Improving the customer experience is a major goal for businesses, especially in the 2020s. As many as two-thirds of companies compete based on customer experience and there is as much as an 80% increase in revenue for businesses that focus on improving the customer experience. On the customer side, around 86% of customers say that they are willing to pay more and work more closely with businesses that deliver a better customer experience. Focusing on the customer experience can increase revenue for companies substantially. For example, companies that earn $1 billion annually can expect to earn an additional $700 million within 3 years from investing heavily into customer service.
From these stats, we can see that improving the customer experience is the best way for companies to differentiate themselves from their competitors. So how can your company or organization improve customer experience?
Focusing on the Contact Center and Its Role in the Organization
Contact centers, for many businesses, are the face of the company. Especially in a post-COVID world that is more mobile and digital than ever before, contact centers are often at the forefront of a company’s customer experience operations. With the effects of government-mandated lockdowns and the absence of brick-and-mortar and in-person customer service, contact centers have become a focal point for businesses of all sizes to maintain a close relationship with their clientele.
With the contact center being more important than ever, businesses looking to improve the customer experience should focus first on the contact center and the role it plays in the entire organization. Being the first point of contact for customers, the contact center needs to be able to get customers to the right resource quickly and connect all the different departments with the customer. All departments within the company, whether it’s field workers, IT analysts, in-store representatives, salespeople, or support, should be connected to the customer and call center closely.
To help connect the contact center more closely with the entire business, your business can utilize tools like internal business communication applications, like integrations of Microsoft Teams into your contact center solution, or the use of contact center mobile applications to help tie together the business.
Getting the Right Contact Center Tools
With the rise of new, emerging digital channels, your contact center needs the right tools to be able to meet the customers on the channels that they want to use. This includes emerging digital channels like mobile apps, messenger apps, and web chat, as well as traditional channels like voice, email, and SMS texting. Not only do you need to support these channels, but you also need a solution that will allow you to treat all of these channels as a single conversation, allowing customers to switch between channels with ease while the agent follows along.
Your contact center solution, especially in the modern digital age, should be an omnichannel platform that can support all of these channels and seamlessly switch between them. For example, a customer coming in through the web chat of your business’s website should be able to easily be transferred to a phone call, which can then be transferred to texting, all while the agent is following along with customer context.
As mentioned above, keeping the contact center in close contact with other departments of the business is crucial for improving the customer experience. To allow your contact center to collaborate closely with other departments, ensure that your contact center integrates with applications like Microsoft Teams and other internal business communication applications. Or, ensure that your solution provides ways to connect subject matter experts outside the contact center with both customers and contact center agents.
Finally, ensure that your contact center platform can integrate with your choice of CRM, whether it’s a third-party or a native record management system. Tracking customer information and keeping interaction history is important, and having a platform that can integrate seamlessly with your CRM is important for improving the customer experience.
Understand the Customer and Tailor the Journey
Customers often have a wide range of issues or requests that they contact the business about, and each customer is different from the next. With the right contact center platform, you can tailor the customer journey to specific issues that the customer has. On Bright Pattern’s platform, for example, our call center solution has drag-and-drop scenario builders to help tailor the customer journey to specific touchpoints and steps. This means that customers with different requests or issues can be lead through different, unique journeys that can help streamline their experience and allow them to get the answers or resolutions that they need more quickly.
Tailoring the journey and understanding the customer can also empower the agent by streamlining their workflow, making the business process more efficient, and increasing agent satisfaction, thereby improving the service that they deliver to customers.
Capture Feedback and Manage Quality on All Interactions
Finally, one of the best ways to improve your customer service is by capturing customer feedback and managing quality on all interactions. Customer feedback is important for businesses that want to improve their customer service and search for weaknesses within their customer service operations. To capture feedback, your contact center can automate the outbound delivery of surveys to customers, allowing your agents to automatically send surveys after interactions over channels like text, email, and messenger apps. This creates less friction in the customer experience when trying to capture feedback, and creates less work for the contact center agents and supervisors to capture customer feedback since it is automated.
Aside from implementing automation in sending out customer feedback forms and surveys, your contact center can also monitor 100% of all interactions on all digital channels with the right contact center tools. With Bright Pattern’s omnichannel platform, your contact center can monitor 100% of all interactions on all channels with Bright Pattern’s OmniQM technology. Utilize AI, sentiment, and text analysis to analyze interactions on channels like voice, SMS, webchat, messenger apps, and more. Call recordings and interaction history is stored and seamlessly synced with your integrated CRM so your supervisors can review interaction history later. Get unified dashboards with easy-to-understand reporting and make monitoring all channels easy and frictionless.
Improving the Customer Experience with Bright Pattern
Bright Pattern’s call center software is designed for contact centers to provide the best possible customer experience with effective call center tools. Bright Pattern has many advanced tools and features, like AI-powered self-service, omnichannel capabilities, and integration with WFM and WFO solutions, that will help empower agents, streamline contact center operations, and improve the customer experience. Aside from inbound solutions, Bright Pattern’s call center software can power any business use case to improve customer experience and improve contact center operations.
To see the full list of features that you can get access to with Bright Pattern’s call center software
