Why Customer Experience (CX) Is More Relevant Than Ever

The automated, digital direction of our industry has some insiders asking whether person-to-person customer experience (CX) is still a relevant concern.

Consider this: The call center is your company’s primary, and often only, point of direct contact with your customers — the people who are using and paying for your services.

A large number of customers will make contact with your agents only once. A small group will interact with agents a second time.

Every call likely presents a one-time opportunity for your agents to:

• Represent your company and its brand
• Showcase its superior customer service
• Leave a lasting impression of competency and effectiveness

Perhaps those are 3 slightly different ways of saying the same thing, but the point is clear: When your call center has the opportunity to develop a relationship with the customer, they need to deliver service with the superior CX critical to successful customer engagements that will, in turn, drive customer satisfaction and strengthen brand loyalty.

What the Customer Wants from Your Call Center

When customers reach out to a call center for customer support, they demand the following:

• Answer my call fast
• Have my basic information ready
• Solve my problem politely, confidently, and efficiently

Unless a call center and its agents satisfy these demands, a customer is likely to look for another organization who is (or leaves the impression of being) better able to meet their needs.

Leaving the customer feeling that their problem was handled satisfactorily and effectively is a critical component of high-performance CX and quality customer service that creates life-long customers and crucial brand loyalty.

Driving Superior CX

How does a call center’s management team know whether agents are meeting the customers’ demands and delivering an effective customer experience?

In large part, this determination comes down to metrics.

Key Metrics Provide Insight

We live in an age of statistics and analytics, with technology providing superior, fact-based insights to guide operational decisions that used to be made largely on gut feeling.

Advances in industry technology continue to shape best practices, including the utilization of management reporting, speech analytics, and call scoring (just to name a few) — modern tools that allow for crucial performance measurements to be gathered.

Critical performance analytics may include:

• First-call resolution
• Response time
• Adherence to schedule
• Quality of interaction
• Agent stats (calls per day & average talk time)

Superior analytics lead to more accurate assessments of a call center team’s strengths and weaknesses — a clearer picture of whether the customers’ needs are being met in the way they prefer.

Analytic Insight Identifies Areas for Improvement

Analytics answer some important questions that identify actionable items for a supervisory team, such as:

• Are we resolving issues on the first call?
• Are customers waiting too long?
• Is excessive holding leading to customer dissatisfaction?
• Is the number of agents sufficient to meet call demand?
• Are agents using key phrases and positive language that fuel customer assurance and confidence in our company’s ability to solve their problems?

With such unbiased quantitative information at their fingertips, the management team can identify actionable items, determine what protocols to improve, and make decisions about the necessary means for implementing such improvements.

Training programs can be designed, schedules adjusted, and new technology employed to increase the quality of CX and solidify customer loyalty, developing relationships with people who will continue to use your company’s products and services, possibly for years to come.

Without these critical metrics and analytics to inform their decisions, a management team is mostly flying blind.

Our Custom Reporting Delivers the Data

With customer satisfaction and loyalty hanging on single interactions, improvements to policies, procedures, and scheduling that affect customer experience need to be made on more than instinct.

Analytics are helping management teams throughout the call center industry refine best practices and provide superior CX.

Let the experts at JBHworks craft custom reporting applications that deliver meaningful analytics and insights your call center needs to satisfy its unique business requirements, drive CX improvements, and increase overall customer satisfaction.