The primary reason for setting up a contact center is to create a conduit for you to have more personal contact with your customers. An expected service from your customers in the whole spectrum of industries, whichever you may belong.
The beauty of it is your customers can request and receive service at the touch of a keypad from any phone. The benefits for yourself are you get to collect data and immediate feedback from your end-users and, in the process, acquire a higher number of customers.
The horrific and beastly side of the contact center is that it may prove to be a risk of opening yourself to the possibility of losing thousands of customers EVERYDAY!
The horror stories of contact centres are well documented and rampant in a multitude of mediums. Unfortunately, for every good story you hear about a contact center, you hear a hundred horrible ones. Stories of state-of-the-art multi-million-dollar IVR (interactive voice recognition) system keep customers in a queue for eternity, then take customers around the mill, spending tens of minutes riding the Ferris wheel of the IVR menu. Subsequently, the customer is put on hold where the hold music’s much louder and more irritating than your prime-time TV commercials.
Inadvertently, the focus to correct this issue is naturally to look at technology to deploy a technical solution. For example, intuitive voice recognition software allows customers to bypass the keypad menu, hold personalized content to the customer, and, if needed, on-hold music that’s relevant and set at a pleasant volume.
Ironically, even with all the corrections in place, your customer numbers don’t increase. Marketing’s latest Customer Satisfaction Survey results indicate there is displeasure still among the masses of customers. Panic-stricken, you dive into all the data generated from your ACD (All Call Distribution). How many calls were taken? What day/hour/minute/second? How long are customers put on hold? What was individual agent performance? All the data seem sound, and targets are met. Technology is no longer an issue. Time to look at the other dimension of a contact center that may turn your contact center from beauty to beast- the PEOPLE. Specifically, analysing the quality of service that your agents are providing.
Hence, the emergence of focus is the most crucial measure of quality for any thriving contact center, Customer Experience Quality. Customer Experience Quality is the catalyst to transforming your contact center into a profit center and not expenditure to your organization. Having delight able customer experience contacts between agents and your customers will provide you with an opportunity to transform customers into advocates singing praises to potential customers.
A Customer Experience Quality program requires both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of a customer contact transaction, emphasizing the latter. Quality programs must focus on the emotional experience for both the agent and the customer. The agent has to tailor service that suits individual customers – at both the passionate and pragmatic levels.
In creating an evaluation form that will follow a call from greeting to close, there are 4 areas that one needs to consider -Call Management, Call Courtesy, Call Accuracy and Call experience.
Call Management
The overall control of a call is essential in delivering a positive emotional experience. Effective call handling relies on an agent understanding the unique situation and circumstance of each contact. Taking a customer through logical and methodological steps provide customers with confidence in the agent.
Call Courtesy – Courtesy is easily identified. However, establishing different levels of courtesy is where most Customer Experience Quality programs falter. On the other hand, precise articulation and establishment of these levels in many instances have assisted companies in establishing organizational benchmarks.
Call Accuracy – Information is the most popular reason a customer would be motivated to call a contact center. Accuracy of this information is the foremost determinant of customer satisfaction. Evaluation of call accuracy provides the pragmatic balance to a Customer Experience Quality program.
Call Experience – Unlike call courtesy, the overall call experience in any agent-customer transaction is difficult to articulate. Yet when successful, it proves to be a giant leap into the Experience Economy, where the emotional echoes of delightful service resonate long and deep in a highly delighted customer base.
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