3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

“What is it that makes a great customer experience” is one of those questions that’s a bit like, “How long is a string?” Depending on your industry, your business, your customer demographics and where the customer is in the sales lifecycle could potentially make for different answers. Some say it’s making customer support quick and easy. Others say it’s personalization that counts. Still more would say a great customer experience is one that doesn’t require speaking to a live person at all.

All the core of all these factors, however, is the same thing. Customer experience heavily depends on how you make the customer feel, not what you do for him or her according to a recent article by  Stephan Belbos for Brand Embassy.

“Customer experience is emotion,” he wrote. “Plain and simple. It is how a company makes a customer feel. That’s what experience really means, and that’s what really matters in any interaction with a customer. Why do customer emotions matter? Because a customer is willing to spend more with; to talk positively about; and to stay loyal to companies that provide positive experiences. And of course, customer service is a big part of any customer’s experience with a brand. The customer really wants to feel good and he or she will reward you for delivering a good experience.”

It's not exactly practical, however, to put “Make customers feel good” at the top of your 2017 to-do list. Belbos writes that there are three emotions that drive the customer experience…three are good, and three are bad. The good ones include surprise, happiness and gratitude. The bad ones include anger, frustration and disappointment. It should be simple to induce the first three and exclude the latter three…right?

To do so, however, it will be essential to discover when (and how) you’re surprising customers in a positive way, or making them happy and grateful. You can continue doing more of it, and less of the activities that bring about anger, frustration and disappointment. Call monitoring can go a long way toward making these connections, particularly third-party remote call monitoring.

“If we agree that customer experience is important, and it’s clear we do, we need to start finding ways to surprise and delight customers, and we also need to pay attention to their language so we can cut through the noise and recognize how the customer is feeling at any given moment of a customer service exchange,” wrote Belbos. “Knowing the customer better is the key to understanding how he or she feels.”

There is no way to know customers and hear their language better than call monitoring, which – whether using speech technology or human listeners – can listen for positive keywords and phrases such as “so happy” or “pleased” to spot the good calls, and competitor names or “mad” and “close my account” for the bad calls. Finding a critical mass of good and bad calls can help contact centers establish best practices to increase the number of good calls, and pinpoint the behavior that leads to bad calls.