Improving CX through the Contact Centre

This blog will advise you how to improve customers’ experiences with a strategic Voice of the Customer programme in place.

*This post was originally featured on the Genesys AppFoundry blog. Find out more here. 

Understand the Customer Journey

Consider how the customer engages with your contact centre and why. This can often be a trickier job than you might assume, but if you get it wrong, it can have a negative impact. Customers are frustrated when they feel that they are being sent on a wild goose chase by an automated voice recording in circumstances where the customer journey has not been adequately considered. It is an unfortunately common mistake that is ultimately preventable.

An awareness of the touch points that are working well or those causing problems will help you target the gaps in CX.

When mapping touch points, it’s no harm to keep Pareto’s principle in mind. As it’s often the case that 20% of touch points deliver 80% of the value, we recommend focusing on getting the 20% right first. Not only is this strategy more cost effective, it’s better to become exceptional in the critical touch points, and then apply the learnings and processes from these across the remainder over time.

Integrate Operational Data

Integrating data from a variety of sources, such as Genesys*, your CRM or other relevant systems to augment feedback, is also essential to ensure that CX runs smoothly.      

At every interaction, your customer expects that you know about their transactions with your business and information about their account. This coordination will ultimately help you to properly measure the customer journey, enabling you to understand how your customer interacted with the different touch points of your business. CX Index specialises in integrating data through multiple channels and this is a key area if you want your programme to succeed.

Pay Attention to the Comments

While metrics such as NPS, Customer Effort Score, and First Call Resolution can give excellent high-level insights into your contact centre’s CX, it’s also important to pay attention to comments to understand the full picture. The comments are in place to explain the motivation for a given response, whether positive or negative, so it’s important not to rush to conclusions based on a response without analysing the “Why.”

You should make sure the customer was not giving feedback in relation to the product or service they were disappointed with rather than the contact centre employee. Contact centre employees engage with a lot of angry customers, but it isn’t necessarily their fault when the customer is left unhappy. If a customer leaves incredibly low feedback, even in response to survey questions directly pertaining to staff, you don’t want to count it against a staff member if it was out of their control.

Empower Individuals

In any contact centre, empowering your staff to do their job and take ownership of managing their own performance will improve CX. Empowering employees fosters an environment of trust, helping teams to learn from successes and analyse failures. With a VoC solution tailored to your contact centre, you can enable your staff to track their own customer satisfaction, providing a clear picture of the aspects of their interactions that customers are pleased or disappointed with.

When a suite of tools are designed with your contact centre in mind, employees can take ownership of improving their own performance, providing the capability to better serve customers. They will be empowered to track their performance relative to their peers on a range of metrics, which should in turn give you a significant uptick in performance levels and deliver winning customer experiences.

Think of the Economic Impact

When designing a Voice of the Customer programme, make sure that your efforts are aligned with a measurable outcome, such as reduced churn, increased NPS, reduced customer effort. Ultimately, the success or failure of a VoC initiative will be judged by its impact on the bottom line. It can be tricky to measure the ROI of CX, so we have outlined some strategies that will be useful for you in this.