What the Contact Centre can learn from Customer Behaviour

We all know customer behaviour is key to driving trends in the contact centre. Understanding it is vital for improving the customer experience, making processes seamless and ultimately ensuring that you’re engaging with your customers on the channels they are active.

This article will explore where contact centres can learn from the way customers behave. Identify where your business could be engaging your customers better and which technologies are available to you to help you achieve this.

What do Customers Want?

One thing is for sure, you don’t want to be lagging behind in your customer experience starting off this new decade. Customer expectations are continually rising at a pace that’s getting quicker. So what are the key characteristics of an experience people will continually return for?

Personalisation

To build good relationships in your personal life, absorbing (some) information about the other person is crucial. Operating commercially is no different, since business is about people. As a customer you’re unlikely to engage with any business that can’t even get your name right (apart from to tell them that it’s wrong). As we become more data driven, the expectation of the customer is that they will receive an increasingly personalised experience.

Taking personalisation to the next level is, for example; sending your customers an email when they have performed a specific action on your website. Or using their data and dynamic content to tailor what’s shown on your website to be specifically for them.

In the contact centre, personalisation equates to the contact centre agent at least being able to understand what the previous correspondence with the customer was about, and maybe giving them a heads up as to why they are now getting in touch. A more proactive approach though, will lead to more cross selling and upselling across your business.

Instant Gratification

This describes the desire to experience your services, products and communications without delay. Otherwise known as wanting it all and wanting it now. It’s the reason over half of mobile users will leave your website if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds.

Why do you think Amazon has done so well? It’s a prime example of placing instant gratification as one of the keystones to their customer-centric approach. Forget next-day delivery, some items qualify for same-day delivery. Gen Z and millennials in particular crave immediacy, hence the emergence of this relatively new concept.  

Transparency

Customers appreciate honesty, break their trust and it’s likely they will leave for a competitor. They want your business to be transparent in terms of the use of their data, your pricing and business practices. Solutions that enable customers to have visibility over their progress in a customer service enquiry for example go a long way.

In this time of increasing digital advancement, customers are incredibly aware of their data security, so introducing solutions like PCI DSS Compliance into the contact centre to protect card payments is crucial, both for you and for your customer.

Technologies That Deliver What Customers Want

We know that in the process of digital transformation, technology is vital for bridging the gap between what your customers want, and you being able to achieve it. Our top technology suggestions will help you to deliver what your customers want.

A Place for all Interactions: SmartINBOX

Your customers want to communicate through a variety of channels; mobile text-messaging, email, social media and so on. The problem is, multi-channel communications coming into your contact centre can be a bit chaotic.

SmartINBOX is a solution that brings all your contact centre interactions into one place. Grouping them together and providing a single unified feed which enables your agents to easily see the customer service journey highlighting all the key information and details they need to close the enquiry. It allows any digital customer interaction or textual task to be blended into single or multiple queues. You can smart tag and use search filters to automatically prioritise, categorise and route the event to the correct agent or department.

Meaning your customers’ experience is seamless and that their enquiry is resolved quickly and efficiently.

Self-Serve: Chatbots and WebRTC

In order to provide instant gratification within your contact centre interactions, technologies like chatbots that enable customers to self-serve are becoming increasingly popular. Chatbots are intelligent solutions that can sit on your company’s website, social media or customer service portal. They help to free up your contact centre agents and guarantee an immediate response to your customers.

WebRTC solutions like WebCall, help you to bolster the customer experience on your website. Customers can call at the click of a button and put real-time communication capabilities into their web browsers, connecting back up to your contact centre for easy handling.

Automate your Key Processes

Ultimately, automating the mundane is vital for delivering a high quality of customer experience. Components like SmartFLOW will help you to automate office microservices or order management and fulfilment. Contact centres are often inundated with repetitive enquiries, don’t you just wish you could make resolving these easier? For councils for example, using SmartFLOW we can automate pothole reporting.

Solutions like this means that you increase the efficiency and resolve queries with minimal (or no) human intervention. Customers appreciate being kept up-to-date and notifications and alerts along their customer journey will keep them assured that you’re on the case.

Clever Forms for Data Capture

What if we told you that you could combine all your disparate systems and clean your data at the same time? We know some contact centre agents need to use 10+ systems to be able to do their day-to-day customer service activities.

Our SmartFORMS component means that you can whittle the number of solutions your agents use down to just one. It’s for data capture and means that your contact centre agents can update customer information using the forms and screens they create. As data is captured, it’s then fed back to all your systems, for instance your CRM, contact centre, marketing and billing systems. So your agents can operate from one pane of glass and always ensure that your data is up-to-date.

Stay Customer AND Tech Savvy

It pays (quite literally) to listen to not only the behaviour your customer is exhibiting, but the technologies that are available to your business to help to absorb and respond to this. Expectations are only set to get higher. Will your business be ready for them?