The contact center experience refers to the impression that a customer has of their interactions with a company’s contact center when placing orders, seeking answers, filing a complaint, resolving issues, or requesting support. Companies can improve the contact center experience by reducing wait times, resolving issues quickly and on the first call, and by empowering agents to handle conversations with knowledge and empathy.
What is call center experience vs contact center experience?
Agents in a contact center interact with customers across many channels, including phone, chat, email, social media, websites, and mobile apps. Agents in a call center communicate with customers principally via telephone. The formula for delivering a positive experience is the same for both types of centers.
What is the contact center experience for customers vs. agents?
The term “contact center experience” can refer to both the experience of customers and agents. For customers, the contact center experience is impacted by how well they feel treated and respected when interacting with contact center agents. For agents, the contact center experience is impacted by training, support, and their ability to deliver exceptional customer service.
What are the advantages of delivering an excellent contact center experience for customers?
Because the contact center is the primary point of contact for customers, the quality of the contact center experience has a direct impact on brand perception and customer satisfaction. By making customers feel valued and respected, positive contact center experiences improve customer retention, loyalty, and lifetime value.
What are the benefits of ensuring a positive contact center experience for agents?
Ensuring a positive experience in the contact center for agents is one of the most important factors in reducing agent churn. Minimizing turnover helps contact centers reduce the costs of recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training new agents. Lower turnover also translates to higher levels of experienced agents who can deliver exceptional customer experiences.
What contributes to a positive contact center experience?
To improve the contact center experience for customers, companies can focus on making improvements in three critical areas.
- Speed. From reducing wait times to resolving issues faster, the speed with which a customer’s needs are met has a huge impact on the quality of their contact center experience by making customers feel more valued.
- Knowledge. Knowledgeable agents can dramatically improve the contact center experience for customers. From a comprehensive understanding of products and services to the many ways to resolve a customer issue, a knowledgeable agent is more likely to impress a customer and to deliver excellent service. Knowledgeable agents also have information that provides context and details about customers and their previous interactions with the contact center, so customers don’t have to repeat details they’ve already shared with the business.
- Empathy. When reaching out to a contact center, customers want to communicate with someone who will understand their needs and validate their experience. Even when an agent can’t immediately resolve a customer’s issue, a high level of empathy can help to create a positive experience.
What KPIs are most important in a call center or contact center experience?
Certain key performance indicators (KPIs) are an excellent measure of contact center experience for both customers and agents.
- Average handle time (AHT) measures the average length of a customer’s call. Focusing on ways to reduce AHT can help contact centers improve customer experiences.
- First call resolution (FCR) is the percentage of conversations that are resolved on the first contact. High FCR rates inevitably result in better experiences.
- Transfer rate is the percentage of conversations that must be referred to another department or escalated to another agent or supervisor. High transfer rate percentages equate to negative experiences, especially when customers must repeat information to each new agent
- Net promoter score (NPS) measures the likelihood that a customer would recommend their contact center experience to others.
- Wait time indicates the length of the customer must remain on hold before reaching a contact center agent. Lower wait times are directly tied to better experiences.
- Abandoned call rates measure the percentage of customers who leave a contact center conversation before their issue is resolved. Abandoned calls are a strong indicator of a negative experience.
What tools do call centers need to improve experience?
Agents can provide better contact center experiences when they have the right tools. In recent years, conversation intelligence has emerged as a powerful technology for improving contact center experience. Conversation intelligence tools analyze conversations in real time and provide instant insights into a customer’s wants, needs, expectations, and emotion. Conversation intelligence platforms use AI and machine learning to harness this intelligence and provide next-best-action suggestions for agents during interactions that can improve the outcome of calls, de-escalate tense conversations, and help agents resolve issues faster.
How does CallMiner improve the contact center experience?
The CallMiner Eureka conversation intelligence platform delivers tools that let contact centers capture, transcribe, and analyze 100% of customer conversations across all channels – phone, chat, email, SMS text, social media, web, and others. By transforming the unstructured information in these interactions into structured data that can be analyzed, CallMiner enables contact centers to better understand what customers want, need, expect, and feel. By sharing this data with agents in real time and providing next-best-action suggestions, CallMiner empowers agents to resolve customer issues with greater speed, empathy, and understanding of the customer’s mindset.
