Customer experience (CX) has increased its importance within the corporate agenda to the point where it is considered a strategic pillar of differentiation. This is mostly because customer behavior is constantly changing and products and services are becoming increasingly similar, as well as being more easily comparable online than ever before.
As a result, differentiation by quality or price is no longer so decisive in attracting or keeping customers, instead, it is more important the perception that customers have of a brand or a company as a result of their interaction with it.
According to Forbes, customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than those that are not. But the benefits of customer experience in Contact Centers are not an industry secret and, in fact, most Contact Centers have already begun their transformation to incorporate a customer-centric vision.
Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than those that are not.
Source: Forbes
Today, more than ever, listening to the customer has become a critical task in understanding the needs of your target audience and customers. Companies seek to design a customer experience in line with their expectations in order to obtain long-term benefits such as customer loyalty and new customer acquisition.
For these reasons, more and more companies are investing in tools to monitor data sources such as Voice of the Customer to help them improve the customer experience and increase loyalty.
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The importance of CX in numbers
- 84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience report an increase in revenue.*
- 96% of customers say customer service is important in their choice of brand loyalty.*
- 73% of consumers say a good experience is key in influencing their brand loyalty.*
- Companies with initiatives to improve customer experience see employee engagement increase by 20% on average.*
*Source: Forbes
What should a Contact Center do to follow a strategy focused on customer experience?
In order to measure customer experience, different metrics can be used to provide information on how positive or negative the customer experience has been. These include, for example, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and the Customer Effort Score (CES), but these indicators do not refer to the whole customer experience and do not measure important aspects such as the emotional and subjective perceptions of customers.
With the emergence of new technologies such as Speech Analytics, which allows in-depth analysis of conversations and therefore the acquisition of knowledge from customer feedback (Voice of Customer VoC), we have the possibility of measuring other important aspects that have a direct impact on the improvement of the customer experience.
1. Listen to customer needs and concerns
Listening to customer needs and concerns is key to Customer-Centric strategies. For years, companies have been listening to customer calls to better understand their needs. Listening to the Voice of the Customer and using it in the right way increases customer loyalty, creates better products, delivers better service and understands the customer experience faster and more efficiently.
But listening to every conversation the contact center has with its customers is sometimes impossible due to the high volume of calls being made. Speech analytics solutions that allow listening to 100% of the conversations are becoming the key to efficiently carrying out customer-centric strategies and improving the customer experience.
2. Knowing the current customer and employee experience
By knowing and understanding customer and employee experiences, Contact Centers can drive retention, processes and profitability. As such, those who focus their strategies on Customer Experience seek to identify opportunities to increase employee loyalty and retention, conduct customer retention programs or identify pain points within processes.
In this way, the objective is to obtain a global picture of the current customer and employee experience in order to subsequently create personalized experiences and services that help increase customer and employee retention and loyalty.
3. Personalization of products and services
It is useless for the Contact Center to listen to customers’ needs and concerns if it is not going to do anything about them. Trying to adapt products and services to these needs or solve the concerns that customers show is imperative to improve the customer experience and generate greater retention.
In addition, the more personalized the services offered by the Contact Center, the greater the connection between customer and brand, and thus the greater the satisfaction and loyalty.
4. Agent training
Contact Center agents are the face of the organization and are often the customer’s first point of contact when a complaint, query or request arises. The impression they create sets the tone for the experience and those that are consistently positive go a long way to building brand loyalty and trust.
The quality of Contact Center agents is critical to their performance. Therefore, successfully recruiting skilled agents and training them properly is imperative to achieve an exceptional customer experience and an effective customer-centric strategy.
5. Performing quality controls
While Contact Center agents are the face of the organization, it is crucial for customer experience and satisfaction to align their behavior with your messages and behavior, otherwise, customer retention and loyalty will be challenging.
Performing quality controls of the service offered becomes essential to building productive and satisfying customer-centric strategies. In this way, it is easier for the Contact Center to offer more complete feedback to agents, providing them with better training and education and improving the quality of service, which translates into greater customer satisfaction.
Conversational intelligence solutions, such as Recordia, provide contact centers with data and analytics extracted from all customer interactions, leveraging predictive insights and allowing them to connect more closely with their customers, anticipate behaviors and identify CX issues and opportunities in real-time.
Find out how to follow a customer-centric strategy and improve customer experience by clicking here.