Customer experience

What is customer experience?‍

Customer experience is the perception and relationship that a customer has with a contact center, based on the sum total of all their interactions. It is critical deciding factor for whether a customer returns to a company or chooses a competitor.‍

What is a good customer experience?‍

The general rule of thumb is that providing a good customer experience comes from asking them the right questions, listening to their feedback, and acting on it. It is imperative that contact centers set up proper frameworks to achieve this.‍

What are ways to improve the customer experience?

1. Personalize calls.
   Agents should address customers by their first names to create personal connections and mention other relevant customer details—often found in CRM or other sales software—to enhance the customer interaction.
   
   

2. Improve first call resolution (FCR).
   Nothing satisfies a customer like having a query resolved in the first interaction. First call resolution is one of the most important metrics for contact centers’ success. (Check out this blog on FCR to learn how to improve it.)
   
   
3. Leverage IVR.
   Interactive Voice Response is a great time-saving tool for agents and customers alike. It routes the customers to the right department, collects crucial information, and provides a consistent and professional experience.
   
   
4. Train agents well.
   An agent with a lack of knowledge about a company’s products and services can severely affect a customer’s experience. Proper training on how to improve customer service skills in a call center is paramount. (Learn how contact center AI can supercharge agent training.)
   
   
5. Staff appropriately.
   Ensuring that you are staffed based on call flow data is absolutely important. Even a single hour of call overflow could do some real damage to a company’s reputation.‍
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6. Reduce hold time.
   Customers detest being put on hold. Agents must try their best to avoid such scenarios and, when a hold is unavoidable, set reasonable expectations. Conversation intelligence solutions like Observe.AI can reduce hold time by, among other things, giving contact center leaders insights into the root cause of hold times, deploying agent alerts, and automatically sharing appropriate knowledge-base articles to provide quicker answers and solutions.