5 ways to improve your contact center

Everyone wants their contact center to be customer-centric. However, many aren’t, because they are stuck with outdated operational strategies that no longer work in today’s customer care landscape. With the rapid evolution of communication channels and technologies, organizations have to change their approach to engaging and retaining customers, to stay relevant and competitive.

As a contact center provider who has been around for over two decades, we have some tips to share on how to be more customer centric:

1. Measure internal and external quality.

Many contact centers have top-of-the-line quality monitoring tools that record and view customer transactions. That’s great, but is no longer sufficient. When you are reviewing these recordings, you’re guessing what the customer feels. Today, you need to know for sure. You need post-contact surveying to find out . These surveys provide invaluable information about agent performance, which can be used to improve training, operational processes, as well as actual products and services.

How? Surveys can be given through the phone (using IVR or live agent), or through an email survey.

Our ice contact center and ice contact center for Microsoft Lync solutions provide you with the tools to measure this.

2. Use key customer data and feedback to continuously improve service, sales, and loyalty.

Contact centers should gather and process the enormous amounts of customer data, so that the organization can continually personalize service, enhance products, bolster revenue, and build relationships. With this information, the organization can proactively provide service, support.

How? Use a CRM tool, engage your analytics people, and take post contact survey results seriously.

ice also provides real time analytics and integration with CRM tools.

3. Emphasize customer centric data, rather than productivity-based metrics.

Look at contact quality, First Contact Resolution, customer satisfaction as a way of measuring performance, on top of using the traditional statistics, such as average handle time. These statistics require that agents are trained and are at the right place at the right times.

How? Use a Workforce Management Tool and have a solution that provides in-depth statistics for the items you need.

4. Keep a hand on customer pulse by using social customer care strategies.

Train agents on how to use social media and how to engage with customers or perform damage control. You can even create online communities to decrease routine customer calls, emails, and chats that agents have to handle, since customer can get answers from community peers as well as from tutorials /blogs provided by company.

How? Provide agents with a solution that enables them to monitor and respond to social media feeds.

ice supports twitter queuing, as well as the more traditional phone, email, instant messaging, and web chat queuing.

5. Truly engage agents.

There are several ways to do this:
• Reward and recognize agents in ways that are meaningful to them.
• Provide ongoing training and development opportunities.
• Empower agents to work on projects that are interesting and challenging to them.
• Encourage agents to share their ideas on ways to improve key processes in the contact centre.

How? Constantly communicate with your agents to truly understand what inspires them. Listen to their feedback and implement them.

ice can provide you the metrics and the tools, but you need to create the processes that best suit your agents.

Customer centric organizations are usually the most employee centric. Yes, you need the right processes and you need the right tools. However, at the end of the day, when you take care of your agents, they’ll happily take care of your customers. –Vivian Pow, http://www.computer-talk.com/en/blog/item/5-ways-to-improve-your-contact-center