Take a Contact Center Selfie:
Examine Your Service Through Your Customer’s Lens
What impression do your customers have after they have interacted with your contact center? Do they feel you make it easy and pleasant to interact with them or are they dissatisfied with your service? Many service departments may not know the answer to this question. For every customer who bothers to complain, 26 other customers remain silenti. Statistics show that these dissatisfied customers will defect. When this happens, there is a substantial financial impact to an organization. It costs 6–7 times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one.ii
Identify Common Complaints
To obtain a more accurate picture of how customers view your service, use call and agent screen recording as a tool to evaluate contact center performance. Call recording solutions that unify voice self-service and live agent interactions within a single reviewable file make it easier to analyze the complete customer experience.
Along with call recording, evaluate customer feedback surveys to see if any pattern of complaints emerges. Some of the more frequently reported contact center service complaints that result in dissatisfaction are:
- Keep them waiting — Although contact centers need to support multiple channels, the telephony channel is still dominant. Excessive queue hold times and confusing self- service menus can make reaching a live agent a challenge. In fact, 75% of customers believe it takes too long to reach a live agent.iii
- Having to start again — A common scenario is that customers hit a roadblock in a self-service channel and then end up having to start all over again with an agent. A transfer between agents is also a source of frustration when customers have to repeat their issue from one agent to the next.
- Can’t help on the first call — Once customers reach a customer service agent, they expect a resolution during that first call. Many contact center managers realize this is important, which is why first call resolution rates are often used to judge efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Implement Process Improvements
Improvements to your contact center infrastructure will help streamline the support process, eliminating many inefficiencies and customer complaints. The quickest and most cost effective way to make these improvements is by moving key contact center components to the cloud—for example, the Automatic Call Distributor (ACD), Interactive Voice Response (IVR), and call recording. Cloud contact center vendors often interoperate with existing corporate technology such as a CRM system, so you will not need to replace all of your supporting systems.
Leverage Innovative Technology
Innovative cloud contact solution providers offer many options for improving contact center efficiency. Leverage their knowledge and resources to:
- Improve your call routing strategy—Call routing rules can be set up for language, agent availability, queue times, and other factors. More sophisticated ACD cloud providers use complex formulas to calculate the best route to an agent, based on multiple aspects such as both queue wait time and agent skill.
- Consolidate customer data — Agent training is a major contributor toward improving customer care. However, don’t overlook the fact that agents also need the ability to easily obtain the correct information from the CRM to answer questions without excessive effort. A CRM system used by agents should manage customer and product information by consolidating data from various sources and channels of communication. This helps agents intelligently respond to customers, especially when they have some context of past interactions.
- Integrate channels of communication — Agents are delayed when they have to switch between computer screens to access different channels and data. An agent’s CRM screen can be enhanced with telephony and messaging information to respond to emails, phone calls, or other types of inquiries—all from one user-friendly menu toolbar that can serve as a channel consolidation point.
Additionally, avoid having customers repeat themselves when transferring from the voice self-service channel to an agent with cost-effective technology such as WhisperTel. This technology allows agents to listen to a recording of what happened in the voice self-service channel prior to taking the call.
Evaluate and Re-evaluate
As products and technology evolve, so too must your service in order to meet customer needs. Establish customer satisfaction metrics that will allow you to continually re-evaluate your performance from your customer’s perspective. 
About VoltDelta
VoltDelta is a global cloud-based contact center provider with 35 years of experience. We rapidly tailor and integrate our multi-channel contact center solutions to enable you to increase revenue, boost retention, and reduce operating costs.
Phone: 866-436-1169
Email: info@voltdelta.com
linkedin.com/company/voltdelta
_____________
i Lee Resource Inc
ii Bain Capital
iii Harris Interactive