4 Customer Service Innovations to Improve Your Company’s CX

Negative customer care experiences come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes.
Whether it’s waiting too long to connect with a call center operator, having a complaint go unanswered, or even experiencing a disconnect between an online experience and a live agent’s interaction. They’re all important, with research from American Express showing that 33% of Americans will “consider switching companies after just a single instance of poor service.”

“33% of Americans will consider switching companies after just a single instance of poor service.” Click To Tweet

Luckily, however, the methods for achieving a positive customer experience (CX) have evolved by leaps and bounds in recent years. Thanks to advancements in technology, strategy and our understanding of the customer journey, there are a number of call center innovations you can put in place today to avoid giving your customers a negative experience and to enjoy the rewards of loyalty.

4 Key Call Center Innovations to Improve Your Company’s Customer Experience

Rise of Personalized Customer Care. Sophisticated marketing methods pioneered by companies, such as Google and Amazon, have led customers to expect to see ads and promotions that align with their preferences, past purchases and search history. So entrenched is this reality that today’s customers have come to expect a customized experience.

Shopping online has become an experience that customers expect.
Source: www.shutterstock.com.

According to research from McKinsey & Company, this should be seen as an opportunity, not a challenge: “For example, since more than 80 percent of shoppers now touch a digital channel at least once throughout their shopping journey, carriers can find new ways to engage customers efficiently and effectively with personalized messages and improve speed, service, and consistency to raise satisfaction.”

More than 80 percent of shoppers now touch a digital channel at least once throughout their shopping journey, carriers can find new ways to engage customers efficiently and effectively with personalized messages and improve speed, service, and consistency to raise satisfaction.

And personalization isn’t just a great way to boost customer satisfaction and loyalty: It’s also a good way to give your team valuable insights factors, including:

• Which of your communications strategies work the best.
• What promotions resonate with customers the most.
• The patterns by which customers engage with you.

Understanding these elements gives you the chance to not just optimize the customer experience, but also to improve your own efforts to upsell and grow your relationships with these customers. That means a better use of your time, resources and improving selling power, all at once.

Access to Real-time Information for Your Contact Center Agents. There are a number of effective ways to provide customers with a truly personalized experience. They include offering special promotions to select shoppers to delivering targeted ads and content that leverage advanced data and analytics to reach specific people, in designated areas, at certain times.

An effective way to provide a personalized shopping experience is through personalized online targeted offers.
Source: www.shutterstock.com.

But perhaps the most effective way to deliver personalized service is to empower your customer care agents with access to real-time information on all the customers with whom they interact. This is no longer a perk, but an expectation—especially when calling into a customer care line. Shoppers react positively to agents who know who they are and already have access to their purchase histories, without having to explain anything.

Again, thanks to the growth of sophisticated customer care technology, this goal is more easily achieved than ever before. Today’s call center technology means agents have instant access to the most relevant information at any given time, from a customer’s past activity on your app or website to a record of previous calls and interactions, and all points in between.

Power to Reach Across Channels. Integrating all of today’s communications channels in an effective way has become a fairly commonplace approach to customer care, though still not necessarily an easy one. Omnichannel marketing—a term that represents the merging of all your efforts across available channels in a way that best reaches your customers—has been around for years. Yet, it’s still really only understood be an elite group of CX experts.

Integrating communication channels is an effective way to provide a competitive customer experience.
Source: www.shutterstock.com.

As with the other service innovations listed here, offering a truly omnichannel experience is now a necessity. It spans across your apps and websites to social media interactions, SMS messaging, email marketing, and even good old-fashioned phone calls. Each aspect of your communications must be aligned with every other piece to ensure the best possible results, in a way that grows satisfaction and loyalty.

In other words, simply communicating across all these channels isn’t enough. What’s really required is a strong guiding strategy to bring all of these channels together under a single umbrella. That requires expertise, as well as access to the kind of technology that can offer one seamless delivery system (and give your agents access to it, too).

Optimization of the Complaint-resolution Process. Forward-thinking service operations know that dealing with customer complaints isn’t a burden to be shuffled off to lower-grade personnel. Rather, it should be an opportunity for skilled customer care agents to not only preserve important relationships but also to ensure better branding and word of mouth.

That means treating complaints as a priority: These are people you don’t want to ignore or keep waiting. Research from Lithium shows 53% of customers expect brands to respond to their tweets in less than an hour, with that number growing to 72% among those who are registering a complaint. And 60% of those customers say they’ll take “unpleasant actions to express their dissatisfaction” if the company fails to meet this demand.

“53% of customers expect brands to respond to their tweets in less than an hour, with that number growing to 72% among those who are registering a complaint. ” Click To Tweet

Thanks to technology-based contact center innovations, avoiding these unpleasant consequences isn’t nearly as difficult as it once was. Workflows can be set up to create notifications when a complaint is registered online, for instance, or to bump customer complaints to the front of the call center queue. The end result is that your process for resolving customer complaints runs just as smoothly and efficiently as any other part of your operations.

Implement the Latest Contact Center Innovations with Working Solutions

If making use of these contact center innovations seems overwhelming to you, you’re not alone. The fact is, making the most effective use of these methods is a big challenge for even the nation’s largest and most prosperous companies. Success requires substantial investments in time, labor and infrastructure, as well as the onboarding of various top-level CX experts.

That’s why so many companies today turn to outsourced, on-demand contact center service providers. With more than 25 years of experience providing onshore solutions for diverse industries, Working Solutions is the go-to source for customer care, integrating the innovations you see here, along with many others.