Why You Need to Resolve These Common Customer Support Issues Today

Sustainable growth cannot be achieved from a foundation built on eroding customer satisfaction. Today, we know that the call center is the key element to a company culture that focuses on the customer and their experience. This reality can be seen in the recent Deloitte Global Contact Center Survey showing 88 and 73 percent of call center leaders see customer experience and service improvement as the top priorities for contact centers.

After a long period of relative economic stability without a major emphasis on customer service, many contact centers now must place a higher focus on creating great customer experiences that result in loyalty to their brand and turn customers into advocates. To make that a reality requires solving the most common customer service issues such as employee turnover and training, effective CRM/CSM integration and disconnected departments. The benefits of solving these challenges accrue to the business through numerous ROI perspectives gained through improved contact center effectiveness.

Every call center battles with employee turnover, but what if you could achieve stability in contact center staffing through the presence of highly skilled and available agents on demand? Having highly skilled agents always available makes it possible for call center leadership to concentrate on staff development. This leads to improved agent performance in resolving phone, email and live chat customer engagements for a faster AHT that frees them to handle more complex interactions.

The ability to concentrate on customer service training for agents can also drive:

• Increased customer satisfaction and retention
• New customer acquisition
• Sales and profit increases
• A stronger competitive advantage for the business
• Reduced agent turnover through effective customer service empowerment

The implementation of effective call center routing strategies and technology also has a profound impact on the business. This approach delivers benefits of faster AHT and improved outcome resolution through connected departments all working from the same information. This dramatically increases customer experience and satisfaction in numerous ways ranging from faster dispatch of field services personnel to sales and support desk fulfillment.

Support center performance and customer satisfaction are also highly dependent on the effectiveness of CRM/CSM systems. The right implementation of the right technology platforms and ensuring they holistically integrate within the call center can drive proactive customer issue monitoring through complete and instantaneous information access.

When these systems are part of a holistic approach to customer service, agents can better track customer account information for faster resolution. Equally important is the benefit of tapping into historical data to shape recurring customer needs fulfillment in the most efficient way possible.

The means to achieving these benefits within the call center is based on a holistic approach of skilled outsourcing support services that can deliver the ROI demanded by business stakeholders. This can range from agent support and training to call center metrics analysis and support system integration among others.

In our next post in this two-part series, we’ll look at the specifics of how to achieve these benefits through approaches capable of making the cost-effective ROI case to business stakeholders. The goal is to show how these benefits can be obtained in ways that actually lower costs while improving support center performance and customer satisfaction to strengthen brand and market share performance.