At the end of the day, company success always comes back to customer satisfaction. It doesn’t matter what industry a business is part of—everyone from hairdressers to contact centers need to be on top of their game when it comes to the customer experience. Contact centers are often a customer’s first point of interaction with a company, so it’s essential that every customer has a great experience; that’s the only real way to ensure that the brand retains a positive image.

To do that, contact centers need to morph into what Aspect (News - Alert) Software refers to as Customer Engagement Centers. To help contact centers with this shift, Aspect has released its Contact Center Self-Assessment Benchmark. The goal of this report is to understand how enterprises are embracing this change via people, process and technology improvements. 

“Our vision was to collect data and produce insights that would be valuable to the participating organizations’ understanding of their own operation as well as provide a measurement against their peers. We aimed to help answer a question many of them ask everyday – ‘How are other enterprises generating the greatest return from their customer and employee-focused technology investments?'” said Ken Ewell, SVP of Aspect Professional Services. “We have been talking with organizations about these topics, as well as collecting and refining our data over the past 18 months. We feel that this has resulted in a meaningful and relevant report which provides a great basis for dialogue. Our benchmarking survey readouts to date have been well received and will continue to evolve as we learn more by interacting with companies around these highly relevant issues.”

The resulting data was quite illuminating. The majority of survey respondents stated that they have the ability to meet or exceed their organization’s defined customer experience. That would be great news, except for the fact that only 27 percent of those respondents feel that they meet those goals consistently. The reason for this lack of consistency can be seen in some of the other survey findings.

For instance, half of the organizations surveyed lack a migration path to a modern IVR and confess to providing a less than optimal self-service experience with their current IVR solution. Self-service options are becoming more and more popular, especially for callers who have “quick-fix” problems. So having an inadequate IVR is certainly not the best way to exceed customer expectations.

Likewise, only 34 percent of enterprise respondents feel that their agents’ skills and competencies are fully aligned with the channels and interaction preferences of the digital-first consumer. Digital channels are growing in popularity pretty rapidly. More people feel comfortable reaching out through the Web than they do calling and speaking to an actual agent. However, it doesn’t matter if a contact center has the best possible omnichannel solutions in place to help agents interact with customers via digital means, if the agents themselves don’t have the skills or training to do so successfully. A contact center can have the greatest solutions in the world in place, but none of that matters without proper agent training.

All in all, Aspect’s Contact Center Self-Assessment Benchmark shined a light on some of the biggest problems facing contact centers that are looking to transform into Customer Engagement Centers. Thanks to changes in consumer behavior, a preference for automation and self-service, and an emphasis on secure solutions, it’s more important than ever for contact centers to hop on the customer engagement bandwagon. Organizations need to provide the best service for customers by not only implementing the best workforce optimization solutions, but teaching agents how to use said WFO solutions effectively. If they don’t, customers will find other brands that are willing to go the extra mile for them.