Tips to improve the customer experience in a Contact Center

Customers’ efforts to resolve their issues on their own through online chat sessions, email, social media posts, websites, etc., have increased exponentially in recent years. This has led to a significant increase in the number of customer self-help requests that contact centers must address without making the situation worse with frustrating wait times or poor service.

To meet these demands, contact center managers must find ways to improve productivity in their agents through process upgrading. Here are some ways you can optimize your operations and streamline processes to provide customers the best possible experience.

1. Continuous improvement in each agent’s customer service skills

Improving customer service skills is extremely important to the success of your campaigns. The attitude of agents towards customers and the way they communicate with them can make or break an organization’s profit margin. Knowing the basic tools used to measure customer service skills, along with some creative ways to apply those tools during training sessions, will help agents improve their skills in a number of important areas.

Training on the first day is fundamental, but so are refresher and continuous improvement sessions that refine what can be improved and prepare for the new technologies and capabilities that the market has in store.

2. Generate a script for agents

Agents will not always be able to answer all the questions that users submit. This may be due to lack of knowledge or experience as well as the complexity of the products or services. A speech can be created that lists the most common queries that users ask.

For example, an agent can have the customer repeat what they just asked to make sure they heard it correctly. This helps measure the effectiveness of the agent’s communication skills, along with his or her listening skills.

A script is one way to improve customer service in a call center, as it makes it easier for agents to handle any kind of question.

To build the script, meetings can be scheduled with the most experienced agents to find out what information is most requested or what problems are the most difficult for them to address. Also, the company can directly determine what data they want to provide when serving customers.

3. Smooth call experience and fewer hiccups

In a contact center, the smoothness of the call experience is key to ensure that customers are satisfied. If there are long hold times or frequent disconnects, customers may become annoyed and may decide not to continue calling the company. Some ways to improve the call experience include using effective skills-based routing, making sure agents have all their tools before answering a question or concern.

Skills-based routing matches the customer’s question with an agent who has the ability to provide a solution, rather than having an agent blindly take a call and go about solving a problem he or she doesn’t know how to handle.

In addition, effective use of wait times results in less customer hesitation and annoyance. If wait times are long, agents can quickly become overwhelmed, and even more so if they don’t know the situation they need to solve.

Asking the right questions to verify the caller’s information before transferring them to another department can save time in the long run by reducing unnecessary transfers, while improving overall customer satisfaction, which could increase positive feedback and word-of-mouth recommendations for a business.

Agents should always have all the tools at their disposal when speaking directly with customers, including access to documentation and other important data such as phone numbers, addresses and passwords.

Finally, if agents or supervisors do not record calls accurately the first time, it will be more difficult to track potential problems later. Many contact center agents are often so focused on connecting with customers quickly that they may neglect their own record keeping. An experienced contact center is able to significantly reduce call times, as well as provide fluency.

4. Perform post-call follow-up

Call center supervisors are responsible for monitoring the performance of their agents. They must ensure that all calls are handled in a timely manner. After each call, it is usually the supervisor who follows up with the agent, this can be through surveys, satisfaction scales or forms, to get more information about the conversation and offer further guidance if needed.

Here are some tips for call follow-up:

• Monitor agents’ times on their calls and try to keep them to the shortest possible time on call.
• If an agent is having difficulty with a customer, referring the call to a supervisor can help provide better guidance.
• Ensure that all customers are satisfied with the service through surveys, satisfaction scales or forms.
• Once the customer call is over, it is necessary to follow up on their satisfaction by sending an email or SMS. In this way, you can obtain the customer’s opinion and remind them of the company’s services.

The follow-up email should contain some sort of question or concern that prompted the original call to make it meaningful, but it should not directly state what was discussed over the phone. It may also ask for feedback or suggestions for improvement.

It is recommended that these messages include some kind of incentive for providing this information, such as giving away points or coupons for purchases on future visits.

5. Implement customer care software

Customer care software can be used to collect information from customers and provide them with many options for contacting different departments of your company through the contact center. It also provides a way to resolve customer issues, whether they are complaints or questions for the business.

It is important to not only have software that can handle typical requests, but also be able to accept more complicated cases. For example, if a customer files a complaint, you should not take them to another department if it cannot solve their problem. An organization’s service department would then receive the request and could contact the customer once it finds a solution.

Having a customer service software allows you to control all the management as well as provide consumer monitoring. It will provide management analysis reports, which provide the results that need to be considered in customer service issues. In addition, if the contact center is multichannel, this software must allow the integration of all customer service channels for greater efficiency in communication with customers and between agents.

Customer satisfaction is paramount

The customer care services you offer through a contact center must be oriented to provide total satisfaction, so we recommend considering all these points and always verify the results. Each company has different needs and different users and that is what a professional contact center considers when offering services for your company in any service or product you sell.