It’s the make or break. It’s the cherry on top or the last straw that broke the camel’s back. The customer experience (CX) of your contact centre is what helps your customers decide: should they stay, or should they go?

Customer-centric businesses are 60% more profitable than those that aren’t, according to a Forbes article written by Blake Morgan, customer experience futurist, author and keynote speaker.

Most contact centres have already started their transformation to become customer centric. However, without an expert’s guidance, it can be a little overwhelming trying to gauge the progress of a contact centre against others.

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Here are 5 markers of a contact centre that has the “CX factor”:

1. Conversational experiences that build connections

A contact centre that offers omnichannel experiences that meet their customers where they are is on the right track. Can that be taken a step further?

The delivery service provider Bolt was able to achieve a 40% increase in its driver registration rate by integrating WhatsApp for Business into its existing solution, according to Orediretse Molebaloa from Infobip. There were three critical elements to this success: chatbots, the conversations feature and the moments feature. Here’s where the real value gets unpacked: the moments feature allows the contact centre to trigger specific, segmented messaging based on certain events, creating a hyper-personalised customer experience.

Contact centres have an unwritten obligation to create personalised experiences for their customers. But it’s not an all-you-can-eat buffet. It’s about choosing the right solutions. Many contact centres have multiple providers to handle different channels across different functions of their organisation. This makes getting a full view of the customer journey a challenge. Instead, Molebaloa suggested an integrated approach to communication across channels and business functions that is scalable and agile.

2. Making the customer feel heard

Contact centre speech analytics is not a nice to have, it’s essential. The golden data is there, it is simply a matter of implementing the mining process.

The ability to track and trend behaviours over time is the key to unlocking the value of speech analytics. Listening to every conversation gives a concrete, holistic view of which interventions are working, and which are not, making sure that contact centres can course correct in near real-time.

According to Corey Springett from Callbi Speech Analytics, a contact centre can achieve in three major areas by implementing speech analytics:

Direct cost savings
One such example of direct cost savings is the ability to reduce dead air or silent time on calls. Excessive silent time is usually an indication that the agent is searching for information and requires more training.

Revenue generation
A quick example of this is which agents are making use of benefit statements are which are not? Which benefit statement is producing the best results? Increase revenue generation by increasing effectivity.

Customer and agent experience
With speech analytics, agents can no longer disguise negative conversations and interactions. Additionally, high-risk customers, such as those who have threatened legal action, can be flagged to be sensitively handled.

According to Springett, speech analytics unlocks the difference between information and intelligence – the difference being the ability to quantify.

3. Reaching the customer

The rise of TrueCaller and other call block software has been a challenge for outbound contact centres. Often these call centres will be burning through numbers quickly and have no way to gain insight as to why.

According to Dalton Wilds from BullTech, the best thing for outbound contact centres is the power to manage CLIs, gain insights on those CLIs, and make decisions based on the insights. Dalton notes that customers have seen as much as a 30% increase to answer success rates (ASR) shortly after the implementation of CLI Manager.

One of the most attractive features of CLI Manager is the VIP Fallback function. Should a certain high-value customer be unreachable for a set amount of time, they can be added to the VIP fallback database. This database will then be contacted with the top-performing number. This is automated and the database is refreshed at set periods.

For any contact centre, this kind of real-time adaption is critical to CX.

4. Understand customer and employee experience

By understanding customer and employee experiences, contact centres can drive retention, processes, and profitability. Believe it or not, this can be done in a sophisticatedly simple manner.

According to Marcus Thorne from Smoke CI, their product agnostic, Voice of the Customer solution was able to deliver outstanding results for Standard Bank. Through data insights and verbatim response analyses provided by Smoke CI, the bank implemented niche, target interventions which improved all key metrics.

Essentially the goal is to truly understand the sentiment of the customer and the employee. It’s about actionable data that grows the lifetime and value of customers and employees.

5. The perfect agent

The quality of contact centre agents is pivotal to the performance of a contact centre. The successful recruitment of these specialised agents is therefore imperative.

The cost of not placing the ideal fit for your organisation is time — induction time and training time. While this is happening, the contact centre agent is not performing at their peak, taking longer to resolve queries and understand the client, placing unnecessary pressure on both the contact centre and the agent.

The optimal solution is to assign the task to the most specialised party. According to Jessica Schutte of SelectONE, a comprehensive talent management solution that specialises in contact centre recruitment, it is imperative that your recruiter understand the four strategic pillars of any CX operation, namely reducing costs, operational agility, increased revenue and improved customer experience.

The CX factor in a nutshell

If a contact centre has actively pursued conversational experience, the ability to understand their customer, the ability to reach the customer, the ability to gain insights into employee and customer satisfaction, and is recruiting and retaining the right agents, it is well on its way to having the CX factor.

If any of these elements are missing in your contact centre, contact Ingrid Green at [email protected] or visit pivotaldata.co.za.

About Pivotal Data
Pivotal Data is a specialist provider of contact centre and enterprise communication solutions. We assist organisations of all sizes by consulting, implementing, maintaining, and managing solutions that simplify complexity and create agile, customer-centric organisations. Our solutions provide our customers with the ability to make every interaction engaging, insightful and profitable, helping grow businesses and improve competitive market positions.