CX initiatives can quickly become stale and drive fewer and fewer results, so how do you turn it around?

Here Vinod Muthukrishnan, Chief Customer Officer at Uniphore, and Katie Stabler of CULTIVATE Customer Experience by Design, alongside our Call Centre Helper readers, share 15 top tips, advice, and experience – as heard on our 7 Strategies to Boost CX Performance webinar.

How to Overhaul Your CX Programme

1. Share Customer Feedback With Agents So They See the Results of Their Efforts

Share feedback and metrics results with your frontline agents.

Share feedback and metrics results with your frontline agents, so they see their hard work and how the changes being made are genuinely improving the customer’s experience.

This will drive commitment and enthusiasm for CX initiatives in the long run.

Contributed by: Ashley, a Call Centre Helper reader

2. Stop Asking Customers What You Can Already Find Out Yourself

Stop over-surveying customers! A lot of data is already known if you know how to look into your customers’ behaviours on your systems or speak with other departments.

After all, there’s no point asking customers what you can find out without bothering them. As an added note, only ask questions you are prepared to do something about when you get the results – for better or worse.

Contributed by: Jaime, part of our live webinar audience

For expert advice on collecting service feedback, read our article: Stop Spamming! 10 Better Ways to Collect Customer Feedback

3. Always Start With Your Strategy – Not the Technology

Don’t roll out new technology just because someone says you need workflow automation or knowledge AI.

Instead, you need to start with your strategy and the kind of customer experience you want to offer your customers. Then, and only then, move to deploying the technologies that help get you there.

This approach will save you from trying to build the experience you want with the technologies that have already been sold to you.

Contributed by: Vinod Muthukrishnan, Chief Customer Officer, Uniphore

4. Create Dialogue Workshops to Help Your Team Share Great Ideas

To increase CX performance, create dialogue workshops with the team so they can share their ideas and solutions on how to improve your customer experience.

This approach can help to create synergy and develop team collaboration.

Contributed by: Nkululeko, a Call Centre Helper reader

5. Make Sure Your Agents Take All Their Breaks and Holiday

When looking to overhaul your CX programme, make sure your employees take their breaks and use all of their holiday allowance.

A lot of the time, your agents won’t even realize they are burning out and need some time off, so set the expectation that everyone takes the rest they need and are legally entitled to.

This will help to keep agents happy, and in turn keep the customer experience positive too.

Contributed by: Ian, a Call Centre Helper reader

If you want top tips and advice on reducing absence, agent burnout, and attrition, read our article: Tackle the 3 A’s – Absence, Agent Burnout, and Attrition

6. Invest Time in Your Customer Experience – Not Just Money

You can’t nurture a good employee experience, or identify and implement the right technology strategy, or effectively collect data to produce actionable insight… without the right investment!

Yes, financial investment is part of it – to bring in the right people, to upskill people, to bring in the right technology – but there’s also a significant time investment, which ultimately comes down to customer experience being made one of your business priorities.

7. Go the Extra Mile to Focus on What Really Matters to Your Customers

Most companies find it much easier to design outcome measures alongside their usual operational metrics (like their KPIs). However, this might not be what really matters to your customers.

For example, you may have a common operational metric such as time to answer, but in reality, your customer might not care whether their call is answered in 15 or even 45 seconds.

However, an outcome that they might feel is incredibly important is that they feel listened to. Yes, this is a harder metric to measure, as it’s far less tangible. But it can be done, for example through quality assurance and measurements of how many times a customer had to repeat themselves. Because, of course, if a customer has to repeat themselves it’s likely that they’re not feeling listened to!

So, make sure you ask yourself “are we doing enough to measure what really matters to our customers?”

Contributed by: Katie Stabler, Founder and Director of Customer Experience at CULTIVATE Customer Experience by Design

8. Double-Check Your Survey Questions Align With Your CX Vision

Make sure that the questions align with the vision you have set.

When looking to survey your customers’ experience, make sure that the questions align with the vision you have set for your team to measure.

This will help to make sure that any customer feedback helps you spot a training issue or an opportunity to change the experience.

Contributed by: Renee, part of our live webinar audience

9. Focus on CX and EX Together for the Best Results

Another way to overhaul your CX programme is to stop focusing your efforts on Customer Experience (CX) OR Employee Experience (EX) at any given time. Instead, focus on them together.

The results of our in-webinar survey showed that the vast majority (63%) of contact centre teams are taking this holistic view – compared to 32% who are focusing most on CX, and just 5% who focus on EX in isolation.

10. Stop Making It Hard for Customers to Find Your Phone Number

Steer away from the often-used approach of concealing your direct customer support phone number – to push customers solely towards self-service options, chatbots, and FAQs!

Instead, empower customers to choose the communication option that best suits them. This, in turn, reduces the effort required by customers to obtain the assistance they need.

Contributed by: Alina, a Call Centre Helper reader

11. Remember… NPS Doesn’t Measure Satisfaction or Loyalty

A good way to overhaul your CX programme is to stop relying on NPS alone!

NPS does not measure satisfaction or loyalty. NPS measures enthusiasm for advocacy. It’s not the same.

Contributed by: Jaime, part of our live webinar audience

If you are measuring NPS, you should read our article: How to Calculate… Net Promoter Score

12. Stop Adding Technology for Technology’s Sake

The best way to react to the ever-increasing pace of technology change and the drive to adopt it is to base all decisions about adopting a new technology on the true business value that technology brings to the table.

Put another way, adopt an attitude of “no technology for technology’s sake” and make sure you have a clear set of business objectives driving the decision.

Contributed by: Robert, a Call Centre Helper reader

If you are not sure if you need new technology, read our article: 17 Signs Your Contact Centre Technology Is Ageing Badly

13. Make Time to Review Your CX Performance KPIs – Every Month!

How often are you reviewing your KPIs? The results of our in-webinar survey showed that the vast majority (70%) of contact centre teams review their CX Performance KPIs monthly – compared to just 8% who look at them yearly.

14. Train New Agents With Real Telephone Calls

When training new CX agents, use real live telephone calls that are good AND bad – so they can hear the difference for themselves.

It’s also good practice to show the power of good and accurate data, and the impact of poor data and after-call notes as early in the training journey as possible.

This can help agents understand the “why” behind the training and expectations of the job.

Contributed by: Patricia, part of our live webinar audience

15. Focus on a New Recruit’s Attitude and Potential – Rather Than Experience

There’s so little from the skills needed for a call centre agent that can’t be trained up in a few weeks!

So, when recruiting, focus on potential, attitude, motivations, and adaptability – rather than previous call centre experience.

Contributed by: Jaime, part of our live webinar audience

CX is becoming a key differentiator for customers. To find out more about how you can improve your contact centre CX, read these articles next:

• Top CX Methods
• The Key Elements of a CX Lifecycle and Ways to Improve It
• Getting Started With Customer Service Mantras and Vision Statements
• 10 Ways to Be More Customer Centric