How to Raise the Profile of Your Contact Centre

Our panel of experts discuss how you can improve your contact centre’s reputation across the entire business.

1. Play Call Recordings to Department Leaders

This tactic will illustrate the full extent of the problem, grab their attention and raise your value.

One technique that will help to raise the contact centre’s profile is to play different department heads recorded calls that are a result of a classic error that’s within their remit. Then tell them how many of these calls you receive a week and the cost that creates.

This tactic will illustrate the full extent of the problem, grab their attention and raise your value.

Just make sure that you do this nicely, highlighting that this is an area for mutual improvement.

Judith Hogan

However, for this trick to work to its full intended effect, the sound quality of each recording must be clear, to ensure that everyone can pick up on nuances in tone and emotion.

Great headsets, which incorporate crystal-clear audio and active noise cancelling, enable this, while also allowing advisors to focus solely on the customer and provide an unrivalled level of care and service.

Thanks to Judith Hogan at Poly

2. Tell Stories to Bring Metric Results to Life

One way to raise your contact centre’s profile is to deliver accurate metrics and data on the value that you bring to the business.

The numbers cannot sit in isolation. There needs to be a narrative around them that is presented back to the business and clearly demonstrates the value of delivering great customer service.

However, the numbers cannot sit in isolation. There needs to be a narrative around them that is presented back to the business and clearly demonstrates the value of delivering great customer service.

Make sure you balance this too. The impact of bad experiences should also be carefully evaluated and followed up with an outline of what the call centre needs to improve.

Chris Marron

In doing this, call centre leaders become customer experience advocates within the organization and can play a pivotal role in driving a customer-centric culture.

To support them in this role, third-party advocates can be hugely helpful. Often, business leaders can become entrenched on certain issues and it can take a third neutral party coming in to help deliver movement and momentum.

Thanks to Chris Marron at 8×8

3. Understand Customer Context

Mark Ungerman

Contact centres are the source of meaningful customer insights and can become a significant profit centre for organizations.

The interactions between organizations and their customers are a great resource for enabling a deep understanding of customers attributes, needs and expectations.

This allows organizations to gain critical insights such as the reasons behind a customer’s interest in a product or service, opportunities to create customer loyalty through upsell, competitive offers the customer may be considering and the root cause of service issues before they become more widespread.

By understanding customer context, organization can adapt products and services to better align with consumer expectations, and focus contact centre agent training on behaviours that lead to more sales, driving profitability.

Thanks to Mark Ungerman at NICE inContact

4. Engage Your Team With Organizational Goals

Talk to your team and tell them about the important role that they play in helping the entire organization to succeed.

Work with your frontline staff, the people who know and understand your customers best, to create a compelling storyboard everyone can be proud of.

Start by articulating the perfect brand story. Work with your frontline staff, the people who know and understand your customers best, to create a compelling storyboard everyone can be proud of.

Then, make your brand story part of the agent thought process. You can do this by giving the story a central role in all recruitment, onboarding and continuous coaching programmes.

If you really engage your team with your organizational goals – through storytelling – you are much more likely to meet them.

Then, you can show the wider business how you are helping them to succeed and meet their key objectives. This can raise your profile.

For more ideas on employee engagement, read our article: 10 Experts Share Their Favourite Advice on Employee Engagement

5. Make Use of Your Data

Such information, presented in the right way, can help other departments to revolutionize the customer experience.

Contact centres are a ready-made library of living and breathing customer intelligence that comes from millions of customer calls, texts, emails, tweets and chats that have been exchanged with agents.

Use this data to put the contact centre at the heart of the organization.

To best do this, use a speech analytics solution to understand the mood, needs and wants of customers, now and in the future.

Nick Smith

Such information, presented in the right way, can help other departments to revolutionize the customer experience and also fix pain points that result in high contact volumes.

Then, promote collaboration by sharing customer success stories, knowledge and learning to help all parts of the organization succeed in meeting their objectives.

Thanks to Nick Smith at Calabrio

6. Job Swap With Other Departments

By exchanging job duties, your contact centre colleagues will get a better appreciation of the broader business, as well as the positives, negatives and pressures of working in other departments.

Walking in the shoes of others can also help your contact centre colleagues identify alternative solutions to customer issues and future career progression opportunities – and you may even recognize that someone is in the wrong role!

Matt Bourke

Conversely, those in other departments will get a better understanding of the day-to-day work of the contact centre and the value it provides.

Walking in the shoes of others can also help your contact centre colleagues identify alternative solutions to customer issues and future career progression opportunities – and you may even recognize that someone is in the wrong role!

Thanks to at Matt Bourke at Sensée

7. Share Customer Feedback

Offer quick insights that feed relevant customer perspectives into the current priorities of other department leaders.

The data held within every customer conversation is the contact centre’s secret weapon.

Contributing insight from support tickets across the business like this is a sure way to raise your profile and value. But getting the relationship to happen can be difficult.

Sharad Khandelwal

To forge positive relationships, start slowly. Offer quick insights that feed relevant customer perspectives into the current priorities of other department leaders.

This is a great introduction to how useful contact centre data can be and, over time, people will start coming to you for insight, flipping the relationship on its head and positioning the contact centre as a valuable asset.

Thanks to at Sharad Khandelwal at SentiSum

If you want to know more about how to obtain customer feedback, read our article: 25 Good Customer Feedback Examples

8. Highlight the Link Between Great Customer Service and Revenue Growth

Traditionally, customer service departments were seen as cost centres with their focus on increasing efficiency and reducing budgets.

Although efficiency will always be important, delivering a great customer experience is what will help to differentiate the contact centre.

Alex Stenton-Hibbert

Although efficiency will always be important, delivering a great customer experience is what will help to differentiate the contact centre.

To reinforce this perception, contact centres should ensure everyone in the organization understands the financial benefit of a great customer experience.

This can be achieved through successfully measuring customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores and looking for correlation with customer retention.

Thanks to Alex Stenton-Hibbert at Business Systems

9. Bring Contact Centre Data to Life

Many organizations fail to uncover those insights and leverage those insights enterprise-wide.

Based on contact centre experiences, customers often form their opinions of brands – whether it be to develop a strong relationship and connection or decide to move on to another company for a similar service.

These customer conversations, which happen across a wide range of channels, hold incredible insights that have the potential to drive powerful business change. But many organizations fail to uncover those insights and leverage those insights enterprise-wide.

Frank Sherlock

To do this, contact centres can turn to tools that not only help them to uncover insights from customer conversations but make it easier to share them with leaders across departments.

These tools include visual representations of data, such as top emotions or key trends, to help business leaders quickly identify where to make improvements.

Thanks to Frank Sherlock at CallMiner

10. Reach out to Other Departments

Treat every customer interaction as an opportunity to increase loyalty and demonstrate value. If you achieve this, show off about it!

Remember, your success hinges on a shift in mentality. Your contact centre shouldn’t simply be a self-contained contact point.

Reach out to other departments and let them know that you have a hold of lots of insight to help them meet key organizational goals too.

Remember, your success hinges on a shift in mentality. Your contact centre shouldn’t simply be a self-contained contact point.

Jason Mitchell

By working with other departments, you will transform your contact centre from a cost centre into a value centre.

Once you enhance your reputation, you can look to invest in customer journey analytics to gain further insights to reduce friction within the customer experience.

Thanks to Jason Mitchell at Odigo

11. Make Better Use of Your Knowledge Base

It is best to equip advisors with the tools and support they need to meet key company-wide goals.

To dispel the image of your call centre being a repetitive environment that offers little value to the organization, it is best to equip advisors with the tools and support they need to meet key company-wide goals.

A knowledge base is a great advisor support tool, giving real-time access to relevant information, which will help advisors to answer tricky customer queries.

Sagi Eliyahu

Also, as the knowledge base provides lots of helpful information, why not share some of this with other departments? This will underline how the contact centre can be a great source of customer insight.

Other benefits to a knowledge base include faster help desk routing, hyper-personalization and easier implementation of a virtual assistant.

Thanks to Sagi Eliyahu at KMS Lighthouse

12. Identify and Share Even More Customer Insights

Contact centres serve as a significant link between organizations and their customers and, as a result, are a great resource for understanding customers attributes, needs and expectations.

Aviad Abiri

A speech analytics system will enable you to home in on each of these key areas and provide invaluable insights to other departments – such as marketing, e-commerce and product design.

By doing so and driving the Voice of the Customer (VoC) across the business, the contact centre can very much raise its profile and build positive relationships.

Thanks to Aviad Abiri at NICE

For more from our panel of experts, check out the following articles:

– 18 Characteristics of Great Customer Service
– How Are Customer Expectations Changing and What Does That Mean for Us?
– 30 Customer Experience Trends to Watch Out For

Author: Robyn Coppell