Contact centers are extremely important to the success of businesses, and agents who can sympathize and empathize (unlike technology and chatbots!) are able to forge lasting connections with customers.
So why aren’t contact centers as successful as they should be?
We surveyed 400 respondents on their contact center responsibilities to better understand the dynamics of a contact center and discovered that approximately 53% of respondents reported that they outsource between 26% to 50% of the tasks associated with their contact center.
Although outsourcing undoubtedly reduces costs, it can also impact your brand since outsourcers focus on cost control rather than building deeper customer relationships. This is a key reason contact centers fail to reach their potential as a loyalty-building hub. So how do companies contend with this problem? Some set minimum performance standards, including how long it should take to close a case or achieve customer satisfaction goals. But these approaches don’t work because it is easy to “game” the system. For example, one organization we work with reported that their warranty requests are exceptionally high. This is because agents learn that providing a replacement quickly will boost both their time to close the case and their satisfaction scores. While this may improve support performance numbers it negatively impacts the company’s bottom line. In some cases, the rush to replace doesn’t actually solve the problem, leaving the customer even more dissatisfied.
The solution to this problem is not complex. It simply requires paying less attention to reaching a target number and more attention to providing agents with the knowledge to align their actions to customers’ wants, needs and desires. This is not just about collecting more customer feedback, it is about systematically collecting data that can actually be used to drive improved performance. When this process is working properly, the agent has the knowledge to quickly assess, react and solve.
There are now solutions that combine all of the analytics contact centers collect through their CRM tools, along with customer feedback, that uses AI to analyze and prioritize the right actions. These solutions provide step-by-step guides to quickly improve agent performance, ensuring that they maintain a high level of operation while keeping managers aware of progress and other opportunities for improvement. This may sound like pie-in-the-sky dreaming, but it is absolutely grounded in reality!
bespokeCX has a solution to help contact center managers elevate their team’s performance. By integrating a myriad of data sources and using the expertise of both humans and AI to analyze the data, bespokeCX delivers precise actions for improving contact center customer experience. With this solution, the future is now: by replacing complex tools and dashboards with effective strategies and tactics, managers can take immediate action to make measurable improvements to customer satisfaction.
To learn more, visit their website bespokecx.com. #CX #ContactCenter #CustomerExperience