Four compelling reasons for leveraging contact centers to optimize the customer experience

Most contact centers are a lifeline for support on critical issues and support challenges. If contact centers are a pivotal part of the business growth, why not focus on enabling contact centers as an active part of the brand-building process? Here are four reasons why businesses or brands should.

As global lockdown continues, the way customers interact with businesses has taken a massive change. Despite having different channels, more customers want to keep the options open and running 24/7.In fact, during the height of the pandemic, call volume has increased between 300 to 800% at the enterprise level. 

It is clear that the contact centers play a vital role in serving and providing reliable service at scale. It is very foundational through this channel to turn every conversation into valuable or relevant insights. With this sophistication and strategic purpose, they have become an integral part of business success.

It begs this question: If contact centers are a pivotal part of the business growth, why not focus on enabling contact centers as an active part of the brand-building process? What is the hold-up? Does the business not getting the value they expect from this channel? Or do they want a more solid return on investment to quantify their investment? Perhaps, this channel is built and established only to respond to a customer call or inquiry?

To find answers to some of these questions, here are few reliable ideas why this channel can help improve brand loyalty, perception, and service excellence if they leverage it as the primary conduit to communicate with customers.

1. Provides insights faster, learns how customers feel about the brand and service experience in real-time, and captures their sentiments in a meaningful way.
2. As customer behavior changes and evolves, they can easily find a connection to understand how they can support customers at the moment’s need.
3. Predict customer behaviors by making it more straightforward for customers to provide feedback while engaging with them across all the channels.
4. Anticipate and respond to customer pain points or challenges proactively rather than putting out fires.
5. Identify top opportunities for growth and improvement by surfacing emerging themes and sentiments.

While these are the advantages of leveraging contact centers, let us take an in-depth look at the reasons why businesses or brands should.

#1 Transforms interactions into insights that drive proactive improvement

The ability to consistently digest and leverage interaction data to deliver exceptional omnichannel experiences allows a brand to align its commitment with customer needs and changing expectations. By learning from each interaction not only helps shape customer expectations and preferences but also drives strategic change. 

It becomes a listening foundation business can reiterate and iterate along the customer journey. It also helps companies focus on designing new contextual engagement that streamlines customer experiences for personalized outreach strategies. Not only that, but it also helps delivers the best experience for both customers and employees.

#2 Understanding customer feedback and doing it the right way

Most contact centers are a lifeline for support on critical issues and support challenges. Not only that, but they also help brands capture relevant and timely feedback to help solve problems before they become complicated. The rise of automated and intuitive technologies is helping contact centers to be adaptable to growth and a variety of opportunities. It includes being agile and innovative partners. 

They understand that the challenge that most organizations want to solve is figuring out and understanding customer feedback. With most feedback, it is unstructured, disorganized, and hard to analyze. Hence, it is most important to simplify this feedback to meaningful and actionable data.

What is customer feedback? It is information stating a customer’s remarks or views on whether they are satisfied or dissatisfied with a product or service and their overall experience with a company. By paying enough attention to this feedback and how it affects customers, they bridge the gaps to what is on their minds. By doing so, they understand how to deliver high-value impact versus low-value impact and the levers to pull to optimize their experience.

In other words, contact centers are the eyes and ears of brands so that they do not end up slightly blind to every little thing they know nothing or less about customer preferences and their motives. Here are some suggestions to gather valuable feedback and ways to simplify it.

1. Be honest and clear about how many questions you want customers to answer.
2. Provide a time frame or expected time to complete the feedback.
3. Ask for a brief reason why their feedback is positive or negative.
4. Incentive it and share their feedback across the organizations.
5. Do not start with the NPS survey. Start with CES or what they have achieved while working with you. A correlation with CSAT and CES would give you a clear picture of how crucial their feedback is.
6. Make sure that you publish this feedback that customers can access and review.

With this simple structure, access to feedback becomes comprehensive, intelligent, intuitive, and resourceful. It brings and aligns customers’ voices and sentiments closer to maximizing their growth opportunities. Not only that, but it also opens up service shortcomings and how to fix them right away.

#3 Helps businesses maintain their underlying brand identity

The rise of the Customer Experience Officer or Chief Experience Officer (CXO) triggers another reason why the contact center has become a hub for this meaningful interaction. They (CXO) help brands identify critical changes in the customer environment and make the right business decisions. They communicate the value proposition — as in what will make customers choose one company over others.

They do this by using the customers’ language and interacting with customers through their preferred communication channels. This role is significant to delivering a positive customer experience which is crucial to shaping customer preferences and ensuring the right path for other customers.

If a brand wants to stay on top of things, they need to show brand consistency, relevancy, attention to detail, and strong customer and employee orientation in practice. This aspect is even more crucial, as many agree that there is a strong correlation between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Customers or employees always appreciate when you ask them if they are happy (or unhappy) with your service or their achievement. 

Discovering the truth behind all the interactions and service issues drives companies to deliver meaningful and intuitive experiences. Hence, integrating brand intentions or combining overall brand goals allows contact centers to take advantage of the synergies of how they can work in unifying the brand purpose — to make an impact at a high-value level.

#4 Serves as the bridge between people outside the company (customers) and inside (employees)

In 2013, Oracle asked businesses three questions: Do you wish to be recognized as a CX leader in your industry? Are you just getting started with your CX initiative? Do you consider your CX initiative in an advanced stage?

These questions are straightforward. But it requires honest answers. Here’s the truth: What many great companies miss is a great employee experience leads to a great customer experience. That’s what CX is all about.

The contact center helps bridge EX (inside employee) + CX (outside employees) = BX (brand purpose). It looks simple, but it is not. Why? Because it takes continuous effort, support from everyone, and undying commitment.

Does this mean the business picks the wrong reasons or intentions and then settles for them if they fail to deliver great CX (customer experience)? No, it only means that thinking it separately (the CX and EX functions) leads to competition between the two for resources and attention. Also, it can make or break customers’ experiences if not properly orchestrated.

The good news, we can start to achieve meaningful results if we leverage the value the contact center provides in connecting the many dots on how to deliver this great experience that we want our customers to experience with our brand or service.