Microsoft estimates that 90% of all Americans consider customer service to be a discerning factor in which companies they choose to engage with. Salesforce reports that 89% of customers are likely to return after they report a positive customer experience. Salesforce also reports 78% of customers will do business with a company again if they have a great customer service experience while fixing the issue.
Those numbers make it hard to debate the merits of strong customer service. The common denominator in all of these compelling numbers that support customer retention is customer experience. In short, even a customer that has a problem at some point in their order will come back to a company if they felt valued, supported, and were able to get prompt help.
Contact Centers: The Frontlines of Customer Experience
Given the fact that contact centers are one of the most popular customer experience tools at a company’s disposal, it is reasonable then to take a look at how to gain actionable insights from current customer interactions. Contact centers are ideal for data collection because lines are recorded, many customers agree to take a quick survey following the call, and outcomes are easily assessed. The trick is accessing and then utilizing the information that comes from that data.
It is up to five times cheaper for a company to retain a current customer than to establish a new one. Therefore, current customers need to have access to excellent customer service that will resolve any issues and offer enough enticement that clients come back again. Properly training and arming team members at a contact center is the first step towards making that happen. Customers hate being told that an employee is unable to help them and detest being put on hold even more (especially if they have already been in the queue for a while), so utilize customer service feedback tools to identify common issues, their solutions, and then prevent these scenarios from happening in the future.
Leverage Modern Contact Center Quality Monitoring Solutions
One way of beefing up the customer experience of your consumers is by investing in a contact center quality monitoring solution. Just a short few years ago listening in on select phone calls at random was considered the hallmark of best call monitoring, but today the emergence of artificial intelligence has changed the game. Now massive amounts of voice data can be mined in minutes, creating actionable reports and measurable results that can be used to address both strengths and weaknesses within a contact center.
The ability to mine data from thousands of calls performed by thousands of agents or just dozens of calls from one employee, at will, allows the contact center manager the ability to custom-train customer service team members as needed. Our analytics include automated training, automated quality scores, and predictive behavioral analytics. Never before have custom training solutions been so easily achievable.
At the same time, call center monitoring has the ability to take the place of surveys and reviews. You can get a higher level of feedback without requiring customers to take additional steps, which most will appreciate. It also solves the common issue that usually only highly satisfied or highly angry customers stay on the line for customer surveys, which creates uneven and unreliable results. Using voice measuring tools and analytics allows a leader to access data from thousands of conversations and create meaningful action plans to strengthen the customer experience and address obvious sticky points that may be dragging down scores.
Larger Companies May Benefit from a Customer Data Platform
While contact center monitoring is a great way to aggregate information, larger companies with more than one notable customer experience data point may benefit more from a customer data platform (CDP). This type of system is usually deployed across an enterprise and is used to collect massive amounts of customer data from a variety of sources and different access points. It is usually managed by an information technology manager who maintains the data warehouse and develops activity logs, customer profiles, and profiling models that can then be used to look at how customer experience is actively affecting your average customer’s behavior.
While the primary function of a CDP is usually to analyze how effective a marketing method is at retaining customers, it can also be used to figure out how effective current customer service measures are to customer retention. The pandemic has placed a squeeze on every business’s budget and profit profile, which means every variable of the customer experience is now more important than ever before.
While it needs to be managed by a professional, a CDP is at its base a predictive analytics software that uses both CRM and marketing automation to create data that can be acted on. Looking over average customer interactions and analyzing where any breakdowns occurred or where customers were successfully retained following a mistake can help a company learn how to sharpen its standard customer service training. This process is often referred to as data-driven management.
Etech is proud to deliver a wide range of data-driven solutions to companies wanting to improve their company experiences. We provide a wide array of analytic services that combine human intelligence with artificial intelligence to create comprehensive resolutions to the customer experience within the corporate space. Contact us for more information on any of our customer experience monitoring solutions.