The holiday season has come and gone—sort of. No one really experiences the holidays as a neatly wrapped package between Black Friday and the New Year, and that’s especially true for contact centers, where customers flock for weeks after seeking help with their new gadgets and gifts, and with working out returns and exchanges.
As you shift from the harried holiday season to the post-holiday aftershock, there’s no time to take your foot off the pedal. The customer experience journey that began with a purchase last year is now coming to a phone or computer screen in your center.
Now is the time to make sure the efforts put into holiday care are not wasted. There are several ways your contact center can create consistently high-quality experiences after the holidays and drive a continuous stream of customer loyalty and advocacy through 2014. Read our top 5 below:
1. Support the Omnichannel Journey.
Your contact center is a support hub for customer experiences across multiple channels. The more you can align the information coming in from all your company touchpoints, the better you will be able to identify the gaps in the experience and train your agents for providing a more seamless service experience.
2. Deliver on Your Brand Promise.
Successful contact support is about more than following procedure. When a customer reaches out to your center, they expect to speak with pleasant, competent, and caring staff. When executed correctly, these attributes can make customers feel happier, healthier, or more attractive.
Brands typically struggle to quantify and measure these feelings, making it difficult to adjust customer experiences at a personal level. The challenge for contact centers this year is to implement technologies that will help them better understand the branded behaviors that elicit these feelings and to create customer interactions that are more positive and memorable.
3. Empower Your Supervisors.
The worst thing you can to do to your shift supervisors is funnel massive amounts of unanalyzed data and undifferentiated feedback to them and expect them to convert it into improvements in agent behavior. Rather than overwhelming your supervisors, respect that they need to spend the vast majority of their time on the floor. Empower them with real-time guest feedback insights, pre-analyzed to clearly show important issues and opportunities for taking action.
4. Share Knowledge.
Shift supervisors frequently encounter guest experience challenges they haven’t seen before. But the challenges that are new to one supervisor are often challenges that have already been encountered by a supervisor during a different shift. Knowledge-sharing technologies offer a convenient way to tap into the brand’s aggregate experience and provide location managers with the resources to overcome nearly any customer experience management obstacle.
5. Break Down Big Data.
Big data, or data collected from large and complex data sets, offers several insights into customer support improvements for contact centers. However, it has long been a challenge for directors and supervisors to leverage this data to help their agents. Today, data visualization technology is one of the best ways to convert your most complex data into simple stories to quickly relay big insights throughout your organization to instruct and unify.
The ability to deliver first-rate customer support is what will keep customers satisfied all year long. Implement these strategies, and you’ll achieve longer term customer loyalty, success, and brand advocacy.
