Jeannie Walters, the chief customer experience investigator at 360Connext, believes understanding the journey your customers are on now is key to delivering winning experiences. She suggests companies “identify the places where all of a sudden your customers are going to have new challenges, different obstacles, and different moments that will make them happy.” “Where,” she asks, “can you exceed their expectations in today’s world?”
The Need for Successful Call Center Strategies
An efficient, well-managed call center goes a long way in helping you land new customers and retain the ones you already have. Call center agents are in many ways your most important ambassadors, reflecting and maintaining your organization’s image in the eyes of consumers. With 96 percent of customers saying customer service is important in their choice of loyalty to a brand, it’s no exaggeration to say what happens in your call center can make or break your business.
To improve the call center customer experience, many enterprises are investing in new strategies or reconfiguring old ones to meet current demands. A cloud-based call center knowledge base, aka a knowledge center, allows agents to access critical information and relay it to customers in a near-instantaneous way.
Regardless of the size of your business, there are several call center knowledge management best practices you can employ to optimize the customer experience.
Improve On-Hold Times
People have never liked long hold times. What a few months ago may have been a mild annoyance, though, can now be a source of major stress for people juggling working from home, dealing with being unemployed, or caring for their out-of-school children. A powerful and secure cloud-based knowledge management solution gives agents the tools they need to deliver the support customers need when they need it.
Personalized Service
It’s never been more true that one customer’s needs and preferences can vary greatly from another’s. It’s imperative for organizations to empower their call center agents with the information that best serves an individual customer’s immediate concerns. While efficiency is a must, boilerplate replies can leave customers feeling dissatisfied and unheard.
Employee Engagement
It can’t be said enough: A great customer experience begins with a great employee experience. It’s true a customer-centric approach is vital to satisfaction, loyalty, and profit. Organizations that also focus on creating a culture that provides a great employee experience find their happier workforce can have a dramatic impact on their growth and reputation.
Visualization
Responding to Walter’s question on how to exceed customer expectations in a “new world,” visualizing your customer’s journey lets you build better customer relationships and create more satisfying customer experiences. Knowledge management provides the means to improve typical KPIs like first call resolution, abandonment rate, and average resolution time.
A True Omni-Channel Experience
People need to access customer service 24/7 and want to be able to do it from whatever device and platform they choose. Web, voice, chat, social media, email, and self-service enable customers to address issues when, where, and how they like.
The Digital Customer Journey
Contact centers are at the heart of today’s most satisfying customer experiences. Adopting these call center customer experience best practices lets you create personalized customer journeys that leave a lasting, positive impact.
Your organization’s knowledge is what gives it a competitive edge and allows it to provide unique approaches to complex problems. Knowledge management allows you to deliver a consistent experience across all touchpoints. It empowers agents and customers alike to draw from a company’s collective knowledge, delivering timely and accurate information where and when it’s needed most.
