The frustration of bad customer support is a near-universal experience.
Forty-one percent of customers have stopped using a product or service after having to repeat themselves over and over, or after being passed from agent to agent!
The ultimate goal of customer experience (CX) is to be as frictionless as possible, quickly fixing customers’ problems in the way that they want to be helped. Every interaction with a customer becomes an opportunity to generate loyalty and revenue – when customers have a good experience and feel satisfied, they buy more and refer more, while bad experiences lead to customer churn and negative online reviews. Because customer satisfaction impacts customer retention, sales growth, and reputation, CX is a crucial financial driver for business.
Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions help businesses take their CX to the next level. By unifying and intelligently routing customer communication channels, such as phone, online chat, web forms, text, and social, CCaaS solutions provide a seamless, holistic customer experience, enhanced with AI and analytics.
Below are 6 ways that CCaaS solutions can create an exceptional customer experience:
1. Empower clients to communicate the way they want to.
Different people prefer different modes of communication and different problems are better suited for different communication channels. A simple product question can be quickly answered in a chat message, while a complicated billing question might be best served through a phone conversation.
CCaaS solutions allow customers to interact on the communication channel they’re most comfortable with – and even move from one channel to the next seamlessly. If a customer’s question proves too complex for chat, an agent can route them to a phone call and continue the conversation to gather more information and talk them through the issue.
2. Improve efficiency and responsiveness.
The interactive voice response (IVR) and automatic call distribution (ACD) features of CCaaS solutions route customers to the best available agent using custom call flows and skills-based prioritization. IVR also enables self-service options for customers to take care of simple inquiries — such as checking their account balance — on their own. Some CCaaS solutions also offer the ability to build AI-powered knowledge bases for common support questions, quickly connecting customers to the information they need.
These self-service features free agents up to focus on more complex customer problems, improving productivity and response times across contact center teams. In addition to custom call flows, top CCaaS solutions also offer automated workflows and time-saving efficiencies, such as click-to-call.
3. Make customers feel like you know who they are and value them.
Nobody wants to repeat their information over and over or get passed around from agent to agent, but this happens all-too-often when customer information is siloed within different apps and tools. With integrations to leading CRMs and help desk applications, CCaaS solutions provide agents with customer information at their fingertips, so they can welcome callers and reduce the need to gather basic information. Additionally, with IVR and ACD, customers get routed more accurately, improving first-call resolution rates.
4. Make it easier to recruit and onboard top agents, so clients talk to the best.
With a cloud contact center, agents can work from anywhere that they have Internet. This frees businesses up to recruit agents and managers with top skills and experience, rather than being limited to a geographical area. Additionally, leading CCaaS solutions offer intuitive interfaces that make it simple to get new agents up and running with minimal training.
5. Use data and reporting insights to continually drive performance improvements.
To stay relevant with customers, it’s important to identify problem areas and improve performance using data-driven insights. CCaaS offers in-depth reporting on critical metrics such as call volume, hold/wait times, self-service vs. agent-handled interactions, and sales conversions. Analyzing this data can help businesses make data-driven decisions to improve their CX.
Additionally, building management operations to evaluate and coach agent calls, using reporting to identify training opportunities, and empowering agents to see their metrics with dashboards can all drive performance improvements, such as increasing first call resolution rates, reducing call answering times, and increasing ROI with sales conversions.
6. Provide business continuity with an exceptional digital “storefront” experience.
As many businesses have gone remote during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, their online customer experience has become their only “storefront,” allowing them to stay operational by serving customers through a virtual model. For contact centers with CCaaS solutions, agents were able to take their laptop and headset from the office, plug in at home, and continue serving customers remotely, with no disruption to CX.
Great CX is a competitive advantage for any business and can directly impact an organization’s bottom line. With CCaaS, you can help your clients create an exceptional customer experience, while improving their business resilience by enabling a remote agent model. Help your clients take their contact centers – and their CX – to the next level by offering CCaaS solutions from the top vendors in the industry.
Want to learn more about adding CCaaS to your stack?
