Perfect CX Series Part 4— Customer Service Experience
From our previous discussions, we know that Customer Experience is a mixture of multiple experiences. In the last blog of the series, we talked about Service Experience, how it is different from Product Experience, and how brands can use it to enhance their CX.
And one important service that any organization, whether product-oriented or service-oriented, cannot miss, is the Contact Center service.
A contact center is a communication hub that links your organization to the customers. Basically, it is that department of your organization where customers come seeking help, asking queries, giving feedback, or looking for someone to hear their complaints.
Your Product and Service Experience would definitely attract the customer and even generate repeat purchases but that can happen only when your customers are able to realize the fuller utility of the product and/or service.
And for this purpose, someone needs to provide them with answers. That is where Contact Centers come to the role and focusing on generating a good contact center experience can help brands strengthen their image and CX.
This blog would revolve around the meaning of Contact Center Experience, the need of CCX for customers, the major hurdles, and the use case of American Express for a better understanding of the concept.
So, without further adieu, let’s begin!
What is Contact Center Experience?
Contact Center Experience is the total of all the little touchpoints that a customer goes through while trying to establish contact with the organization for filing complaints, asking queries, seeking details, or just providing feedback.
For instance, when you call customer service on Flipkart or Amazon to report a damaged good and ask for an exchange or refund, you are interacting with their contact center.
And the pain you feel while holding the line to reach the appropriate person in charge is what your customer might feel for your brand. And that is not a good sign. Because this will definitely lead to them quitting on your brand with bad reviews for 10 others.
Thus, understanding Contact Centers and what matters to the customers when it comes to CCX is crucial for brand success.
Why does Contact Center Experience matter to Customers?
A contact center is a very important touchpoint for customers. They depend on these centers for their queries and difficulties while using the product or inquiring about a service. It can be the most initial or the last touchpoint of customer journey and can determine their purchase decision and further purchase behavior.
That is why, customers expect a reasonable amount of concern from brands when they reach out to them because more than 50% of customers believe that their feedback is not acted upon by brands, according to Biz30.
Another reason why contact center experience matters to customers is because they want fast and interactive service. They want their efforts to be at least when they are already agitated with a troubled product.
According to Inc.com, about 36% of customers find it frustrating when they have to provide information about their problem multiple times.
Customers aspire for a representative who is knowledgeable, listens carefully to their queries, understands them, cares for their issues, and takes accountability for getting their grievances redressed immediately.
And these expectations create certain difficulties for brands in enhancing their contact center experience.
Some major ones are…
Difficulties in Enhancing Contact Center Experience
Creating a contact center experience that can add to the overall CX can be difficult and full of challenges like:
- Synchronizing channels: To minimize customer efforts, it is necessary to have a sync between the various channels available for communication. A lack of coordination can result in repetitive information collection, longer processing of complaints, and lastly, an annoyed customer.
- The behavior of representatives: According to HubSpot, about 40% of customers prefer to reach out to contact center teams than interact with bots. And so, customers loathe it when contact centers have mechanical representatives who feel more like machines than humans. It is thus necessary to have the human touch alive in all customer interactions. But, this can be a difficult task to accomplish due to the monotonous nature of the job.
- Contact center metrics: Contact Center Experience cannot be measured from the performance of the employees or the number of customers attended, rather it needs a special metric. Defining such a unique metric that measures the satisfaction of the customers from their interaction at the contact center is a big challenge.
- Ease of service: Another often missed issue in CCX is the ease of finding and availing the contact service. Many times brands focus very little of their time on improving the communication systems and forget to highlight the ways by which customers can reach them. This results in customer churn.
- Timely action: Ensuring timely action on the complaints is necessary because customers appreciate faster service. According to Forrester, 66% of adult customers feel brands must value their customers’ time in order to improve their experience.
AmEx identifies and rectifies errors in its own Contact Center Experience. Let’s see how…
Contact Center Experience by American Express
AmEx has built a wholesome contact center system and strategy. Its contact center experience includes toll-free contact numbers for each category of the card for personal users, merchants, and corporates.
It also includes services like FAQs for personal and corporate card members, chats options via the AmEx mobile app, and the AmEx Card online account access.
Image: AmEx card-based contact details
American Express also got a step ahead to identify the limitations in their contact centers and revamp their contact center experience. The most prominent one being the representatives in the contact center and their hiring process.
AmEx recognized that the call center representatives were the first in line to interact with customers daily and thus, they must reflect a genuine interest in the customer problems and prove to be helpful. This called for a change in the hiring and appraisal policies.
It was then made a process to identify the qualitative aspects of the contact center representatives which included their ability to empathize with the customer, building relationships, understanding of the brand, and passion for the delivery of service.
Also, performance appraisal was linked directly to customer feedback and employees could earn an incremental bonus of 25% — 35% for satisfied customers.
And lastly, AmEx started using NPS (Net Promoter Score, the percentage of customers who would recommend American Express to a friend) as a key metric to measure the quality of their contact center experience.
Conclusion
Contact and communication are very important for any organization. It is an important touchpoint making it necessary for brands to focus on the experience customer reaps from the contact centers. Only then can they go forward with the total CX.
So we have discussed customer experience through brand, product, service, and contact center. But we have forgotten an important aspect of the customer purchase journey, the Store! So, in our next interaction, we shall discuss Store Experience and how it impacts CX. Till then, keep reading the space for more on Customer Experience.
In the other parts of this series, we will learn more about each of the six varied types of experiences forming Customer Experience
