Approaches to customer experience are changing. Just a few years ago, many businesses hired external agencies to help them build customer journey maps and CX strategies.
Unfortunately, these third parties did so with little consultation with various business departments. As a result, only some proved operationally useful, and many missed the mark.
Recognizing this disconnect, lots of businesses have tried to re-engage department leaders with the broader strategy, often changing their job titles to include “customer experience.”
Such a trend is particularly prevalent in contact centers. However, many still need guidance to enhance customer experiences beyond improving what they already do.
Here is where the following three best practices come in. They allow contact centers to transcend their service silo, connect the enterprise, and play a leading role in CX transformation.
In doing so, contact centers can help solve upstream issues, lower pressure on their operations, and stake their claim as the cornerstone of CX.
If they achieve this, the results are potentially significant. Indeed, Forrester finds that experience-driven businesses outperform their counterparts by 1.4x in revenue growth.
Moreover, operations can reduce long wait times and foster better first contact resolution (FCR) rates: the two biggest priorities for customer service teams – as per ContactBabel research.
1. Understand Customer Intent
Demand driver data is often an enterprise's most underappreciated source of insight.
After all, it uncovers customer intent and - when assessed - this can spotlight costly pain points within the customer journey.
Yet, perhaps why it is so underappreciated is that traditional methods for collecting and assessing demand drivers are often unreliable.
For instance, many contact centers still ask agents to manually input disposition codes. Alternatively, they may tie these up with the IVR.
Unfortunately, both methods are subject to human error and static – i.e., they do not account for new and emerging demand drivers.
As such, contact centers have two options to gauge customer intent accurately:
- Automate the process with conversational analytics.
- Stick with agent dispositioning but increase agent coaching and monitoring while running periodic reviews to identify new demand drivers.
The latter tends to take too much time. Meanwhile, conversational analytics allows contact centers to dive deep into each demand driver, pick up on repeat phrases, and spotlight broken processes that mire customer experiences.
By addressing these – as below – contact centers can fight back against rising contact volumes and improve customer experiences beyond service touchpoints.
2. Spread Intent Insights Across the Organization
Having highlighted broken processes through customer intent analysis, contact centers can separate these into three separate groups:
- Internal Issues – Contact centers can resolve this in-house.
- External Issues – Upstream problems that require other departments to address.
- Policy – These issues require a fundamental change to how the business operates.
By following this framework, contact centers can methodically improve customer experiences by fixing broken processes.
Internal issues often offer quick wins. Yet, helping resolve external issues is likely where contact centers can make the greatest gains.