What is contact center experience?

Any contact center experience definition has to begin with the recognition that it encompasses two distinct elements: the customer experience and the agent experience.

While it’s commonplace for companies to focus squarely on the former as part of a wider customer-first strategy, some make the mistake of neglecting employee experience. But it’s crucial to consider both factors since they go hand in hand.

Contact center experience for customers

Contact center experiences for customers include:

• Ease of connection: How straightforward is it for your customers to get in touch with your contact center?

• Query resolution: Does your contact center provide the answers your customers need?

• Speed of results: How quickly does your contact center resolve customer issues? This can be a particularly relevant concern regarding communication platforms such as email.

• The human element: How does using your contact center make your customers feel? Do they feel valued or unimportant?

Contact center experience for agents

On the other side, the agent contact center experience encompasses things like:

• Training programs: How comprehensive is the training you give your contact center agents?

• Supervisor support: Do supervisors and other managers provide adequate real-time support to agents faced with more challenging cases?

• Feedback opportunities: Do you actively invite and incorporate agent feedback into your planning?

• Access to information: Are your systems set up to optimize the available customer and marketing data, so your agents have everything they need to perform at their best?

Why is contact center experience important?

The way your customers and agents experience the day-to-day reality of your contact center can have a profound effect on your business. Here are a few of the main reasons:

1) Significant effect on agent productivity

The first thing to note is that your agents' experience working in your contact center has a huge impact on their overall productivity. If they’re expected to cope with minimal training, limited access to information, and little supervisor support, it’s no surprise if they don’t deliver a good performance.

By contrast, if you focus on equipping your agents with everything they need and make sure their voices are heard, they’ll feel like valued members of the team. This is the best way to maximize productivity in your contact center workforce and boost staff retention rates as well.

2) It affects your brand reputation

Your contact center is the true face you show the world, much more so than any exquisitely crafted advertising campaign. No matter how slick your marketing messages are, customers with a bad experience with your contact center will quickly ditch your company for a competitor.

On the other hand, if your contact center is efficient and effective and delivers results with a friendly hand, you’ll give your business a competitive edge. Word gets around — creating an excellent customer experience with your contact center translates into great reviews, recommendations, and a boost to your brand reputation.

3) Influence on customer satisfaction rates

Customer satisfaction is one of the most important metrics for any business. No matter how great your products or services are, a poor customer support experience or an irritating marketing experience can leave a bad taste in the mouth.

But when you create a helpful user experience and deliver on your promises, happy customers result. Your business will enjoy all the benefits of consistently high customer satisfaction.

4) Impact on your bottom line

Of course, all the preceding factors will have a considerable impact on your bottom line. That’s because optimizing the contact center experience for both customers and agents is also good for business.

Customer and agent retention rates will soar, increasing revenue while minimizing costs. Overall, focusing on making the contact center experience all that it should be should result in a definite uptick in profitability.

What makes for great contact centers?

To sum up, a great contact center:

• Makes both customers and agents feel valued

• Deploys well-integrated contact center solutions to leverage data effectively

• Delivers on its promises to help customers as quickly as possible

• Remains flexible and open to customer and employee feedback

What impacts contact center experience?

In practical terms, the following are important factors influencing the contact center experience, meaning you should give them careful consideration:

• How effectively your contact center solution integrates with other business software

• How well your business can cope with regular or seasonal peaks and troughs and achieve the right balance between contact volumes and staff numbers

• How well trained your contact center agents are

• How often you collect customer or agent feedback, and how effectively you incorporate it into improving your systems

Types of contact center experience

Creating the kind of agent and customer experience that contact center managers should aim for depends on your business goals. Specifically, contact centers don’t all have the same focus. The main types are:

• Inbound contact center: This is a contact center designed primarily to service customer inquiries and resolve customer problems. Its major focus is ensuring customers have ready access to multiple communication options.

• Outbound contact center: Agents and reps at outbound contact centers actively reach out to existing or potential customers. Analytics are a key element in deciding who to contact and when.

• Multichannel contact center: All contact centers are multichannel, which means that interactions between employees and customers take place on various communication platforms.

• Omnichannel contact center: An omnichannel contact center is distinguished from a standard multichannel contact center by its focus on integrating different platforms as efficiently as possible. The objective is to ensure that customers can contact the business on a variety of channels at different times and receive seamless service regardless of which they choose.

How to improve the contact center customer experience for customers: best practices

How do you ensure your customers’ experience of your contact center is excellent? You can start by implementing these best practices:

Seek out and act on customer feedback: In addition to asking your customers for feedback directly, keep an eye on reviews of your product or service on third-party sites. These can be particularly useful because you’re likely to unearth some honest nuggets of criticism you won’t necessarily obtain using other methods.

For instance, if you find many customers complaining about your chatbot (also known as virtual assistant) not being helpful, that’s a clear sign that you should examine that element of your system and try to improve it.

Take advantage of specialist software: Top-tier contact center solutions deliver much more than basic operational applications. In addition to providing your business with a unified platform to run your contact hub, many of these solutions incorporate the latest in machine learning and AI technology.

For example, did you know that some software can conduct real-time sentiment analysis during voice calls? This monitors the tone of the conversation and can provide more detailed insights into each contact center interaction that you can determine via basic metrics.

Offer self-service options: Many customers prefer to resolve simple issues themselves if you give them the chance. After all, this tends to be quicker than waiting for an agent to do it for them.

Take the case of a customer wanting to add goods to an order rather than placing a new order. There’s no reason this should be particularly complicated.

Ensure you have a clear process for customers to follow to save time for both them and your agents, who could then focus their attention on more complex tasks.

How to improve the contact center customer experience for agents: best practices

Following the steps below is the best way to improve the contact center experience for your agents.

Seek out and act on agent feedback: Just as you collect customer feedback, gathering feedback from your employees is crucial. That’s because they’re the people in everyday contact with your customers, so they’ll be the first to spot systemic problems.

Let’s say one of your services suddenly experiences a large number of cancellations, and the data does not immediately indicate why that’s happening.

Your agents can likely tell you many people have mentioned a competitor that offers a similar service with a valuable new feature that yours doesn’t. That means you can take action right away to include something similar.

Monitor performance: You can leverage sophisticated analytics to track the performance of your contact center in some detail.

Starting with call data and monitoring crucial metrics like response times and resolution rates, you’ll develop an accurate picture of what’s working and where you can improve, which means agents will receive the support they need to do their jobs effectively.

Create personalized training programs — rather than simply creating standardized training programs, it’s better to tailor training to each agent’s needs.

For instance, supervisors can monitor calls and take note of each agent’s strengths and possible areas for improvement. This way, you can offer personalized support that helps each employee reach their full potential.

How to use AI in contact center experience

The use of AI in contact centers has seen a revolution in customer service delivery. AI is a superb tool with many different applications that streamline the efficiency of a contact center’s operations. Here are just a few of them:

• In-call sentiment analysis to better understand customer behavior

• Suggestions of potential responses for agents to make to improve the customer experience

• Generation of automated call transcripts and summaries in real-time for later review

• Intelligent call routing based on factors like agent skill, call priority, or previous customer interactions to reduce waiting times

• Automatic monitoring of crucial metrics

• In-depth, customized analytics to generate insights based on huge amounts of customer data

Must-have technologies for a contact center

To optimize the customer experience, contact center managers must implement some essential technologies. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the key functionalities that make all the difference:

1) Text and speech analytics

Leverage the power of AI to transcribe, summarize, and analyze speech and text across all your contact center channels. This will allow you to quickly pick up on emerging issues and generate actionable business insights.

2) Live chat software

Convenience is key to delivering top-tier service to customers. You’ll need high-quality live chat software to offer clients an immediate resolution to their issues.

3) Unified knowledge hub

Collecting data is one thing; using it well is quite another. Having a centralized hub for all your customer information that’s easily accessible empowers your agents to do their jobs to the best of their ability.

4) Customer management software

A top-quality CRM is essential for any customer-facing business, including a contact center. It should be seamlessly integrated with the rest of your tech stack so your agents have full access to all the customer data they need to deliver genuinely personalized service.

5) Smart callback functionality

Many customers still prefer to contact companies via voice call, but very few are happy to wait 30 minutes for an agent to answer. Make sure you offer a smart callback facility that your customers can trust.

6) Quality management software

Finally, efficient quality management software should give you more visibility into what’s working and what isn’t in terms of the contact center experience.

It can analyze every interaction with customers, helping you develop better training and coaching programs for your agents.

How do you measure the effectiveness of a contact center? Best metrics to track

Determining how effective your contact center is means monitoring its performance as closely as possible. To do this, some of the key metrics you could track are:

Average handle time (AHT)

This is a crucial metric for voice calls. It tells you how efficiently your contact center is handling the current volume of inquiries.

Of course, some calls take longer than others due to the complexity of the query, but tracking the average over time will let you know whether your staffing levels are adequate and your agents are sufficiently trained.

First-contact resolution (FCR)

Customers prefer their queries to be dealt with and resolved as quickly as possible. There’s a direct link between the number of issues resolved on first contact and how happy your customers are with the service they’re getting.

Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

That neatly leads us to the next crucial metric to track — customer satisfaction. It’s one of the most important indicators of the contact center experience from the customer’s point of view, and it will quickly give you a clear signal if any problems are developing.

Agent effort score (AES)

This measures how easy agents find it to provide the required support to customers. You can track it by asking agents for direct feedback. This metric will tell you if you need to fine-tune your training programs or offer more supervisory support.

Top tips to improve contact center metrics

Once you’ve chosen your preferred contact center metrics, how can you improve them? Well, there are several approaches you can take, including:

• Setting clear expectations of staff so everyone is comfortable in their assigned roles

• Making sure your staffing levels are optimized at all times

• Investing in top-quality contact center software to boost service delivery

• Using targeted customer and agent surveys to gather useful feedback

• Providing adequate support to agents in terms of resources, in-call support, and training opportunities

Choosing the best contact center experience software for you

There’s a wide variety of contact center software solutions available, so it’s vital to devote some time to investigating the possibilities before committing to a purchase decision. Take into account factors such as:

• Integrations: You’ll need a solution that works well with your other business-critical software.

• Scalability: If you’re in a growth phase, it’s vital that the software you choose scale easily as your business develops.

• Features: Before choosing a package, consider which features will be useful for your company. For example, the Vonage Contact Center solution is highly flexible, so you can avoid paying for features you don’t need.

• Support: Make sure you choose an option with excellent client support to resolve any issues as quickly as possible.

• Customization: Check how customizable the solution is. Flexibility is the key to finding software that fits your business well.

Build a foundation for contact center experience success

Ensuring your contact center provides a good experience for customers and agents is the key to long-term success. At Vonage, we understand how to make this happen, thanks to years of experience working with companies like yours.

With Vonage Contact Center, you can access flexible cloud-based solutions that streamline customer interactions and improve agent efficiency. You’ll also benefit from the latest AI-driven technology, empowering your agents to deliver the top-quality, personalized service your customers deserve.

Want to know more? Contact a Vonage expert today to discuss how we can improve your contact center experience.