating bottlenecks for new callers and delays for those already waiting.
The solution to these bottlenecks is a refresh of technology.
Investing in modern, high-quality hardware and internet removes the potential for system delays.
Opting to integrate your frontline agent software with back-end subject matter experts’ communications platform means agents can do the following:
- Find someone available using a presence indicator
- Send an instant message asking for help
- Share documents relevant to the query
- Transfer or conference as necessary
Less time looking for help and waiting for systems. More time delivering what customers want.
6 - How good does our customer experience need to be?
Here, we can get buried beneath industry and regulatory benchmarks.
Sure, if a competitor reports 72% first contact resolution, you should strive to beat this.
What’s more important is that you focus on providing the best experience every time a customer reaches out to you.
Be it web chat, email, SMS, social media, or a call, the expectation should be that you resolve the query in a reasonable amount of time.
Start with your own internal benchmarks and create a continuous improvement goal. The key element here is continuous.
In reality, no contact centre is perfect. Because when you hit 97% of calls answered within three rings, you can bet the other 3% are fed up with waiting.
Embrace technology like auto-responses, chatbots to field basic queries, and self-service ticketing so customers can log their issues and get on with the rest of their day.
7 - Will spending money improve our customer experience?
Not without strategy.
But, yes, in general, you will need to spend some money to improve customer experience.
It could be on technology:
- Skills-based routing
- AI-assisted chatbots
- Omnichannel routing
- Workforce management
- Agent copilots for in-app coaching
These all present a clear return on investment by improving agent efficiency and streamlining the customer experience.
Likewise, it could be on people:
- More agents to field basic calls
- More experienced agents to field complex calls
- External consultants to review processes and documentation
The fact remains, however, that without strategy, throwing money at a problem is a fool’s errand.
“Throwing money at problems never solved anything!”
- Rush Limbaugh, American political commentator.
8 - How do we deal with toxic customers?
You know, the ones who want you to move heaven and earth every single time they call.
They upset agents and they cause unwanted stress to stakeholders across the business.
But they pay the bills and keep the lights on.
It’s a tricky scenario. You don’t want them but you feel like you need them.
In an ideal world, you’d gently let them go. Explain you can no longer support their needs and assist with migration to another provider.
If you can’t afford to do so, involve stakeholders from your sales and marketing teams to work on diversifying your customer base. This way, you're not reliant on one customer for such a large part of your business.
While you sign new businesses to recover potential losses by letting this customer go, there will be a period of hand-holding agents.
Here, it’s important to do the following:
- Explain the importance of retaining such a customer for the benefit of the business
- Assign a dedicated account manager
- Remain professional at all times
- Take a proactive approach
9 - Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by only offering calls?
Almost always, yes.
There are some cases, like those in areas with no access to the internet or those without customer bases who only make phone calls to contact a business.
But how many of those do you realistically serve?
While research by Twilio unveiled that 88% of over 65s want to use the phone to reach companies, what about the 12% who prefer channels like email and web chat?
If you have 1,000 customers, that’s 120 people you’re missing out on providing their preferred customer experience.
10 - Do happy agents make for happy customers?
"Many studies have shown a direct link between employee satisfaction and customer retention," said Elka Popova, VP and senior fellow at Frost & Sullivan, in an article for Association of Talent Development.
In fact, the overarching conclusion of research conducted by Glassdoor in 2019 was:
“There’s a strong statistical link between employee well-being reported on Glassdoor and customer satisfaction among a large sample of some of the biggest brands today.”
It’s at this point that contact centres started taking employee engagement and happiness seriously.
In another study by Gallup, we learn that companies enjoy a higher 147% earnings per share versus their competitors, thanks to having happier employees.
And it makes sense. No customer will be thrilled talking to a grumpy agent. But there’s a good chance that a happy agent creates a mirror effect on a customer.
Of course, there are more elements in play here. You’ve got to have at least an okay product, answer the phone within a reasonable time, and display competency.
When you look after your employees, however, their positivity is contagious. Happy agents do indeed equal happy customers.
Ask these questions to your contact centre colleagues and peers. See how you score and note down all the suggestions you gather. You’ve just taken the first step to becoming a customer-centric organisation.