The modern contact center is always developing and contact centers need to evolve with time and technology. Before evolving your contact center, there are always components to be taken care of for improving and offering superior quality to all customers, which is an Effortless Customer Experience. If a contact center provides an effortless customer experience, the call center needs to develop a definition that the employees can relate to and deliver.
To stay ahead of the competition, it’s important for all call center leaders to have an eye on trends. Customer Experience and Service has evolved over a decade with digital advancements. To set yourself apart in the market, you need to incorporate the customer service strategy focused on delivering an effortless customer experience, which includes go where your customers are, engage every employee, collect operational insights and gather competitive information. Here are 5 key differentiators that you need to recognize for a successful customer experience:
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Customer experience
Customer experience reflects how the customer feels about your company and product. It is the mode of interaction between a customer and an organization over the duration of the relationship. Happy and satisfied customers grow from being customers to being loyal advocates.
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Create an Omni-channel
Customers use various channels such as website, live chat, social media, and email. Businesses should be ready to deliver this effortless customer service on any channel. Creating an omni-channel experience for customers expect is crucial for success of any company.
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Engage all employees
The best designed processes and systems will only be effective if carried out by the employees of the company. Rewarding your team is very important. Creating a great culture will be translated straight to the customers. Creating a winning culture is one thing which I have seen over the years that will brings business to the next level.
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Operational insights
Using customer interactions to gather operational insights helps improve processes. This optimizes the customer experience approach, lower call volume and reduces repeat calls for similar problems and positively impacts the bottom line of business.
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Gather competitive information
Gathering competitive insights will help you identify more up-sell, cross-sell opportunities.
For a successful customer service, you need to make sure that you have the right employees to handle the customer service job who can deliver an effortless customer experience. The most important thing is to know what to look for in the potential candidates while interviewing them. The key is to understand who they are based on the answers they share during the interview. The days of hiring for Empathy are coming to an end, customers want their issue resolved on the first call therefore it’s important to hire people who can own the situation and take it to resolutions. This includes good communication, active listening, problem solvers and the right attitude to do the job. Hiring the right people that fit into the company culture helps to effectively serve your customers. A person needs to have a mind-set of effortless customer service, which is not only being ready to serve others but a willingness to go the extra mile for creating a truly positive and memorable customer experience and making customers happy. So, what type of employees does your company needs? The answer is simple – deliberate, detail-oriented people will go a long way in meeting the needs of your customers and for your company. The leaders here play a very important role. They are not only great examples for other team members to follow; they are excellent problem solvers, responsibility takers and decision makers. Leadership skills are critical in complicated situations when a customer expects someone to take the wheel and offer them a quick and efficient solution.
To stay ahead of the competition, it’s important for leaders to have an eye on trends that have the potential to accelerate. Technology will allow companies to communicate with the customer and add value in new ways. Some of the important innovative trends in customer service are:
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Contact centers as engagement centers
Today’s contact centers are seamless extensions of brands, and a place for constant feedback between your business and your customer’s ¬ a place where you can build personal relationships and transform customers into brand advocates.
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Customer experience
Offering an exceptional customer experience wins some loyal customers. A string of loyal customers who rave about your brand is one of the key things you need to beat the competition. Exceptional customer service is making the customers feel they are the most important for the few minutes you are interacting with them. You assure them that you will do that you can to make their day better.
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Live Chat
We see brands proactively start to initiate chat interactions where a customer is detected fumbling through their online support environment. Chat has emerged as the most natural channel for customers to interact though as it gives customers all-important privacy, as well as the freedom to drop and pick up conversations later.
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Social Support
Technology has made it easier for brands to provide a more compelling customer experience on social. It provides options to seamlessly take interactions off social media to a private phone call with an agent. The company’s Twitter account can tweet back to the customer with a custom link that works only for that customer. But in considering these emerging technologies, many brands are still very behind when it comes to social.
Being in this competitive market, I have always believed that a properly developed brand can be worth billions! It’s all about creating the right experience which makes Etech Global Services a market leader. Every once in a while we hear a story about a brand which delivers an incredible customer experience. The experience described needs to be carefully planned, organized, and executed. Your customers are the reason we are still in business, and our job is to serve the customers to the best of our ability. In my opinion, it does not only take a certain person to provide customer care but most importantly a culture that a company builds to deliver an exceptional customer experience. Excellent customer service must become a natural part of the company’s personality. As a business leader, it’s up to you to create a servant leadership culture, and to show (by your behavior) what it means to serve. Act as if your employees are your customers; then treat them that way. They will learn from your example; so whether you set a good or bad example, this is what your staff members will mirror. You are communicating to your employees what you value, and what you expect.
Here, technology plays a vital role to allow companies to communicate with customers and add value in new ways. However, most companies just aren’t there yet.
Like I discussed earlier regarding the technology advancement in contact centers, the most common question I have faced is – Will the new Artificial Intelligence technology remove people from work? I believe that people will take on more of a “problem solving” role, overseeing processes and recommendations to help drive business insights. When the idea of artificial intelligence comes to mind, everyone conjures up a different image. For example, some think of fully-automated robots that can function in human society. Others think of programs and software’s that can mimic one specific form of human intelligence. When we refer to artificial intelligence, we will be referring to the ability of a machine to perform human intelligence tasks equal to or better than people. We need to focus on the services that people and AI would provide together to tackle the problem at lightning speed. People will always be a very essential part of the process regardless what these machine learning and AI companies tout. Think about delivering services to a client. Most customer challenges are routine, but people play a very important role in addressing new issues, solving them the first time they appear and then consolidating the process into the system. Managing the unpredictable is where people work gets the most interesting, and that’s the future we’re moving into along with machine learning.
This blog was first published on LinkedIn.
