5 Golden Rules For Delivering Great Customer Experiences

Tim Kimber of NewVoiceMedia shares five key tips for delivering great customer experiences through the contact centre.

Forrester, in its CX Index analysis, identified that customer experience (CX) is a function of the customer achieving their goal, expending minimal effort to get there and then most importantly how they feel about the exchange, or their emotions.

Gartner has stated that by 2020, 81 percent of companies expect to be competing mostly or completely on the basis of CX.

However, delivering exceptional CX has become more complex in recent years, with customers expecting to interact with organisations through a proliferation of new communication channels such as email, SMS, social media, mobile and more.

As a result, the contact centre is playing an ever-increasing role in CX, particularly for high-touch complex situations or for resolving digital failures.

Rule 1: Work With Your CRM

Your CRM should be the foundation of your contact centre, working dynamically together for routing, agent operations, customer messaging, reporting and analytics.

Rule 2: Make Conversations Personal

Turn CRM data into customer delight by routing interactions to the best available agent who will know who’s calling and what they’re calling about and can resolve their issues straight away.

Rule 3: Focus on People, Not Technology

Technology should be an enabler to great conversations, not a hindrance. Make it easy for your agents to have all the information they need at their fingertips, in a single system that automatically logs all interactions.

No more toggling between systems, copying and pasting data and chasing agents to ensure they’ve captured everything properly.

Rule 4: Make Conversations Flow Effortlessly

With customers interacting via the channels of their choice, create an environment where conversations flow seamlessly across all the channels and everything is tracked for future reference.

Similarly, when reporting and analysing the data to find the key insights, you’ll want to be able to easily manage and optimise resources across all channels.

Rule 5: Leverage Data to Get Better Over Time

The contact centre should automatically push all data into the CRM so that everything is captured to give a complete and accurate customer view.

Since your customer conversations are such a rich source of data, leverage speech analytics to quickly find the ‘needle in the haystack’ insights and best practices and to identify calls that may highlight a training need.