Drive Efficiency In Contact Resolution
Improving efficiency in resolving customer contacts is a significant challenge for businesses, but it’s a worthwhile effort. It’s crucial for protecting your organization’s financial stability, retaining customers, and promoting growth. However, it’s important to remember that delivering a positive customer experience (CX) is equally important.
You Can Achieve Everything You Desire
Balancing efficiency and customer experience in your business's contact center is crucial for growth. Research shows that poor customer experience can lead to loss of customers. To achieve this balance, it's important to not only track and measure performance using key performance indicators (KPIs), but also to re-evaluate and optimize the overall operations of the contact center. Efficiency, in this context, means not just cost-cutting, but also elevating the customer experience for sustainable business success.
Customer-First Customer Experience
Achieving a positive customer experience involves meeting their expectations. For the majority of consumers in the U.S., this means a quick resolution to their issue. Many consumers now expect to have their complex issues resolved through a single interaction with one representative on a single channel. The challenge for organizations is to find a balance between efficient call center operations and providing a customer experience that prioritizes first contact resolution.
Save KPIs for Future Use
It may be tempting to rely solely on key performance indicators (KPIs) when trying to improve efficiency and agent performance. However, KPIs are most useful for measuring the effectiveness of changes made and setting new benchmarks, rather than identifying opportunities for improvement. Additionally, reorganizing your contact center operations can bring about some efficiencies, but lasting change that benefits both the business and the customer requires a deeper examination of processes and customer interactions.
Empowering Customers to Solve Issues on their Own
Customers should use your contact center as a last resort, not the first option for resolving issues. One of the most efficient and cost-effective ways to decrease contact volume is by providing self-service options. Many customers now expect your organization to offer self-service options, and many have already visited your website before calling.
Having a well-maintained set of online FAQs, customer forums, conversational or visual IVR system or a dedicated chatbot trained to respond to common customer issues can deflect common call drivers. This allows your agents to focus on more complex issues and customer interactions. In addition to reducing contact volumes and increasing customer satisfaction, self-service options also significantly decrease CX-related costs. The average cost of a self-service customer resolution is $0.10 per interaction, compared with $8.01 per customer for resolution through live
Analyze and Automate
Different touchpoints hold varying levels of significance to customers. To distinguish your brand through customer experience, it's crucial to identify the most crucial interactions. Some touchpoints evoke more emotions than others. To achieve sustainable business growth, effort should be focused on providing exceptional customer experiences that align with the brand promise, specifically in high-impact moments. Additionally, tailoring experiences to specific customer segments based on their lifetime value can be effective.
Empower Your Team
Artificial intelligence (AI) powered speech and data analytics enable capturing more data, more quickly and more accurately than manual input by agents. This provides real-time insights that can be used to optimize processes and improve agent's role, and identify gaps in agent training and potential improvements to existing scripts to speed up resolution.
The next step is to apply robotic process automation (RPA) to automate repetitive tasks that would otherwise be handled by agents.
For example, 45% of customer call time is spent by the agent searching for information while the caller is on hold or waiting to be transferred. By using RPA to capture and input data or automatically retrieve knowledgebase content, average handle times can be significantly reduced. RPA and automation can reduce as much as 29% of contact center agent's workload, while also reducing wait times, errors, and cost to serve by 25%.
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