How Can You Transform Customer Experience with a Call Center System?

Customer experience is the most influential factor in customer service, and contact center solutions play the first role in this process. Those customers who achieve excellent customer service are more likely to enjoy their customer experience and this leads you to success by establishing customer retention, customer loyalty, brand advocacy, and higher customer lifetime value. We all know that customer acquisition costs 5 to 25 times more than customer retention, and this is more than enough to start investing in customer experience call center strategies. 

But how the contact center solutions can help in achieving these goals? Is contact center software multifunctional and influential enough to build a stable positive customer experience? What tips should you keep in mind before building your customer satisfaction and experience-boosting tactics? 

Time to answer the questions.

Personalize each single call

Personalization is a stable and more and more accepted trend in customer service. Moreover, all studies regarding customer service personalization show that buyers are more likely to purchase from brands that offer personalized customer experience, as well as customer service personalization, which is the main factor that builds customer loyalty and retention and influences the chance of extra purchases. 

But how to perform customer service personalization? First of all, use such a feature of contact center software as CRM integration – this option allows agents to find customer data almost immediately and provide assistance based on the unique data for each client. 

Customer service personalization doesn’t end with calling customers by their names – you have to gather data about their preferences, changes in their life, and even special dates such as birthdays to greet them and use this data to build warm relationships with them. 

For outbound calls, such a feature as the Preview dialer offers agents a customer card to learn before each call so the outbound campaign becomes not only fast but personalized. 

Improve First Call Resolution rate

This rate is one of the fourth components of customer experience and there are a few rates that are as important as FCR. How to boost it? Use a well-designed IVR system to identify the nature of customer requests from the early beginning of the customer interaction and link them to relevant agents based on skills-based or priority-based routing rules which are set up and managed by the ACD solution. ACD system is also included in contact center software and it identifies customer menu choices in the IVR system to find a relevant agent and link him to a customer based on the essence of the request. 

Optimize Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system

IVR is the first point of contact with the customer when customers are either becoming frustrated or starting their pleasant customer journey. What causes customer frustration in the case of IVR? First of all, long and irrelevant menus, overuse of advertisements, absence of “call the agent” option, poor voice recognition algorithm, and inability to find the needed menu section. By eliminating these issues, you achieve a highly-efficient tool that can offer self-service for elementary customer inquiries, such as “What are the business hours?”, “Where the main office is located?”, “What is my shipping status?”, and so on. The more such simple requests are proceeded by the IVR system, the less call volume is, and the better agent performance is. Additionally, IVR can be used to send automated calls to gather feedback from clients or to follow up with them.

Provide permanent training for staff

Agent performance is the main factor that influences the customer experience and customer service level. Agents have to gain specific soft and hard skills, such as an empathetic communication style, the ability to adapt to customers’ communication preferences, skills to extinguish conflicts, knowledge of small-talk tricks, and surely, a deep understanding of the product and company’s principles and values. Such tools as a knowledge management system, call recording to capture the real samples of customer conversations, and other call center management tools can greatly enhance the training process and its results. 

Improve call flow management

What is call flow management? The call flow is the specific number of stages that are similar for each call, and their main purpose is to help the customers to solve their issues. Call flow management is your skills that are used to keep the conversation flowing in the right direction. There are 7 main stages of a call flow: greeting, active listening and answering the customer, detection of the root problem, understanding the ways of the resolution, resolving the issue, closing a dialogue, and filling out all the needed documents as after-call work. To help agents manage the call flow, contact center solutions include such a feature as call scripting – an editor for call scripts that can cover all potential changes in call flow and provide a better customer experience. 

Decrease On-hold times

Customers hate being put on hold, and your goal is to reduce these times as much as possible. There are a few features of call center software that can help you reduce average on-hold time – internal chat to ask for help and communicate with colleagues faster, knowledge bases to find all answers for customer queries, and intelligent call routing to link clients to the most appropriate agents from the first try. 

Remember that all clients are unique

Here’s a tip that requires your agents to be adaptive and knows how to delight every single customer. For instance, some customers enjoy formal communication, so agents have to pick it up and follow up with them via formal email to show respect for their tone of voice. Vice versa, other customers expect empathetic communication, so agents have to know how to provide customer service that would delight them. Here such features as call recording and CRM integration can greatly help to make customers satisfied. 

Gather customer feedback

Hearing your customers is the best way to make them feel totally satisfied. You can gather customer feedback with such features of call center software as IVR automated calls, SMS surveys, post-call surveys, or surveys in chatbots as our VoIP call center software provides a multichannel approach and allows you to be accessible across communication channels.