Summer has officially arrived and with it a few hot topics to add to your contact center reading list. Top blog posts in June included a look at work-life balance challenges in the contact center; customer expectations for a more personalized experience; how to improve communication and collaboration effectiveness and efficiency using tools you may already have; helping frontline agents to succeed as an effective communicators; and three best practices for leveraging VoC insights to achieve strategic value.
Promote Better Work-Life Balance in the Contact Center
Employment as a contact center agent has a lot to offer. Agents have access to state-of-the-art technology. They can work with peers who share the same demographics and interests, which leads to a spirit of camaraderie. In modern contact centers, the culture is customer-centric. This appeals to workers who enjoy communicating with others and strive to deliver superior customer care.
Leverage Customer Data to Deliver a Personalized Customer Experience
Customers are tired of being treated like numbers. They’re aware of how much of their information and feedback is being collected, and now consumers want the companies they do business with to use that data to provide a more personalized experience. According to a recent Accenture Pulse Check, 83% of consumers are willing to share their data to enable a personalized experience as long as: (1) businesses are transparent about how they are going to use the data, and (2) customers have control over it.
Use the Right Tools for Internal Communication
A few universal truths guide contact centers, and one is that everyone seeks “efficiency and effectiveness.” Efficiency includes timely responses and (relatively) short contact handling. Effectiveness means those responses are consistent and correct, and therefore bring closure. Lots of time and money gets spent in pursuit of these fundamentals, and yet the simplicity of these concepts gets betrayed by the complexity in achieving them.
Cautious Optimism… Taking Ownership of Communication
Cautious optimism is defined as “a feeling of general confidence regarding a situation and/or its outcome coupled with a readiness for possible difficulties or failure” (TheFreeDictionary.com). I had an interesting experience when I called my insurer the other day. I approached the call with “cautious optimism.” What made it interesting was the way the agent was able almost immediately to introduce calm to a situation that I anticipated would be difficult.
Unleash the Data in Your Contact Center to Achieve Enterprisewide Customer Experience Excellence
Transformation is happening in the market today. Transformation driven by the growing consumer preference for digital interactions using smartphones, tablets or computers. Transformation that is exponentially increasing the ways the voice of the customer (VoC) can reach you. This transformation, in turn, has increased the amount of data generated by customer interactions. Some organizations are overwhelmed by it. The data is scattered across different departmental silos without the means to pull it together into a cohesive, actionable whole.
