Tips for Enhancing Call Center Customer Experience

“Customer experience is the next competitive battleground. It’s where the business is going to be won or lost.”

– Tom Knighton

Every business strives to make customers happy and achieve their loyalty. But, the one that offers exceptional customer experience will win the race.

A call center bridges the gap between the business and its customers. Through call centers, we directly connect with the customers, help them, and add value to our customer interactions. But, how do we ensure a great call center customer experience?

Here are some simple tips that the call centers can follow to enhance their customer experience.

1. Customer Profiling

Personalization is the key to an excellent customer experience. But, to offer personalized customer experience, it is essential to understand the customer and his needs.

Businesses must follow an omnichannel approach to gather customer data. While the customer shares different data on each channel, his needs and preferences are reflected through all these interactions. And so, we should leverage multiple channels to gather comprehensive data about the customer.

After analyzing customer needs and preferences, the customers are segmented into various categories, and customer experiences are designed specifically for each segment. The segments could have various sub-segments too. Is that difficult? Not anymore with the use of Artificial Intelligence!

After segmenting the customers on their preferences, personalized customer experiences are designed for the customers. The use of AI helps businesses learn from past experiences with customers. If the same customer calls again, the language can be automatically selected based on his past preference.

Eliminating the repetitive steps in further interactions reduces the customer’s waiting time as he doesn’t have to click through various menus to get to the call center agent. So, remembering the past options selected by the customer helps increase the resolution rates in call center processes.

2. Predictive Customer Experience

The current call center trends are moving from merely personalized to fully predictive customer experience. Predictive customer experience is based on using customer data for predicting patterns in behavior. These patterns are then used to serve the customer better.

Predictive customer experience facilitates better customer relations and enhances customer engagement. Proactive support must be extended to the customers before they need help. These aid in preventing the anger of the customer and making him believe that he is valuable for you.

IVR is one of the best examples of how we can use the predictive experience to improve an inefficient existing process. Let’s admit; customers hate Interactive Voice Response! It keeps directing the users without listening to them.

But, businesses cannot eliminate IVR as it eliminates repetitive interactions. So, we should use AI technology to make the best out of IVR. AI improves the effectiveness of IVR by learning from customer interactions. It also makes IVR sound more personal, conversational, and responsive.

Furthermore, Natural Language Processing and ML help interpret user’s statements instead of just offering options in a call. It can catch not only the keywords but also capture the customer’s mood by analyzing his tone.

Sentiment analysis in the call center process helps detect the politeness level of the customer from his past interactions. So, when he calls in the future, the agent is allocated depending on his behavior. For instance, if the customer is rude, an agent with more patience can better resolve the issue.

3. Streamlined Customer Experience

The call center process is crucial for a business as it acts as an interface between them and their customers. So, the call center process will determine how your customers perceive your business.

No business wants a process that becomes a threat to its reputation. But, unfortunately, the human-centered call center process is subject to quality variations. This is because every two humans are different. Some are more empathetic towards the customer and would want to resolve his problem by all means. But, some others just want to add another call to their day’s log!

As a result, the quality of overall customer experience deteriorates. The call center process should give a consistent experience to all the customers. Machines don’t suffer from biases, unlike humans. A machine-based process acting as a support, not substitute to the humans, helps make the process more streamlined.

AI-enabled bots can be used in the initial stages of customer interaction. These bots can resolve the common FAQs, and answer standard queries of the customers.

Apart from that, for standard procedures, businesses should share self-service alternatives with the customers. This includes tutorials for troubleshooting and infographics for standard procedures.

All the customers who come to the call center agent with a generic or standard problem can thus get a standard and uniform solution, irrespective of who is attending them. Moreover, the technology-conversant generation loves self serve ideas that can solve their problems.

4. Live Engagement Tools

We are in an era of live engagement tools! So, you cannot expect the customer who is facing a problem with your product or service to send you screenshots of the issue on email, and then wait for your response.

Call centers are now focussing on improving call resolution rates. With live customer engagement tools, the call center agents cannot just interact with the customer in real-time, but video chats enable them to see the customer’s issues. The co-browsing feature leads to easy identification of the problem and a better call resolution rate.

Live engagement tools are going to be the future of call centers. These will empower the call center processes with high-quality video interactions and an overall increase in productivity.

5. Cloud-Based Solutions

Cloud-based solutions are replacing almost all areas of business technology. Even for the call center industry, cloud solutions are a boon.

The cloud-based call center solutions provide scalability and flexibility to the process. Data security is a very significant aspect of call center operations. Cloud-based call center management aids in high security and ease of maintenance. So, the call center businesses can concentrate on their quality of processes instead of worrying about the setups.

The call center industry has to deal with numerous compliance issues. Cloud-based solutions help manage the compliance issues centrally, and so scaling the operations does not become risky.

Wrapping Up!

The primary motive behind call center services is to improve conversations with the customer, assess customer expectations, and evaluate customer satisfaction. If we offer quality customer experience, we can expect a high ROI from our call center initiatives.

While the very big brands have their own call centers for customer interactions, the vast majority of businesses outsource their call center operations to the experts in this domain. Irrespective of the mode they choose, the business must integrate their call center data with different business functions. It is crucial to let your employees know the customer’s response to your products and services.

Last but not least, do use the technology solutions to make your call center operations and process more robust. Don’t wait any further for complete software-based call center setups!