Wouldn’t every contact center like to boast that its managers are fully aware of its own operational costs or that its leaders are very familiar with the elements that jeopardize its customer interactions?

Yes, we believe they would. However, that case is usually not the norm when it comes to larger contact centers. Tim Moynihan (News - Alert), VP of Marketing for Empirix, recently shed some light on factors that contribute to the drop in positive customer experiences, and the factors that contribute to them.

In a staggering statistic, Moynihan revealed that the company had done its research and found that $83 billion dollars is lost each year in the U.S. because of poor customer service experiences. In broad surveys, he told the audience during a recent webinar that 79 percent of customers experience poor quality services, and 68 percent of customer leave a business because of poor service.

The worst part? Dissatisfied customers tell up to 10 other people about it. Yikes.

So what are some of the key contributing factors to poor customer satisfaction? Among them, according to Moynihan, are transferred calls (call center customer satisfaction drops 15 percent with each one), the lack of access to real-time data, hidden network issues, and lack of appropriate testing.

But performing adequate monitoring involves three components, said Moynihan, including “preempting, performing, and predicting methodology.” To preempt a customer problem, a contact center needs solutions to validate network performance before customers go live. To properly perform, it needs solutions to ensure ongoing great customer experience, and to predict, you’ve got to have an analytics system.

TOM Lynch, director of Architecture for Empirix (News - Alert) also mentioned during the webinar that testing is key. “With testing, the premise is to test in layers. Start with infrastructure testing…move to voice self service testing, on through CTI (News - Alert) routing, then finally testing the agent desktop which typically involve virtual agents.”

He mentioned that including different types of transactions is important, but the key point is that you’re testing the entire infrastructure with no blind spots.

Check out the whole webinar here to gain more insight into how Empirix helps contact center’s assure themselves of the best ROI, and what types of solutions are the best for your contact center.