Technology and services are must haves in our fast paced, hectic lives. We go along smoothly from one task to another until there is a hiccup. These disruptions can be harmless or throw us completely off balance.
With our lives disrupted, we have to do something to restore order and get things back on track. We might go to the website and read FAQs, or ask a friend for advice. When all else fails, however, we may have to admit defeat and make the dreaded call to customer service.
One of our main objectives at InMoment is to create products that get rid of the sense of impending doom customers associate with contact centers, and replace it with a state of resolution and peace. We are frequently asked, “How do we prevent this from happening?” or “Where can we learn what issues our customers may face so we can correct them before there is an issue?”
As a leader in the customer experience industry, we know where the answer lies: data. For each of our clients, their website, chat, voice of employee, and contact center data are rich with information about what the customer is experiencing and the solutions that can resolve it.
Here are some quick tips on how to harvest this data and use it to resolve your customers issues in the contact center—maybe even before they happen:
Explore your contact center data.
Contact centers that are not part of an organization’s primary business are commonly not included in strategy sessions. Their offices are either located off-site or their jobs are outsourced to reduce costs. In many organizations I work with, the contact center is viewed a necessary evil that few understand and even fewer want to interact with.
Despite this sentiment, organizations must leverage this valuable resource. CX centric leaders recognize that they can use the data such as net promoter score and customer feedback to shape their business. Remember: the contact center is where at risk customers who want to be retained interact with your organization.
The phone or chat agents who speak with your customers become aware of what products or services cause your customers the most pain and what steps need to be taken to resolve the customer issues. They keep detailed notes and code each interaction to track quantities. IVRs route calls to varying teams based on customer inputs.
In short, contact centers have mountains of data that can be sifted through to quantify the root causes their impact your customers. Don’t discount their effectiveness!
Create reporting that includes all customer touchpoint data.
Most organizations have data scattered all over. There’s website data on one server, marketing and sales data on another, and our contact center data stored in yet another server. We access it using differing tools from CRMs, data imports, social media platforms, or custom queries of data warehouses to try and explore what our customers are saying and feeling. This simply is not an effective process; in order to get a complete picture of their customers touchpoints, organizations need to de-silo their data.
Many of our clients import data into the InMoment system and pair it up with voice of customer feedback. Once the data is accessible in a reporting platform, our clients can then create custom dashboards to compare customer sentiment across each touchpoint. This capability would simply not be possible with siloed data.
Establish cross functional teams to tackle issues with perspective from all departments.
Once you can see where the issues lie, you can tackle them one by one. My most successful clients start by creating a cross functional teams that can evaluate each need and provide every department—including the contact center— with the opportunity to give their unique point of view and ensure that the solution has a positive impact on their customer base. The goal of each member on this team is to provide insights gathered from their department’s experience and data to the greater committee as they work to improve the customer experience for the organization as a whole.
It’s important to make sure that each member of the team is heard. The most successful committees create a safe environment where each member’s perspective is considered, regardless of title or department. The committee usually has a sponsor who can act as the voice of reason, making sure everyone is heard and representing the committee to the rest of the organization.
Establish a voice of employee program to gather information from front line employees.
Voice of employee programs help everyone feel heard, provide new insights into customer issues, and allow team members to provide creative solutions to those problems. Voice of employee programs act as a follow up asking the team member if they were able to resolve the customer’s issue and if they were empowered to take care of it themselves or escalate. This provides you with a whole new data set to consider when facing problems in the contact center and in the organization as a whole.
The important thing to remember when setting out to improve the contact center customer experience is that doing anything is better than nothing. Start with the steps that work best for you and your team.
Network with other departments to start the flow of information. Find a way to measure the touchpoints across your entire organization. Work together to solve even the most complex of issues. Don’t try to know it all, or hope someone else will fix it. Listen to your team members and you’ll find you all want the same thing: To provide a world class customer experience.
Ready to get a big-picture look at your customer experience and contact center data? Read this InMoment white paper on the case for data unification and how it will benefit you! Click here to download Customer Experience Management: The Danger of Data Silos