Improving the Contact Center Customer Experience

Improving the Contact Center Customer Experience

Image of a customer service person smiling on a call.

Today’s customers have grown accustomed to convenient, effortless customer service experiences. That’s why it’s essential for contact centers to find ways to improve the customer journey.

What Is CSAT in a Call Center?

What’s the customer satisfaction level at your existing call center? How can you tell if your customers are satisfied?

Contact centers use Call Center Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores to tell how satisfied a customer is with your product, service, or the agent they spoke with. Typically measured by conducting surveys, the CSAT score is a leading call center performance metric of loyalty and long-term revenue for your business. The score is often based on the following customer satisfaction levels:

  • Very satisfied
  • Satisfied
  • Not satisfied
  • Very unsatisfied

A Guide to Improving the Customer Experience in a Call Center

If your customer satisfaction scores are less than desirable at your existing outsourced call center, here are a few ways the best call centers prioritize the customer experience:

They Understand the Customer

It’s no secret that customers expect agents to know who they are when they call. But how can you ensure that you partner with a contact center that understands your clients? The key is to ensure that agents offer a tailored, personalized customer experience by accessing information about their past interactions with your business. One way contact centers get to know your customers better is by using customer profiling. This technique involves collecting data and using it to build individual customer profiles that contain their preferences, buying habits, and other useful information. Contact centers also use this data to create segments of customers so they can target them with relevant offers and services.

They Train Their Agents Well

In the contact center industry, a crucial component of customer service is the agents that handle inquiries. That’s why it’s essential to ensure your agents are well-trained and equipped to provide the best service possible. That way, they’re more confident, comfortable, and productive in their roles, resulting in improved customer satisfaction, increased efficiency, and lower employee turnover rates. But what does “properly trained” actually mean?

Proper training not only begins at the start of a career, but also continues throughout its lifetime. During initial onboarding, agents are given the tools and resources to be successful in their roles, including learning about your company policies and procedures, familiarizing themselves with your products and services, and practicing communication techniques. Additionally, it’s also important to provide ongoing education and training opportunities to keep agents up to date on any changes or updates within your organization.

They Understand the Customer Journey

To ensure the best experience, contact centers must understand the customer journey, the type they’re interacting with, and how to interact with them appropriately. For example, customers who’ve called in several times before have already provided contact centers with information about a specific problem. By understanding the stages of their journey, agents can provide more personalized messages to enhance experiences. On the other hand, customers who are new to the contact center might have different expectations and needs, so it’s important for agents to understand the context of their journey and interact with them in a way that’s appropriate.

They Reduce Hold Times

It can be incredibly frustrating when customers have to wait on hold for a long time. Fortunately, contact centers have the opportunity to counter this issue by leveraging multichannel capabilities to streamline their processes, such as sending and receiving customer support emails, texting, and social media messaging. These are a great way to give customers more interaction options while ensuring agents are using their time efficiently.

They Ask for Feedback

By collecting feedback from customers, contact centers gain valuable insights into the customer experience, enabling them to make changes that enhance the customer journey. Collecting feedback can be done using surveys, focus groups, or customer interviews. Contact centers also use existing customer data, like ticketing systems and call logs, to look for patterns and identify potential issues.

If keeping up with customer service inquiries is becoming difficult, it’s time to consider hiring a call center.

They Use Live Chat

Live chat services give your customers an easy way to connect with an agent for support. The customer navigates to your website and clicks the chat button. From there, a chat feature opens where users can directly type their questions that are sent to an agent to answer in real-time.

They Simplify the Customer Experience

Contact centers can improve experiences by streamlining their processes with innovative technologies, such as automatic callback. This feature allows callers to request a callback if the line is busy, there are no available agents to pick up their call, or they want to be called back at a later time. By leveraging features like automatic call back, contact centers reduce customer effort and boost satisfaction.

A Customer Experience Call Center

ListenTrust is a contact center that prioritizes the customer experience. As a nearshore call center, we specialize in providing excellent customer service for direct response, e-commerce, and digital and brand marketers. With our help, you can rest assured that your customers always get a great experience 24/7/365 with support in English or Spanish. We offer diverse multichannel solutions, including inbound and outbound phone solutions, email, social media, and live chat support.

ListenTrust also has the staffing capabilities to effectively manage seasonal call volume variability. Whether you want to drive sales for your insurance firm, increase donations for your non-profit, foster retail brand loyalty, or improve customer satisfaction, we have the perfect solution for your industry needs. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help improve your customers’ experience.