Optimal Contact Center Technology Improves Customer Satisfaction

Customer loyalty is the make-or-break for most businesses. If customers do not keep coming back to you, and are not advocates of your organization, then churn will become increasingly damaging.

How a optimal contact center can increase customer retention? Customer service is the largest single influence on consumer loyalty. Research has shown that 46 per cent of people feel that service is their number one driver for loyalty, compared to only 33 per cent who felt that product quality was key. So if you can achieve both excellent service and product quality, then your business will have high loyalty, and help drive profits up!

Customer Frustration

The research identified that there are three main areas of customer frustration in the contact center:

• Hold times
• Interactive Voice Response systems (IVRs)
• Call transfers.

Businesses need to be aware that these areas can cause a great deal of dissatisfaction amongst customers, and ensure they work to avoid it.

1. Hold Times

We all know that a great enemy of customer satisfaction is hold time. Long hold times are a prime cause of customer frustration.
There are three main strategies to reduce hold times:

• More staff
  If you have long hold times, then chances are that you do not have enough staff on the phone. Adding staff is frequently a solution to hold times, but in the current economic climate it is not always the easy answer. Fortunately, there are some technologies which can also help like Call back feature on Queue, VIP Caller identification etc.
• Skills-based routing
  With automated identification services, you can capture information about the customer and what it is they require. This information can run through a skills-based routing engine to find the right agent, equipped to handle the enquiry correctly, first time. By using skills-based routing it is possible to widen the pool of agents that are available to answer a call type. This means that you do not have calls queuing while you have staff available who could take that call.
• Virtual Hold
  An additional tool that can be used to eliminate hold times altogether is to provide a virtual hold. Offering a customer, a call-back service at a time where the contact center is at full capacity gives the option of waiting on the phone, or being contacted at a time when an agent becomes available, without losing their place in the queue.

2. Poorly designed IVRs

Most Customers do get frustrated by IVRs that have too many or incorrect options within them.
The problem that contact centers face with IVR is a design one. Creating a simple-to-use voice application will significantly help stop customer frustration. Part of the design process must include consideration of how to make the IVR option seem like an opt-in for callers.

If customers are happy to use a voice IVR, it is a quick, easy way to resolve their enquiry.

3. Call Transfers

Contrary to expectations, it is not call transfers that frustrate customers. In fact callers would like to be transferred if the person they speak to next is better able to help them.

What frustrates customers has to repeat same information again and again to every agent.

If they go through an automated ID and verification process at the beginning and give all of their relevant information, then there’s no need to repeat it when they get through to an agent.

This lets the customer know that the business values their time and they have not wasted it.

Information sharing is the key to success. The contact center needs to become truly dynamic and utilize all of its resources effectively. Information can be screen-popped to an agent’s desktop before they receive the call, showing all the information that the customer has given. Any re-verification steps should be made as short as possible. With other processes such as skills-based routing in place as well, transfers should be cut down, and with screen-pops throughout the business, when transfers do need to happen, they can be executed seamlessly.

Making the Emotional Connection with Customer

Traditional customer satisfaction issues have been on the radar for several years, and several forward-thinking companies have made great inroads into addressing these issues successfully through the deployment of a dynamic contact center approach.

Managing those interactions well means that whenever a customer chooses to contact your business, they go away feeling satisfied and will return.