Contact centres are on the frontline when it comes to customer experience, so with pressure mounting, many are asking how they can further improve their customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores.

The modern customer is used to getting what they want, when they want it. They can pick and choose when and how to interact with a brand, and they expect consistent levels of personalisation and attention across every channel. This means that high quality service leads to increased loyalty from customers.

The industry is also recognising that there is a direct connection between customer experience and revenue. Recent research by West, The State of Customer Experience 2017, found that while a huge majority of contact centre leaders (92%) agree that the link between CX and revenue exists, just 29% strongly agree that their contact centre can design and deliver a seamless customer experience across multiple channels.

Enda Kenneally, vice president of sales & business development for West’s Unified Communications Services looks at the top three practical techniques that will ensure you continue to meet customer needs and increase satisfaction.

1. Remove drivers of customer effort

Industry research shows that around 30% of customers report spending what they considered a high level of effort to get their problem resolved. This often means that by the time they make a call to an agent, they are already frustrated. Forcing customers to switch from the web to the phone, or asking them to re-explain an issue, together with having to repeatedly contact a company are three main culprits of reported high customer effort levels.

By identifying where the effort drivers are, firms can proactively work to eliminate them or ease the friction and provide a satisfying customer experience. In fact, many contact centres find that most of the issues causing customer effort can be easily avoided with the right technology and process flow design.

2. Empower agents

Too often frontline customer service representatives just don’t have the right information – and are often not given the responsibility – they need to resolve customer queries first time. Make sure you give agents the training and technology tools they need to keep your customers satisfied. If your agent can’t clearly see the data or information about the customer they’re speaking to, they will be unable to personalise the attention given to the customer.

It’s also worth thinking about the style of interaction you are encouraging. When did you last review the workflows and scripting technology of your contact centres? Do they support your agents to make their interactions as natural and human as possible? Or are they inflexible, robotic and frustrating for both parties? If so, it might be time for an overhaul.

3. Develop a self-service strategy

Most consumers, across all demographics, prefer self-service for simple transactions and interactions. Research from the world’s leading air transport IT and communications specialist, SITA, showed that almost every flight is now booked using self-service technology; and only 4% say they will seek out a human.

Yet contact centres have been slow to catch on; recent research commissioned by West shows that just 21% of contact centres offer self-service. It is time for a change.

Whatever industry you are in, find ways to empower your customers to self-serve, whether via a touchpad, the web, within the IVR, or even a mobile app. For example, if you start to see customers reaching your contact centre with the same or similar issues, then investigate if the solutions can be introduced into a FAQ on your website, or a self-service strategy. By deploying successful self-service tools, you can empower your customers to quickly resolve minor issues the way they want to and customer service representatives can spend more time on dedicated and complex queries as the contact centre load is reduced.

You can even extend self-service into calls, by playing personalised messages in call queues, such as a customer’s predicted delivery time. Or in call menus, where customers can interact with the system without needing to speak to a live agent for issues such as requesting product information or even payment processing. However, you must make sure that customers are given the option of whether to use your self-service system – always provide them with a choice to speak to an agent if they wish to.

These principles are not difficult to put into practice; but they can involve a cultural shift. The effort invested will be worthwhile, allowing you to continue to match customer expectations and boost satisfaction by focusing on their changing needs rather than a rigidly-defined strategy. At the end of the day customer satisfaction is about getting the balance right and making sure your customer always has a choice. By increasing convenience for your customers­­­ you will find a welcome by-product: lower operational costs and pleasing spikes in your customer satisfaction ratings.

About the Author

Enda Kenneally is the VP of Sales and Business Development at West, previously Magnetic North. Enda has a wealth of experience in the communications technology industry delivering against UK, European and Global senior sales and business development roles. By building inspired, dynamic and successful teams, Enda has led three different voice vendors to number one market share positions in the UK. Before joining Magnetic North (now West), Enda worked at Avaya, Excell Managed Services and Mitel Networks.

Rather than reducing staff or altering workloads, call centers should first look for a much more straight-forward approach to decrease operational expenses, such as reducing average handling time (AHT). AHT is the sum of talk time, hold time and call wrap-up time divided by the total number of calls. For large enterprise call centers that receive hundreds of thousands of calls, reducing the time needed to address each one – even by a few seconds – can add up to significant savings by enabling customer service representatives (CSRs) to handle more calls and therefore be more productive.

But, of course, if CSRs are rushing through calls in an effort to reduce AHT, customers may not be getting their issues adequately resolved, which can negatively affect the overall customer experience; agents may even be targeted on AHT and can hide behind poor call handling to ensure an AHT reduction by having the caller make repeat calls! The key to reducing AHT while still providing a positive customer experience is to focus on reducing the call time spent on transactions, such as taking payments.

When accepting payments over the phone, many call centers today ask customers to read their payment card information aloud to the CSR, a practice that actually increases AHT. That’s because payment card details are often misspoken by the customer, or misheard or miskeyed by the CSR. Frustration ensues on both ends as customers and CSRs need to repeat numbers back and forth, and entering a wrong number can cause the transaction to be rejected by the Payment Service Provider (PSP) and a failed transaction charge applied to the call center. Even worse, the practice can put customers’ personal data at risk. If the customer is in a public place when reading their payment card details aloud, for example, they risk exposing their sensitive data to a malicious eavesdropper or a rogue CSR who could copy the information for fraudulent use.

Likewise, interactive voice response (IVR) systems used by some call centers can also cause frustration and negatively impact the customer experience – particularly when it comes to taking payments. If a customer miskeys their credit card number while using an IVR system, they often don’t know how to navigate the system to correct it, or simply hang up in scenarios such as debt collection. Without a CSR on the line to help, the customer is far more likely to end the call, potentially causing the company to lose a sale… or worse, lose a customer completely.

Fortunately, there are ways for call centers to reduce AHT, keep customers’ payment data secure improve the customer experience, and reduce costs all at the same time. Using advanced technology, call centers can have their customers securely input their payment card information via their phone keypad while remaining on the line with a live CSR. With this approach, the CSR can continue to converse with the customer and provide assistance, or even begin performing wrap-up tasks while the customer inputs their card details – further increasing productivity. By providing a single point of numerical entry, the opportunities for error are significantly reduced, and the CSR is no longer responsible for capturing the card details. Because the CSR and the customer are not spending valuable time re-reading numbers to each other, AHT, and in turn, costs, can be significantly reduced.

Perhaps most importantly, this process also improves data security. The audio tones from the customer’s telephone keypad are masked and the data is automatically and securely transmitted directly to the payment provider. This means that the CSR never hears the card details and the tones are masked in all audio recordings, significantly reducing the risk of fraudulent activity. Moreover, the payment card data never hits the call center’s IT systems, greatly reducing the scope of compliance for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) regulations. The entire process is not only more secure for the customer, but it also saves the call center a tremendous amount of time and money associated with maintaining PCI DSS compliance.

Leading companies are already experiencing the benefits of using such technologies. One of Semafone’s customers, a global insurance brand, was able to decrease AHT by approximately 30 seconds per call using this approach in its call center. Similarly, a global telecommunications provider lowered AHT by 26 seconds per call (an 8-percent decrease). For large enterprises that receive hundreds of thousands of calls in their call centers, shaving 20 to 30 seconds off per call can add up to millions of dollars in savings per year and a significant increase in productivity.

As companies in every industry look for more ways to reduce operational costs and improve efficiency, reexamining the payment processes in their call centers represents the low-hanging fruit – an excellent place to start. Through the use of new technologies, they can cut call center costs by reducing both AHT and the costs associated with maintaining PCI DSS, all while continuing to deliver superior customer service and strengthening data security.

About the Author

Ben Rafferty is Global Solutions Director at Semafone. Rafferty has more than 15 years of experience of delivering speech recognition, IVR and contact center automation on CPE and hosted platforms. At Semafone, Rafferty is responsible for the smooth deployment of solutions into hosted environments and for the overall management of Semafone’s hosted offering. Starting as an engineer and working up through a variety of roles, Rafferty’s career includes the successful delivery of programs for a wide variety of organizations, including large multi-national corporations, such as SAP, Deloitte, Interflora and Odeon, as well as local and central government, Parliament, the NHS and all “Blue Light” services in the UK and Europe.