Consumers expect a highly personalized, responsive and omnichannel experience from your organization. According to a PWC study, 32% of consumers will leave a brand they loved after one bad experience. And 80% of consumers value speed, convenience, knowledgeable help and friendly service as key drivers to a positive experience.
Excellent customer experience is vital to the overall success of your contact centers. Knowing how to improve your contact or call center experience is the key to the growth and competitiveness of your business.
What Is a Contact or Call Center Experience?
A contact center experience involves all the consumer touchpoints with your customer service team. It includes every social media interaction, chat encounter, inbox message, email or call—whether a consumer is reaching out to request a refund, log a complaint or ask for information about a product or service.
Customer contact center experiences may be impacted by several factors:
- The amount of time your team takes to resolve queries
- Channel availability and whether you’re capable of serving customers in their channel of choice
- The self-service solutions you provide
- The user-friendliness and navigation of your website, app and platforms
- The overall efficiency and knowledge of your contact center agents
Customer Call Centers vs. Contact Centers
While these terms are often used interchangeably, a call center typically provides customer service only by phone. In contrast, a customer contact center can offer your customers an omnichannel hub to interact with your team on the channel they prefer.
- Social media
- SMS/MMS
- Chatbots
- Mobile apps
- Phone calls
The Importance of Contact Center Customer Experience
A contact center experience goes beyond resolving queries and answering calls on time—it’s about building loyalty and strengthening relationships with your consumers.
Contact centers are at the core of your business. The experiences your customers have when they engage with your agents can have a massive impact. If consumers have a positive experience, they will be your greatest advocates and allies. But if they have a disappointing encounter, they may leave your brand for good and share why on multiple platforms.
A contact center experience is a vital strategy to help your organization:
- Build meaningful relationships with customers
- Reduce your costs to serve
- Generate positive feedback and recommendations
According to Forrester’s contact center research, U.S. customer experience (CX) index rankings are declining despite 80% of business leaders claiming that CX is a high priority for them. Focusing on your contact center customer experience can be a crucial differentiator for your business.
Keeping Customers Happy With an Exceptional Contact Call Center
Call center customer satisfaction and happiness depend on a few key aspects:
- Wait times: Minimizing time spent on hold is an essential element in satisfying callers. To keep consumers happy, your agents need to serve them quickly and handle queries efficiently. You need sophisticated software to help your employees speed up call resolution times and deliver digital self-service options. Self-service frees your agents to address more complex matters that require a human touch.
- Agent experience: Your call center agents should be equipped with intelligent tools to help them get context and history when a customer calls in. They can also benefit from innovative technology that provides real-time scripts and prompts to serve the customer best.
- Channel collaboration: Consumers expect your call center staff to know about previous interactions and issues on other channels without them having to repeat themselves. Getting your reps to serve customers in an omnichannel way requires software that bridges gaps between platforms and departments. This cross-collaboration functionality will give call center reps access to information from chatbots, previous calls, emails, social interactions and in-store interactions.
- Customer feedback: One way to improve customer call center experiences is by asking consumers what they want. Engaging with customers will show that you value them and are interested in building authentic relationships with them.
Call centers will remain important in helping customers experience the human element in service. You can elevate CX by advancing your conventional call centers with technology to ensure you meet your consumers’ expectations.
Types of Customer Contact Centers—And How You Can Improve Them
There are multiple types of contact center infrastructures to leverage. To maximize the effectiveness of contact center models, you should consider insights on customer experiences for each. Here are four main contact center types and guidance on improving them to ensure customer satisfaction.
1. Outbound Contact Centers
Outbound contact centers are critical in proactively engaging with your customers and prospects. Instead of waiting for customers to contact you, you can reach out to them to upsell, cross-sell or complete transactions. Outbound calls offer a chance to provide personalized assistance and cultivate solid relationships.
To improve your outbound contact center experiences, you can:
- Leverage data: Use available information to understand audience needs and which consumers may respond positively to outreach.
- Maintain meticulous records: Keep detailed notes on lead generation and consumer preferences so you can tailor when, why and how you contact customers and prospects.
- Keep offers relevant: Use your records and systems to ensure outreach is relevant to the consumer and related to topics that interest them.
2. Inbound Contact Centers
Inbound contact centers are call centers where consumers phone you to resolve queries. You may use software like Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) or an interactive voice response (IVR) to streamline inbound calls. The software helps route, track and manage calls. It also gives your agents valuable consumer information, like call history.
To enhance your inbound contact center experiences, you can:
- Use technology: Technology will help direct consumers to the correct department seamlessly and reduce the need for customers to repeat themselves. The software will also give your agents information at their fingertips to serve customers effectively, improving experiences.
- Cross-train agents: Customers see your organization as one unit. That means agents need training on all aspects of your business to give consumers a unified experience. This way, if a customer phones the service center to find out information about a product, your team will be equipped to answer questions without transferring the call. Cross-training will also help sales reps deal with service queries that may arise during upselling calls.
- Optimize wait times: Customers expect speedy service. To support your team and minimize hold times, use software that offers self-service functionalities and IVR to route consumers to the correct department quickly.
3. Multichannel Contact Centers
Multichannel contact centers go beyond phone calls and allow customers to engage with your team on multiple channels—phone, email, chat, social media and SMS/MMS. Multichannel contact centers offer greater flexibility to help your team serve customers on their preferred channel.
To ensure a positive customer experience, multichannel contact centers should:
- Know what channels customers prefer and engage on those channels
- Resolve queries efficiently, no matter the preferred channel
- Ensure multiple departments have access to customer data to deliver personalized solutions and enhanced customer experiences
4. Omnichannel Contact Centers
With omnichannel contact centers, your customers can engage with you on multiple channels that are integrated rather than operating independently. The result is a more seamless user experience. Consumers can switch between channels without losing information.
Omnichannel contact centers prioritize cohesive experiences, whether customers reach out to your organization via social media messages, chats, SMS, calls or emails. To establish these centers, you must create a unified cloud-based or virtual contact center hub to serve customers as soon as they reach out.
To improve your omnichannel contact center experience:
- You must understand customer engagement and be able to identify the best channel depending on the nature of customer interactions.
- Your organization should use data to meet consumer expectations, responding to them when and where they want.
- Your business must leverage sophisticated technology to provide seamless transitions and a cross-channel experience.
Boost Your Call Center Customer Experience With CSG Solutions
CSG provides organizations with award-winning software solutions to help boost contact center experiences.
CSG Xponent
CSG Xponent will help your organization drive loyalty with each interaction. Xponent enables seamless omnichannel engagement through one solution, which provides:
- Simple integration: Xponent enables your organization to connect existing data and customer engagement solutions to offer personalized experiences.
- Data access: Get actionable insights from real-time data to help you tailor customer interactions.
- Rich insights: Xponent enables you to view and manage the entire customer life cycle in one place.
- Rapid launch capabilities: Our quick-start library of prebuilt integrations and journeys helps you get started fast.
CSG Bill Explainer
CSG Bill Explainer helps you streamline your billing processes, offering more than a transactional experience. The bill and payment journey can be a make-or-break moment for customers. Reduce bill confusion and call center volumes with custom microsites explaining the whats and whys to your consumers.
CSG Bill Explainer:
- Simplifies the billing experience, helping customers pay with one click
- Provides proactive billing communications with customers
- Strengthens your customer relationships, loyalty and bill comprehension
- Improves billing operational efficiency
CSG Encompass
If you’re a telco looking to start boosting CX and improve the employee experience while also driving revenue growth in your contact center, give your contact center agents the agent desktop built for telco.
Designed for communication service providers (CSPs), CSG Encompass provides an agent desktop that empowers your agents and will supercharge your operations. Encompass delivers modern, out-of-the-box capabilities to facilitate better customer interactions while also generating revenue.
Speak to the CSG Experts to Optimize Your Contact Center Experience
CSG will help you accelerate your growth and provide consumers with first-rate experiences. We have over four decades of experience helping thousands of companies deliver frictionless contact center solutions.
Contact a CSG expert today to learn more about our future-ready solutions.
