A contact center is a hub from where all the customer interactions are managed – voice, email, SMS, chat, chatbots, website, mobile apps, and social. The contact centers ensure consistent and exceptional experiences across all channels of interaction.
It all began with helpdesks in the form of call centers where voice was the only channel of communication. Slowly, they started adding other channels like email, SMS, messaging apps, chat, chatbots, mobile apps, and social conversations – depending on what their customers wanted.
For a long, these channels functioned in silos. While customers were serviced across channels, they did not have a record of customer interactions that was made available to the agents. That’s when they started integrating these channels and enabled an omnichannel communications platform.
Now, as an agent, when a customer interacts with you in any of the channels, you’d have a single view of your customers that pulls together all the interactions that your customers had across channels. It makes you offer customized and personalized service to your customers.
The biggest advantage for customers is they can choose to interact in any of the channels and seamlessly transition from one to another without having to repeat themselves at any point in time.
Let me give you a couple of personal examples.
Example 1
I recently sent a package by courier to the NCR region through a renowned courier company that prides itself on its service. This is not the first time I am sending it through them, and they have always excelled at their delivery timelines and the quality of their interactions.
However, this time, I received a message stating that the postal code does not come in their delivery region and that I should provide an alternate address for the package to be delivered.
I was surprised as they had delivered to the same postal code multiple times earlier. Now, I scampered to figure out a way to reach them (I never had to do this earlier).
I could get a landline number that never worked and a 1-860 number where I would be charged for the call that I made. After calling, I realized that it had only automated features, and there was no way I could reach an agent.
I was left with no other choice but to travel to the collection center. I spent close to 90 minutes at the collection center, and the collection center person did everything he could to trace the package and organize a delivery to the address.
I wouldn’t have taken the pains to go to the collection center if I was not desperate for the package to be delivered.
What went wrong here?
The business did not prioritize the customer experience.
While they are one of the premium logistics companies in the country, your ability to solve customer problems when they face a challenge is what differentiates you from the rest.
They should have provided an option for me to reach someone on the phone, SMS, WhatsApp, or any of the other channels. At least, they should have provided an option to request a callback.
If not for the friendly guy at the collection center who did everything in his capacity to help me out, they would have returned the parcel to me. The intended purpose would not have been solved.
This is where the Cloud contact center solution play an enormous role in ensuring customer experience. The contact centers will have to be designed with the customer’s needs kept in mind.
What are the possible reasons for which your customers will try to reach you in the case of a logistics company?
- I want to inquire about the areas serviced and the pricing [This is a revenue opportunity]
- I want to know the status of my delivery [This is a CX opportunity]
- I received a message that my package could not be delivered as the place was locked. Now, I want to reach them to ensure delivery to an alternate address [This is a CX opportunity]
- I want to know if packaging would be done by the courier company as opposed to doing it by myself [This is a revenue opportunity]
- I want to see the impact of the variables like weight and the volume of the package [This is both a revenue and CX opportunity]
In all of these cases, with better experience, you stand to gain revenues and improve the lifetime value of your customers.
Despite these benefits, organizations typically provide step-motherly treatment to their customers, and they try to cut costs by automating all of their service components.
While I don’t deny the benefits of automation, it cannot handle every request of your customers, and there has to be a seamless way by which you can help your customers with their needs, issues, and challenges.
Would you agree that I would think twice before going back to the same courier company to deliver something in the NCR region?
That’s a huge possibility, and it could lead to a potential loss of revenue for the organization.
Example 2
I have a broadband connection at home, which functions really well most days of the year.
Recently, it failed, and I was unable to use the Internet at home. The only way you can interact with them is through their mobile app.
They had a support menu. When I clicked on it, it took me to a chat app, where they had a number of things pre-filled. I kept clicking one after the other and registered a complaint. It promptly provided me with a complaint number, and I received a WhatsApp text with the expected time of closure.
Now, the closure did not happen, and I went back to their mobile app to check on the status of the complaint. They had defined a different closure time now, and they did not communicate that to me.
I tried reaching one of their customer service agents, and there was no such option. So, I went back to their chat app, and I couldn’t find a way to talk to an agent. However, they gave me an option to request a callback.
When I clicked on that, I immediately received a call from them, and I inquired about the compliant status. They explained in detail that due to some tree felling in my area, their cables got cut, and they are replacing them, which is the reason for the delay in ensuring connectivity.
Now, I knew the reasons, and I made peace with the situation.
Eventually, the provider restored my Internet connection, and I am happy with the fact that there exists a way to reach the customer service agents.
What went right here?
While they are a small operation, and they did not have the resources to provide a lot of channels, they do a good job with their app.
Most common queries and needs are addressed in the app by default. For anything that goes beyond that, they have an option for you to request a callback, which you get immediately.
They sort all your queries on the call and ensure that you continue to remain their customer in the long run.
Even with one or two channels, you can still handle your customer queries better and delight them with experiences they would be happy about and possibly talk about later.
I don’t want to get into the features and functionalities of a contact center platform like autodialing, intelligent routing, workforce management, data management capabilities, reporting, compliance, and security aspects.
I am assuming they are a given, and I will talk about the four must-have features in your contact center platform to ensure exceptional customer experiences.
#1 Integrations
As a business, you would have a lot of internal systems to run your business, and most of them would handle the needs of your customers.
You have to ensure that your contact center platform is integrated with your CRM, helpdesk software, ERP, and other best-of-breed IT systems.
So, identify a platform that can do easy API integrations with these systems.
Let us take, for example, our contact center platform, ClearTouch Operator. We have pre-built integrations with industry-leading CRM and helpdesk software like Salesforce, Zoho, Freshworks, Leadsquared, Zendesk, and ServiceNow.
It is very easy to integrate with any other best-of-breed systems as well.
What this does is provide your agents with all the customer information, which allows them to provide better service to your customers.
#2 Omnichannel experience
It doesn’t matter how many channels you service as a customer experience function. What matters is whether the serviced channels provide a single view of your customers to your agents.
Let us assume that you are doing a website chat with an agent, and all of a sudden, you have to leave your desk and move. Does it provide you with an option to switch the interaction to a call without having to repeat yourself?
That’s omnichannel for me, and that’s what your customers would love.
Ensure you provide this experience, for this would mean better revenues and increased customer lifetime value.
#3 Self-service capabilities
About 85-90% of the queries are transactional, and self-service channels can handle them.
Let me give you a few examples:
- I want to learn about the functionality offered by my software
- I want to know the status of my shipment.
- I want to know the last five transactions I made in my account
- I have lost my wallet, and I want to block my debit and credit cards.
- I want to request for my account statement to be delivered to my email
- I want to request a checkbook
- I want to stop a payment standing instruction on my bank account
- I want to know the departure timing of my flight
- I want to add more kgs to my luggage on the flight
- I want to request a specific seat in the aircraft with more leg space
Most of these queries are transactional, and human intervention is not required to handle them.
You can handle them with a simple chatbot or access to the knowledge base or FAQs.
#4 Analytics and Intelligence
How often have you had your agents mess up a customer interaction?
It is only natural for people to make mistakes, but how do you prevent that from getting repeated by any other agent?
It is by incorporating those scenarios in real-time training.
Often, most such scenarios don’t get reported or captured. This is where your analytics and intelligence play a role.
They can analyze everything that is stated as well as unstated. They can read between the lines. They can make sense of pauses and filler words and provide you with a report on customer sentiments, frustrations, and places where agents did not handle things properly.
It can pull up compliance and misselling scenarios.
You can intervene in real-time, and at the same time, you can include this as a part of training and development activities to ensure that your agents are equipped and empowered with this knowledge that these mistakes don’t happen.
Contact centers are the lifeline of customer experience in every organization.
If you take a step back and look at it, everyone’s job in an organization is oriented towards providing better customer experiences, and your KRAs should be defined in a way that reflects the culture of customer-centricity.
Imagine a situation where everyone in your organization asks this question to themselves:
What difference did I make to my customers today, this week, or this month?
With this culture, you would have an organization that doesn’t have to worry about growth.
The simplest infrastructure that would let you make a difference to your customers is the contact center platform.
