5 Tips on How to Improve Customer Engagement in the Contact Center

Let’s face it: Competition is fierce in today’s customer-centric marketplace. Businesses that prioritize the customer experience stand to reap the rewards: improved customer retention and loyalty, positive word-of-mouth marketing, increased company revenues, etc. Companies that don’t may find they’re losing business to their competitors.

To shed light on how organizations can optimize customer experiences across the enterprise and effectively engage customers, we’ve compiled a list of 5 tips from a variety of sources across the Internet.

The following is our curated list of 5 tips on how to improve customer engagement in the contact center:

1) Listen to Customer Feedback

“A two-way dialogue is imperative if a brand is to build customer engagement. It shouldn’t be a top-down approach and it needs to be a win-win situation for the customer. In the current age, with social media platforms offering direct customer interaction, the opportunity is available to get them involved in product research and product sampling.

By taking this valuable feedback, even if it is unstructured, brands can glean insight that can help them refine and their current strategy and develop new strategies for the future.”

(Source: James Le Roth in Contact Centre Helper)

2) Empower Employees

“A good customer experience depends on [a company’s] front-line agents, so give them the power to truly serve customers. (And, in turn, make those customers ambassadors of the brand.)”

(Source: Fonolo)

3) Remember Different Types of Customers

“Each of [a company’s] customers will come with unique needs. While some are accustomed to automated processes, other customers may reject this service and prefer a live person. The younger generation may engage with the brand via social outlets.

Organizations must ask themselves: Are [we] prepared to serve this diverse audience? Are [our] agents equipped to respond appropriately using a broad range of communications tools?”

(Source: Platform28)

4) Evaluate Customer Engagement Solutions

“As customer engagement expectations continue to evolve, it is important to continuously analyze and improve the contact center solutions and technology [a company has] deployed for [its] customers. Here are five questions to ask [when] evaluating existing customer engagement solutions:

• Does it provide a best-in-class customer care experience that sets [the company] apart?
• Does it decrease the customer care cost associated with each customer, without sacrificing the customer experience?
• Do [the company] have regular, collaborative sessions to gather strategic input by both business and technology partners to align objectives?
• Does it drive revenue through proactive customer engagement?
• Does it improve customer retention and satisfaction by initiatives formed with multichannel data?”

(Source: West)

5) Understand the Complete Customer Journey

“When all is said and done, the customer experience comes down to not multiple, disparate points of interaction but the collection of those interactions overall. In other words, companies must be able to understand the customer journey, regardless of the communications channel used, and seamlessly integrate those interactions into a complete picture.

By aggregating customer interactions, transactions, feedback, and agent data, solutions such as customer engagement analytics work to provide an end-to-end picture of the customer journey. Armed with these actionable insights, contact centers can both engage customers and provide an improved experience overall.”

(Source: CallMiner)

Final Thoughts

In today’s rapidly evolving digital marketplace, customers are in the driver’s seat. What this means is that companies looking to stay one step ahead of the competition must respond accordingly, driving customer engagement optimization at every step of the customer journey in order to provide an exceptional customer experience overall.