The expectations of modern customers are higher than ever. With the rise of remote work and digitization, today’s contact centers must deliver seamless experiences while being innovative and adaptable. Many contact centers, however, struggle with low customer satisfaction, rising agent turnover, and a lack of actionable business insights.
So, the question is: What are today’s customer experience trailblazers doing to deliver high-quality customer experiences?
In our webinar, “3 Ways to Modernize Your Contact Center and Delight Your Customers,” we invited three leading C-suite experts to share their insights, stories, and strategies for successfully tackling today’s contact center challenges.
Speakers:
- Kimberly Simms, Chief Customer Officer, Planful
- Sanjay Kini, Chief Customer Officer, 6sense
- Scott Romesser, Chief Customer Officer, GoTo
Host: Peter Mahoney, Chief Marketing Officer, GoTo
How do you balance improving productivity and creating high-quality customer interactions?
The tightrope balancing act between improving operational efficiency and delivering high-quality customer interactions is complex. But Kimberly Simms from Planful takes on this challenge by taking a top-down, customer-first approach that involves every employee. This means that the entire team, even the engineers, always has the customer in mind when performing their responsibilities. This ensures every aspect of the customer's journey is considered.
Centralizing customer information is also key. Kimberly explains that when their support agents engage a customer, they have real-time access to valuable details about them that helps deliver a better, more tailored experience.
Information such as customer history, use cases, and other data — all readily available on a single, centralized platform — helps the agent personalize the customer’s interactions, allowing them to get to the root of a problem quickly. Using technology and tools not only improves the customer experience but also makes the agent more efficient.
Additionally, focusing on soft skills training, especially for offshore teams, is vital. Kimberly explains how agents must be equipped with the necessary language skills and product knowledge to deliver top-notch experiences. This ensures high-quality interactions where customers feel heard and valued.
How do you drive performance while ensuring agent retention?
A contact center’s success is closely tied to the performance of its agents, but reducing agent turnover while encouraging productivity could be a challenge. Providing agents with the right tools for success may be the key. According to GoTo’s Scott Romesser, agents who are equipped with the right technology, processes, systems, and information can unlock their full potential and do their best work.
When it comes to Customer Relationship Management (CRM), it’s important that agents utilize a system that provides the necessary info, such as interaction history, ticketing information, and product usage. Easy access to these customer insights leads to quicker resolutions and more empowered, more productive agents.
Creating clear career paths for agents is also paramount. Some may see customer-facing roles as transient jobs. This raises the question: How can companies help agents build long-lasting careers?
The answer lies in helping them progress swiftly within the support organization and allowing them to explore other opportunities to transition, such as sales or engineering. With the right coaching, mentoring, and career advancement, contact centers can boost agent morale and set them up for a brighter future.
Adding a little fun to the workplace doesn’t hurt, either. Scott points out that a customer-facing role may be difficult and present its own unique challenges, so adding a bit of joy to the working culture can help ease the tension. Creating a fun, positive environment where efforts and achievements are recognized will make agents feel valued and motivated.
How do you leverage data to optimize operational and business performance?
Operational and business performance aren’t (and shouldn’t be) mutually exclusive. A successful contact center can excel in both areas. Take 6sense, for example; Sanjay Kini revealed that making business decisions based on data was the key to operational and business optimization. At 6sense, data showed that engineers were overly swamped with support cases, managing 80% — an unsustainable load.
By employing data-driven insights, the company managed to shift most of these cases to support teams, reducing the load on the engineers. As a result, overall efficiency improved as engineers now handle only 20% of cases, even though the number of cases quadrupled.
Leveraging Product Issue Analysis to pinpoint high-volume product issues is another effective strategy. Collaborating with product teams to tackle these issues can cut down related support cases, driving business optimization and customer satisfaction.
6sense also makes it a point to track use cases that every customer has implemented. Sanjay explains how leveraging analytics to track use cases in real-time for different customer personas and scoring their health (green, yellow, red) allowed the company to address potential issues proactively. This type of real-time data monitoring enables preemptive actions to take place during interactions, ensuring a solid customer base.
Embracing efficiency: Rethinking customer interactions in the digital age
Today, efficiency is the name of the game, and customer experience trailblazers from Planful, 6sense, and GoTo are at the forefront of it. Modernizing your contact center is not just about adopting new technologies; it’s about rethinking how you interact with customers, support your teams, and leverage data to make informed decisions. From enhanced customer satisfaction to higher operational efficiency and agent retention, our expert panelists proved that these strategies are your best bet for a successful, modern contact center.
For a guide on developing a mature contact center for better business outcomes, read our "Contact Center Blueprint for Growth" ebook.
Explore our webinar for key strategies from experienced leaders on transforming customer interactions. Watch on demand here!