The Role of the Contact Centre in Customer Experience

The Importance of Customer Experience in 2020
In a year where businesses have had to operate at the mercy of a changing environment and disruptive policies, CX represents a welcome opportunity to invest in something that’s more (but not completely!) within their control.

The trend for investing in CX is as strong as ever – it is a key lever to pull when defining a competitive differentiation strategy. As we all know, it is far more efficient to keep a customer than to find a new one.

The contact centre is at the heart of CX for businesses of all sizes and will remain so. This is particularly true for customer-facing teams in mid-market organisations, which are often small or multi-functional by necessity – particularly now, as businesses become more streamlined to survive.

These businesses are demanding more sophisticated tools to deliver efficient, informed and intelligent pre and post sales customer care, borrowing heavily from solutions that were once solely the preserve of the enterprise.

The Role of Contact Centre Agents in a Customer Experience-focussed World
The contact centre needs to become more collaborative if it’s going to continue to be an effective way to deliver great customer experience. It cannot be a silo where information in or out is limited – it must be properly embedded within an organisation’s total communication and customer service flows.

This is all the more true as the pandemic has ushered in an age where teams are smaller, distributed, and more multifunctional than ever before. In this setting, knowledge-sharing and collaboration is vitally important, whether it’s between agents, agent to supervisor, or with employees that operate outside of the bounds of the contact centre – customer facing or otherwise.

Agents need to be empowered with the knowledge to improve their own performance, and the visibility of how well they are achieving this, against personal, team and business KPIs. They also need to be able to effectively influence outcomes, and feed back information that improves processes, for example script optimisation or call scheduling.

This is only one side of the challenge though; a meaningful agent experience can only occur when augmented with effective supervisor tools, allowing predictive resource modelling and better coordination of agents’ efforts.