How To Improve the Customer Experience by Eliminating These 6 Barriers in a Call Center?

Call centers are tasked with improving the customer experience (CX), but sometimes-internal factors get in the way. This requires looking at processes, policies, technology, skills gaps, and other variables that may be barriers to delivering successful CX.

How To Improve the Customer Experience (CX)?

Although contact centers are not solely responsible for CX, they play a vital role in the company’s customer experience strategy. When call centers improve CX, the entire organization benefits.

What Stats Justify the CX Upgrades?

• 80% of consumers believe that engagement is as important as product quality, according to Salesforce.
• Most consumers are willing to buy more products (87%) and recommend a company to others (81%) if they have an exceptional customer service experience, Salesforce says.
• 80% of users would change companies due to poor customer service, according to the same study.
• Globally, 90% of consumers believe that customer service is very important in choosing a brand, according to Microsoft Dynamics 365.
• 57% of users report that customer service is an attribute that influences their loyalty to a brand, according to Zendesk.

In short, customer service is an important component of CX and influences customer loyalty, purchase decisions, and brand advocacy.

How To Improve the Customer Experience by Eliminating These 6 Barriers in a Call Center?

1) Obsolete Technology

An article published by CMS Wire reported that 88% of companies have barriers to improving CX, with technology being the most cited.

Obsolete technology is holding back call centers that want to improve the customer experience. The new digital world requires companies to have a modern and flexible customer service platform that is capable of delivering the types of experiences customers expect.

Contact centers must remove this barrier so they can:

• Better understand your customers.
• Provide digital experiences on customers’ preferred channels.
• Offer efficient support 24/7 through effective self-service solutions.
• Make the most of customer data to deliver personalized experiences.
• Give agents the tools they need to build strong customer relationships.

Modern technology will not only help improve CX, it will also improve the agent experience (AX).

2) Agent Fatigue

Modern technology can improve the agent experience and reduce attrition by:

• Automate repetitive and everyday tasks.
• Allow agents to work remotely.
• Consolidate all applications used by agents into a single interface.
• Put technical and customer information at your fingertips.
• Make performance results highly visible.

These capabilities enable agents to be more effective in helping customers and improve their performance on the job.

3) Training Focused On Technical Skills

According to Salesforce research, 68% of customers expect brands to show empathy, but only 37% of them say brands meet this expectation.

Being proficient with soft skills allows agents to better connect with customers, show they care, get to the heart of their issues, and instill confidence that they will resolve their query.

A study by Leadership IQ revealed that 89% of new hire failures are due to soft skills, such as interpersonal skills and attitude.

Additionally, modern contact center software can help agents hone their soft skills. Real-time interaction guidance tools listen to voice interactions in real time, determine customer sentiment, and train agents in soft skills that have been shown to increase customer satisfaction.

4) Isolated Apps and Channels

It is not possible to optimize the CX if all the applications and digital channels are integrated with each other. In this sense, when support channels are isolated, companies cannot provide seamless omnichannel experiences.

Customers should be able to move between voice, digital and self-service channels, regardless of the provider that created each application. For seamless out-of-the-box experiences, contact centers should consider using a single vendor to meet all of their support channel needs.

5) Not Taking Advantage of Unstructured Customer Data

Unstructured data includes information such as customer feedback on social media, responses to open-ended survey questions, and what users say to each other in their interactions. Unlike structured data, such as numerical ratings in surveys, high-value unstructured data has traditionally been difficult to analyze.

Analysis tools powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) as well as interaction analytics can examine interactions across all channels and produce insights such as:

• Customer sentiment.
• Contact drivers (know why customers need help identifying pain points).
• Hot topics (allow call center leaders to proactively address emerging issues before they negatively affect too many customers).
• Potential compliance issues (two important components of CX are ensuring customers have all the information they need and protecting their data). 

When contact centers don’t take full advantage of the unstructured data at their disposal, it becomes a barrier to optimizing the customer experience.

6) Not Acting On Customer Feedback

Customer-centric companies regularly solicit your feedback through focus groups and satisfaction surveys. This allows companies to identify sticking points and stay on top of customer feedback.

However, collecting feedback is only part of the equation. Companies need to take action by contacting individual customers and, at a more macro level, by solving widespread problems.

Unfortunately, according to Microsoft Dynamics 365, 53% of consumers think that companies do not act on customer feedback. This may explain traditionally low survey completion rates, as people don’t want to waste time providing information that won’t be used.

In conclusion, organizations shouldn’t simply follow up on disgruntled customers. They also have to be grateful to users who provide exceptionally positive feedback to further strengthen those relationships and transform satisfied customers into brand advocates.