Communication is changing, customer experience solutions can bring huge benefits
The way people communicate is changing. Businesses not only need to make sure that they are enabling their customers to interact with them in the way they wish to – via Voice, Email, Web, SMS/WhatsApp or Social – but they need to ensure that they can track the customer experience and understand what customers are raising via these platforms. Having a communication strategy should be at the heart of every business, the way we engage with customers could determine if we get repeat business from those customers. This is where a Contact Centre solution can add real value to business and allow them to understand how their customers want to engage, what is being asked, when busy times are, ensure the customer experience level is met and allow businesses to make the decisions based on real data.
Contact Centre or CX Solutions benefit businesses in the following way:
- Omni-Channel is key
- The rise and power of Social Media over the past 10 years has been impressive. End users are looking to engage with more than just family and friends on the platforms now and if communication via these platforms don’t have rules and aren’t monitored one bad customer experience can reach a large number of people and have a big impact on a business. Contact Centres will allow businesses to monitor social media engagement and will allow businesses to look at the data and train their staff accordingly.
- Almost everyone has a mobile phone now, being able to communicate with users either by SMS or by WhatsApp is a must for any business looking to give a better customer experience.
- Online continues to grow, whether it’s doing your weekly shop or ordering, buying TV packages, ordering a new phone or the more luxury items that you’ve spent hours researching (online of course). Allowing customers to talk to someone via your Website, ask questions about – stock, delivery times, raising issues. Making these interactions easy and direct from your Website will enhance your customer experience and increase the chances of gaining repeat business from your customers. More and more business are looking to bots to help them deal with those quick easy questions from their customers. With Contact centre solutions you can.
- Email communication, while a lot of us wish we could reduce our emails customers still like to be able to send an email and get a response in a timely manner. Using a contact centre will allow you to monitor and report on the incoming and outgoing emails to ensure customers get the responses they need and ensure any issues are resolved.
- It’s good to talk as someone once said and voice should still be a key part to any business when it comes to their communication strategy. Being able to manage your call flows easily and ensuring customers get through to the right people easily and quickly is key to giving people a great customer experience. Deploying the right contact centre will allow you to deliver this to your customers to ensure they don’t have to go into multi layered IVRs, wait in lengthy call queues and they get their questions/issues resolved easily and quickly.
- Data is King
- Being able to make the right business decisions is paramount, data plays a huge part in being able to make sure those decisions are correct. This is where a contact centre will deliver. Being able to understand where the customer experience is falling down, where it is strong and where it might need improving will help every business with customer engagement improve and make the right decisions to win repeat business from the customers they are working with as well as making the first interaction with themselves easy to ensure they are winning customers.
- CRM platforms are critical to all companies with a customer base. The challenge for all companies is ensuring that this database is up to date and all engagement with customers is recorded. Making this easy for your workforce to do is key. Integrating your phone system or contact centre solution with your CRM system is a crucial element to any deployment. Giving your workforce instant access to the data of the customer that is calling enhances the customer experience but also allows the workforce to quickly see notes, issues, orders etc that the customer might be calling about. It also allows whoever is engaging with the customer to update their account easily so the CRM system should always be up to date.
- Performance & Workforce Management
- Many organisations struggle with managing and improving employee performance in their customer service departments. With a plethora of systems and data in their contact centres, back-office and branch operations, it’s easy for managers to drown in data, even when very little of it may be directly useful. Performance management can capture and aggregate data across multiple systems while providing a single, standardised framework for efficiently tracking, managing, and improving individual, team, and organisational performance.
- The volume of interactions and work in modern contact centres can be moving targets, especially in larger organisations. Your forecasting and scheduling processes can grow very complex and become increasingly difficult to manage. Scheduling the right people with the right skills at the right times can be a daunting challenge. Workforce Management helps you solve these problems. With Workforce management you can optimise your schedules and streamline your workforce management processes, reduce the risk of overstaffing, minimise overtime, increase employee satisfaction by providing them preferred schedules, and automate routine administrative tasks which frees your supervisors to focus on the more important and engaging parts of their jobs.
Two of the key elements that I believe are often overlooked, or don’t get the attention they should get as part of any new voice system are – Devices and training. Both of these elements are key to ensuring that your business get the return on it’s investment and that your staff are happy and comfortable using the new solution and customers will then get the experience that the solution is designed to deliver:
- Handsets aren’t dead, but there’s a device for everyone
- A crucial element to any deployment of a new phone system, especially one that enables remote work, work from anywhere, mobile clients, is ensuring that staff are using the right end point. The days of rolling out the same handset to all members of staff and expecting them to work solely from one desk should be forgotten and put into the history books. Business should now be putting a real focus on end points and what each department/person should be using. (So much so, I’m going write another blog solely on end points in the coming weeks). If you have got a lot of staff working in an open office environment, taking lots of calls, make sure you take the time to evaluate what devices are best suited for the environment, your staff and what will give the best customer experience (minimising the background noise).
- Every day is a school day, make your staff comfortable with the new solution
- Companies are always looking to maximise the ROI on the solution they’ve invested in. One of the best ways to do this is to ensure that your staff are comfortable with the new platform and that they know how to navigate their way around it. If you can get your staff maximising the solution from day one you will instantly see the return for the business.
Contact centres can add real business value to any business that engages with its customers. If you are only using voice to do this at the moment, don’t get left behind and give your customers the choice on how they reach you and make sure you can report and take the business insights from these communications. Come and talk to NFON about how we can help deliver a solution that gives you a better customer experience, give you cutting edge technology, makes your staff happy with the new solution and help drive your business forward.
