Lucy Holloway
Spring has sprung
Spring seems to have every department refreshing their strategies. And as customer relationship management is more important than ever to deliver the best customer experience possible, contact centres will have to shift their focus and equip their agents with the right tools to do so.
For those in the know
Sales and support channels should work synergistically to seamlessly deliver on a brand’s values with consistent information available at every customer interaction to result in optimum customer experience. Knowledge-bases can be key to create this synergy.
When looking to spring clean your knowledge-base it’s important to not only have up to date information to hand but to consider the following:
- Is it centralised and how is knowledge shared, ensuring that the same information is given to customers across all contact channels, helping to improve satisfaction rates?
- Is it clearly sign-posted on a home and contact page, helping customers to find answers to their own questions quickly and efficiently?
- Does it extend into your contact centre enabling agents to give customers consistent, accurate and timely answers to their questions, reducing agent-training times and increasing conversions, whilst improving the overall customer experience?
Simple DIY
Extending knowledge into an intelligent FAQ section on an organisation’s website can dramatically reduce the amount of inbound contact to your contact centre, allowing agents to deal with more complex queries. And today’s digitally savvy customers want to self-seve.
A whopping 9/10 customers in a recent Synthetix survey said they would visit a company’s website first to find answers to their query. And there are many more technologies that can help up customer satisfaction scores across channels such as:
- Intelligent FAQ search for Facebook – enables customers to self-serve answers to questions, intelligently re-organizing the knowledge-base after every interaction.
- FAQ self-service for contact forms – deploys comprehensive answers to customer questions directly onto your contact forms, deflecting customers who have missed other self-service options before they submit an e-mail.
- E-mail Management – intelligent routing of customer enquiries to the correct agent based on department and area of expertise. Agents can search a contact centre knowledge-base for instant access to up-to-date information and documents to respond quickly and efficiently to the customer.
No longer just a call centre, the contact centre today is constantly having to evolve and adapt to customer behavior. But valiant efforts to deliver a choice of multi-channel customer service can still crash and burn spectacularly if not deployed properly. If contact centres don’t have a strong strategy with an integrated multi-channel software platform and training, agents will become frustrated and less engaged.
Get your game-face on
Gamification is great way to keep contact centre agents involved and interacting with colleagues, and not just for the newer generation, who grew up with gaming. According to a report by Aberdeen Research in 2012, organisations that deployed gamification have seen their annual revenue grow nearly twice as fast as their peers. The concept of gamification seems to speak to employees in a positive way and set imaginations alight.
A strong driver of collaboration, gamification can help identify top performers and encourage them to publish their best practices in a central library for others to view.
Spring into action
A lot has been said in our series of ‘Spring clean your contact centre’ blogs. With technology progressing faster each day and customers expecting more, contact centres will keep facing the pressure to perform better over 2015 and forcing them to adapt and evolve.
But enough talk, contact centers are so much more than customer service centers. So grab that duster and get your contact centre, customer experience strategy and profits sparkling.
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