For years, companies saw customer experience and employee experience as two separate concepts. A great employee experience in the contact center environment was essential to reducing agent turnover, while customer experience initiatives ensured companies could preserve the loyalty of their buyers.
However, the research shows that “employee experience” and “customer experience” are actually two sides of the same coin. Improving the agent experience for contact center professionals simultaneously leads to higher levels of customer satisfaction.
In fact, studies tell us that 70% of engaged, empowered agents are better equipped to address customer needs, and can even make businesses 21% more profitable.
Today we’re looking at 10 of the quickest, and most effective ways business leaders can improve the contact center experience for both agents, and customers alike.
1. Make Personalization Easy
Delivering personalized experiences is a must in today’s contact center landscape. No customer wants to be treated like just another number. While an all-in-one omnichannel contact center environment will help agents to deliver more customized experiences, companies can also take additional steps.
Choosing a contact center platform with access to customer profiles, for instance, can help agents to collect and access valuable information about each client including last purchase, loyalty tier, preferred channel for communication.
Some contact center solutions such as Engage by Local Measure can even automatically surface this data as soon as an agent answers a call or message.
“We’ve all been there; after years of loyal custom, we call a business's contact center and even though they have all our details on file, they still don’t know who you are and why you are calling. And this is even though you have called 3 times this week about the same issue and repeated yourself to 3 different people. The data is there, it just needs the right platform to bring it all together.” - Jonathan Barouch, CEO & Founder, Local Measure
2. Preserve Context in Conversations
Speaking of context, customers don’t just want to be able to contact companies on any channel, they want a consistent experience, with as few friction points as possible. No customer likes repeating themselves when they’re transferred to a new agent or move to a new communication channel.
With this in mind, it’s worth ensuring you can preserve context in conversations, giving your agents access to cross-channel history and valuable data whenever they respond to a customer. This not only creates a more consistent experience for customers, but it also supports agents by ensuring they can access all the right information to enhance a discussion, without multiple apps.
3. Use an Intuitive Omnichannel Platform
Today’s customers want to connect with brands through a variety of different channels, from social media messengers, to SMS, chat, and email. Ensuring your customers can contact you using their preferred method naturally improves their experience with your brand. However, it’s important to approach your omnichannel strategy correctly.
Choosing an intuitive platform for contact center management, which unifies multiple communication channels into a shared inbox, strengthens the experience for customers and agents. With a truly omnichannel ecosystem, agents can retain context between conversations on different platforms, and serve multiple customers in the same place, without having to jump between tabs.
4. Leverage Integrations
The best contact center strategy for improving agent and customer experiences shouldn’t just make it easy to unify communication channels. It should also ensure companies can combine the features and information from multiple environments into one ecosystem.
A flexible cloud contact center, with integrations available for CRMs like Salesforce, Ticket management, knowledge bases and marketing automation tools streamlines the agent experience, boosting productivity. Moreover, when agents can access all the tools and information they need in one place, they can often solve customer problems faster.
5. Implement Automation
Automation has quickly become one of the most valuable tools in the contact center. With the right automation strategies, companies can improve the agent experience by minimizing repetitive tasks, like summarizing calls and data entry.