With the current wave of digital transformation well underway, most customer experience (CX) advice centres are simplifying online journeys and enabling digital self-service.
But a digital-first approach doesn’t mean a digital-only approach. No matter how slick your online journeys are, there will always be customers who need to interact with a person – because they lack digital confidence or because their issue is too complex to be solved by FAQs or a Chatbot.
This means it’s important to continue investing in contact centres to ensure your offline CX is as seamless as your online one (especially when you consider that customer-centric businesses are 60% more profitable than non-customer-centric ones).
How do you achieve that seamlessness? This blog looks at 3 ways you can make sure your contact centre CX is first-class.
1. Understand the customer’s journey
Read any guide to CX these days, and you’ll come across the theme of personalisation. And for good reason. Personalisation – that is, understanding exactly who your customer is and then meeting and anticipating their needs – increases customer spend, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty.
But personalisation isn’t just for digital channels. Contact centres can and should tailor their approach depending on where people are in their journey. New customers, for example, will need more context about your processes, whereas long-standing ones will appreciate recognition of loyalty.
With the help of customer journey tracking and a robust CRM system, contact centre teams should be able to pinpoint where someone is in their lifecycle and tailor their approach accordingly.
2. Decrease customer effort
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that everyone is super busy nowadays. Therefore, it’s more important than ever to make sure your customer experiences are as effortless as possible.
For contact centres, this could mean, for example:
- Asking for their phone number upfront so you can call them back quickly if the call is disconnected
- Enabling collaboration between call centre and digital teams so there’s a seamless handoff
- Equipping agents with a holistic view of a customer’s engagement with the business to help avoid the need for repetition and speed up resolution
- Connecting data sources so people don’t have to repeat themselves every time they change channels
Not only will reducing effort improve customer satisfaction, but it will also reduce average handling time and make your operations more efficient in the long run.
3. Explore other channels
When we think of ‘live action’ customer service, we usually think of customers phoning a call centre. But in the omni-channel age, it’s important to explore other channels for human interaction, too.
WhatsApp, SMS and live chat are all ways for agents to engage directly with customers without relying on the phone. And they have the added benefit of being easily accessible for customers in a range of situations and at various times – an essential ingredient to convenient customer service.
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Despite the increasing focus on digital CX, we shouldn’t forget the value of good, human-led customer service.
For more ways to improve your contact centre experience in the digital age, download our latest guide, From Self-Service to Assisted Service.
