Consumer Duty – How can contact centres help to comply?
Consumer Duty requirements were launched by the UK’s FCA in June 2023 and represent legally binding regulation for financial services. But what does t...
The experience your customers have with your contact center or customer service center can impact your business – positively or negatively. Positive contact center experiences occur when customers get the help they need in a timely fashion, while negative call center experiences can result from rude or dismissive agents, long wait times, or an insufficient resolution to a problem.
This guide outlines what customers expect from their contact center experiences, including:
- What is contact center experience?
- Four features of a good contact center experience
- How to improve contact center experience
- The role of conversation intelligence in contact center experience
- Frequently asked questions
What is contact center experience?
Contact center experience is the feeling a customer has toward their overarching experience with a contact center or customer service center. The contact center experience includes interactions with agents, steps toward resolution, the actual resolution, wait times, and the customer’s overall treatment throughout the process.
Contact centers also use several key performance indicators (KPIs) to track performance using call center software. The most helpful KPIs include average handling time, which tracks the total time it takes to resolve the customer’s problem, and customer satisfaction, which is typically measured using customer survey feedback.
Four features of a good contact center experience
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Customers have expectations when they call for help, as they should. After all, they typically aren’t reaching out to your organization for any other reason than to get their issue resolved or a question answered quickly. Most customers would agree that they had a good, productive contact center experience if they encountered the following:
- Helpful agents: The agent a person speaks with should get to the root of the problem quickly so they can address it. Agents should know where to find any information they don’t have to prevent delays in resolving an issue.
- Short wait times: Wait time is a significant pain point for many customers, sometimes even causing them to avoid calling for help at all. Generally, customers don’t want to wait more than two minutes before being greeted by an agent.
- Courtesy: Customers who call for help expect courtesy from an agent when handling their issue, regardless of how minor it may be. Empathy and respectful responses and tones are key for positive call center experiences.
- Quick and effective resolution: Once the problem is clear, a resolution should happen quickly. Customers want their questions answered or a solution to their problem within a few minutes of calling.
How to improve contact center experience for customers
Each customer’s experience becomes a part of a contact center’s overall experience. As such, each customer’s case must be handled with care, preventing anyone from falling through the cracks. Contact centers should implement the following steps to ensure a high-quality call center experience at each part of a customer’s journey.
Spend ample time on training and onboarding (and make it ongoing)
Knowledgeable and caring contact center agents come from having proper training and onboarding from the start. Spend enough time with each new hire to catch them up on your contact center software and processes. Complete mock interactions with them using various situations to determine whether they’re ready to handle calls on their own.
Training shouldn’t be considered a one-and-done process. Instead, offer professional development workshops, events, courses, and meetings to keep fine-tuning agent skills.
Listen to your agents as much as your customers
Customer surveys provide helpful feedback that contact centers can use to improve their processes. But as important as customer feedback is, agent feedback is just as handy. Agents interact with customers every day so they understand common pain points and can relay that information to managers in charge of tweaking scripts and processes to assist customers better.
Utilize everything contact center software offers
Contact center software offer a number of features that improve customer experiences. When management and agents know how to use contact center software effectively, they can get the data they need from conversations to continuously make improvements based on sentiment and emotion analysis from conversation intelligence technology.
The role of conversation intelligence in contact center experience
Conversation intelligence analyzes conversations between agents and customers to provide data that contact centers can use to enhance overall experience. CallMiner works in the background of every conversation – phone as well as other channels, like emails and social media – to provide the necessary data for driving positive customer experiences and retention.
Request a free demo to discover what CallMiner can do for your contact center.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a contact center and a call center?
A call center is a contact hub for phone calls between a customer and a company. While call centers include only phone contact, contact centers cover multiple contact channels in addition to phone calls, like texts, social media, emails, or live chats.
Why does contact center experience matter?
A negative contact center experience can cause customers to feel negative toward a brand. Customers typically call to get a problem resolved quickly and respectfully, and when that doesn’t happen, they could decide to seek competing brands instead. Essentially, contact center experience is a critical part of customer experience, brand management and more.
What’s the best way to improve contact center experience for customers?
Highly skilled agents are necessary for positive contact center experiences. Therefore, thorough training and onboarding is the number-one way to ensure that agents have the technical and interpersonal skills to satisfy customer needs and improve call center experience.
