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Customer Experience

3 Ways to Future Proof Your Contact Center

The contact center is at the heart of any organization that truly has a customer-first approach. It presents an incredible opportunity to generate revenue and optimize costs while also providing customer service that endears customers and drives loyalty. To build a high-performing contact center, service leaders need to focus on ensuring high customer satisfaction through curated experiences while also streamlining processes and reducing the effort it takes for customers to find a resolution. But this is easier said than done.

The Qualtrics 2022 consumer trends report highlights reasons why that might be:

  • The gap between what customers expect and what companies deliver is more significant than ever.
  • 8 out of 10 people believe customer experience needs to be improved.
  • 43% of consumers said companies need to majorly improve their customer service (second after prices and fees).
  • 62% of consumers said businesses need to care more about them, 60% of consumers would buy more as a result.

Download the Qualrics 2022 Consumer Trends Report

The need for improvement is clear, and teams must set their eyes toward the future and use technology to improve in these three key areas:

  1. Use intelligent automation to increase agent efficiency and effectiveness
  2. Leverage digital customer service and social listening
  3. Personalize interactions with comprehensive customer profiles.

Let’s see how Qualtrics enables contact centers to bridge the gap between customer expectations and service delivery in these areas through industry-leading innovation:

1) Use intelligent automation to increase agent efficiency and effectiveness

Leading contact centers are choosing to implement intelligent automation, which to us means “understanding the emotion and intent expressed in conversations to inform what to automate and to track the impact of automation on customer and employee experience.” One way to do this is to automate agent scoring–this allows companies to evaluate agents across all interactions and channels in a holistic, objective, and transparent way.

Qualtrics’ patent-pending Intelligent Scoring feature taps into the power of our industry-leading Natural Language Understanding to analyze both the customer and agent sides of the conversation and surface key coaching opportunities. This means managers spend less time hunting for coachable moments and more time coaching agents. With more support from managers and more visibility into what they need to improve, agents become more effective, and agents feel more empowered, meaning they are less likely to leave the company.  With Intelligent Scoring, you can also create alerts to automatically identify churn risks and script compliance infractions to keep customers (and the company) safe and happy.  We can even automatically and intelligently recommend what the scoring criteria should be!  Our solution provides a simple form to create a matrix of weighted scoring criteria. Need help determining what attributes to score? Predictive drivers in XM Discover use machine learning to determine the topics and attribute values that impact a particular outcome, which is crucial to defining meaningful score criteria.

But what is working or not working? Do agents feel they are being evaluated fairly, or do they have rebuttals? Our solution can answer these questions and more by auto-routing and assigning tasks and then tracking actions taken to understand how KPIs are being impacted over time as a result of changes made.

Another area of opportunity for intelligent automation is post-call work.  Post-call work such as writing up a summary report or cataloging reason-for-contact eats up a lot of agents’ time and costs contact centers millions of dollars in lost productivity. Improvements in AI-powered natural language understanding (NLU) are helping tech-forward contact centers to assess, tag, and summarize all customer-initiated interactions automatically, freeing up agents for more productive service-oriented tasks. These automated summaries also provide more readable, usable, and consistent outputs, meaning they are prime for analysis and identifying trends.

2) Meet customers on their preferred digital channels

In today's digital world, consumers engage with brands 24/7 across a broad spectrum of channels, including social media, chat, and on the web. Sometimes these interactions are about getting complaints addressed and questions answered. Other times, it’s about saying thank you for excellent service or offering feedback on a product. Customer care and social teams face increased pressure to respond effectively to the millions of customer service requests they receive through these channels. And customers expect fast service. In fact, 94% of consumers expect brands to answer questions and respond to negative posts on social media, and they want a response quickly.

Every customer that they don’t get to in time can turn into a costly phone call to their contact center, which is already commonly understaffed and overwhelmed.

Providing customer service over digital channels provides companies with a tremendous opportunity to meet customers where they are and create meaningful interactions that improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. At the same time, it also offers companies an opportunity to collect tremendous volumes of unstructured data, full of insights into how customers behave, and their expectations. Looking at this data holistically, brands can understand the root cause of poor experiences, and proactively fix them before it’s too late.

Listen, analyze and improve service delivery on all social and digital channels with Qualtrics Social Connect

With connections to more than 35 popular digital channels – including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SMS, Email, WhatsApp, Live Chat, Forums, Blogs, and review sites – Qualtrics Social Connect helps businesses listen to, connect with, and serve customers on whichever digital platform they prefer.
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3) Take a personal approach to solving customer problems

Customers don’t contact support for casual conversation. They are calling because they have a problem that they need fixed. Unfortunately, the path to resolution isn’t always a straight line. But, the customer never has to know this.

Experience ID (XiD) for the Contact Center allows organizations to easily connect all the operational and experience data across an individual’s interactions. By analyzing and enriching this data, teams can understand the emotion, sentiment, and intent captured at each touchpoint. This ability then allows the organization to create a customer profile that can be used to tailor that individual’s experience.

Steps to success:

  • Route the customer to the right channel, the first time: craft support experiences based on these insights
  • Deliver highly targeted experiences for individuals, cohorts, or segments
  • Make these insights accessible to frontline agents, so they know who the customer is without having to ask

 

People’s expectations for the products and services they use, for their employers, and for the organizations that serve them have never been higher. Brands can’t meet customers’ expectations for personalization without building authentic relationships.

We’ll continue to innovate on our products and solutions to help Contact Center teams be more effective and efficient, empower agents to resolve customer issues, and build deeper relationships with their customers.


Discover other proven tactics for your contact center