The contact center experience refers to the experience of customers as they interact with a contact center and the experience of agents working in the contact center. A customer’s contact experience can be impacted by the length of their wait time, the quality of their interaction with an agent, and the speed with which their issue or request is resolved. Since the contact center is now the primary place where customers interact with a brand, companies are paying a great deal of attention to the quality of the contact center experience.
What is a contact center?
A contact center handles communications with a company’s customers. Contact centers may be a department within the company or a third-party organization contracted to provide services. Contact centers are staffed by agents who interact with customers across various channels to offer help with sales, support, and service.
What is a contact center vs. a call center?
Agents in call centers interact with customers over the phone. Agents in a contact center interact with customers across all channels: phone, email, chat, SMS text, and social media.
What is the contact center experience for customers?
Providing a positive customer experience is the top priority for every contact center. Exceptional experiences increase customer satisfaction, build customer loyalty, improve customer lifetime value, and generate positive word-of-mouth. Conversely, a poor contact center experience can cause a customer to stop doing business with a company and to let others know about their negative experience.
What is the contact center experience for agents?
Creating positive experiences for contact center agents helps to increase employee retention and reduce churn, minimizing costs and ensuring adequate staffing levels within the contact center. Superior agent experiences also lead to better customer experiences since agents who enjoy their work are less stressed and provide better customer service.
How do I improve my contact center experience for customers?
Contact centers can improve the customer experience by providing agents with training and tools to resolve customer needs faster and more efficiently.
The most effective contact center solutions will:
- Offer self-service options that help customers resolve simple requests on their own.
- Provide agents with a seamless view of customer information, history, and account information across channels.
- Personalize the customer experience by tracking customer preferences and details from previous calls.
- Align agent skills with customers’ needs.
- Minimize hold times by making interactions more efficient.
- Provide agents with automated tools that help to resolve issues faster while recognizing and validating customers’ emotions.
- Continually measure the performance of contact centers and agents to identify areas for improvement.
How do I improve the contact center experience for agents?
Proper training and a positive culture are the foundation for positive agent experiences. Continuous coaching and feedback help agents feel valued and supported while providing opportunities to learn, improve, and succeed. Agents also benefit from automated tools that minimize repetitive tasks and guide customer conversations to better outcomes.
How do you measure the effectiveness of a call center or contact center?
There is a wide range of metrics that contact centers use to measure effectiveness.
- Average handle time (AHT) measures the average time required to complete a transaction successfully.
- First-call resolution (FCR) tracks the number of customer issues that can be resolved on the first call.
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) measures customer satisfaction with contact center interactions.
- Net promoter score (NPS) gauges how likely a customer is to recommend the company to a friend.
Tracking these and hundreds of other metrics requires superior, automated technology. Many contact centers today use conversation intelligence solutions that can automatically track these metrics while also capturing and analyzing 100% of conversations to monitor agent performance and to understand customers’ wants, needs, and experiences as they interact with the business.
How does CallMiner help improve the contact center experience?
CallMiner is the global leader in conversation intelligence technology. The CallMiner Eureka conversation intelligence platform uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing to automatically capture and transcribe speech- and text-based interactions in phone calls, email, chat, web, SMS, and social media. Eureka transforms the unstructured information in these interactions into structured data that can be analyzed, categorized, and scored to deliver visibility into agent performance and customer needs and motivations. Eureka also provides real-time analysis of customer interactions and suggestions for the next-best action an agent can take to resolve a customer’s needs, improving the contact center experience for both customers and agents.
