Call Center Management Featured Article
Excellence in Customer Experience: A Result of Great People Supported by Real-Time Data
At its heart, good customer service is an intensely personal, human thing. The best customer support interactions require person-to-person contact, and usually involve people who go above and beyond to show they care about a customer. (On the flip side, the worst customer support interactions are usually also human-to-human interactions.) From this, it might be tempting to conclude that it’s people and not technology who make the biggest difference. Some companies may draw this conclusion and use it as an excuse not to modernize. This is a big mistake.
The best-trained and most experienced agents in the world won’t be able to make a difference if customers cannot connect to them, or if the agents simply don’t have the right information. Humans may have the empathy required to craft a high-quality customer experience, but if those humans are busy toggling between 12 applications to try and find the right answers, the empathy won’t mean much. Today’s contact center solutions are designed to provide real-time answers and monitor the customer experience, so it’s critical that contact centers don’t lag in adopting these technologies, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software (News - Alert) CEO Chuck Ciarlo.
“Innovation often comes slow to the contact center, so while there are now a multitude of effective tools available to transform a wealth of data into real-time solutions, managers may not have the means to maximize this potential,” he wrote. “Downtime is one area where this gap is especially noticeable. When agents experience downtime, it should be leveraged to enhance productivity by making good use of that time.”
Technology today isn’t only about an effort to route calls correctly and find the right answers. As Ciarlo notes, it can help boost productivity and enable companies to get the most out of their existing human resources. Bored contact center agents are to no one’s benefit, and some solutions – workforce managing and scheduling notably – help ensure that agents’ time is used wisely and effectively. Ciarlo says companies should ask themselves some basic questions: Does your contact center have intraday automation that triggers real-time workforce adjustments during a shift? Can you change staffing levels when there’s a decrease in demand, freeing agents to begin a training session?
Most of these newer solutions are about leveraging data to mine intelligence and make effective and timely decisions in real-time that can help improve performance and quality of service on the spot.
“The goal of all of this is providing excellent customer service,” wrote Ciarlo. “When customers are happy, the business thrives. One study by the Harvard Business Review found a whopping 240 percent annual revenue difference between customers who rate their experience as ‘great’ and those who said it was ‘poor.’ Data can deliver more ‘greats.’ But it must be used in real time, and that may be the most essential aspect of contact center technology.
While excellence is mandatory in great customer support today, it can only be applied if the underlying structure exists to enable agents to be effective. Absent of this critical real-time intelligence, agents have little more to offer customers than a sympathetic ear.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi