This is the first of two posts where we’ll explain our take on eight fundamentals we believe are essential to delivering the ultimate customer experience. None of these elements exist in a vacuum – each is as important as the others. The trick is in understanding how each plays its part, and in finding the right balance for your business. Having done that, it becomes an organisation-wide effort to maintain that balance, adjusting and adapting to market and other influences, so you stay at the top of your customer experience game.
1. Improve customer support and satisfaction
There’s a raft of different technologies on the market that will help you streamline your customer support, but technology is just a tool to help you reach the ends you desire. Your advisors need the right training and support from management if they’re going to be able to help your customers achieve their own ends – that is, get their business done quickly, easily, and on the first call.
And remember, customer satisfaction isn’t just the responsibility of your contact centre team. Everyone – from the CEO to the mailroom must be thinking “customer first” if you’re going to create a strong customer experience brand.
2. Let your customers choose how they connect
To slightly paraphrase Madonna, we’re living in a digital world. But we are still dealing with real people. People with busy lives and whose priorities rank waiting on hold or in a queue way down at the bottom. Especially if they only want to carry out a simple transaction like pay a bill or access information.
Take advantage of the digital solutions available to give your customers a choice in how they connect with you, and when. This helps keep wait times – fewer unnecessary calls – reducing your customers’ frustration, and abandonment rates. And with fewer unnecessary calls, you’ll be better able to manage your team’s schedule.
3. Integrate your customer information systems
Keep call times down by making sure your advisors have all the information they need at their fingertips when they need it. The last thing your customers (or your advisors) want is more waiting while your staff switch across systems to check or cross-check vital information.
And heaven forbid your agent finds information the customer has already updated once (or more), because it hasn’t been recorded properly, or was captured in one system, but not another.
Get all your systems on track and working together, and make sure your team are fluent users. Make sure you audit your data regularly to keep it up to date.
4. Boost sales performance
When you’re running a phone campaign, you want your advisors to be able to focus 100% on the person on the other end of the line, and on getting the best possible results for the call. All the while ensuring the person has a positive experience of your agent’s professionalism, and the standard of service they’re providing.
The last thing you or your agent want is to lose time chasing dead ends (a day of talking to voicemail boxes can be very unappealing, not to mention unproductive). Nor do you want your agents losing their rhythm on a call with distractions from unreliable systems or out of date information.
Whether your team are making collections calls, raising funds, or generating leads, you know every moment counts – for you, and for your team. The Premier Contact Point suite of tools ensures your agents are fully focused on each call, and not scrabbling around with the technology. Happy, more productive agents produce significantly better results.
Delivering the ultimate customer experience
Premier Contact Point helps you identify which of these areas you need work on to get the right balance for your business. (Be sure to read Part II for the final four). Together, we can build a strategy and action plan that will get you on track to delivering the ultimate customer experience. Talk to one of our customer experience experts today to take the first steps.
