Customer Journey

Optimize the Customer Journey as a Whole, Not Touchpoints

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Customer Journey

The first step towards improving the ease of your customer’s experience, becoming more customer focused and improving relationships is taking a comprehensive look at your customer’s journey. Customer experience should be at the very center of your business strategy. That said, recent research has shown that your customer can have positive experiences at each touchpoint along the customer journey but still have an overall negative experience. This may seem counterintuitive, but it’s important to consider the journey as a whole and not as a series of individual events.


What is a  Customer “Touchpoint”

A customer touch point occurs any time a customer comes in to contact with your organization. This can include a visit to social media, contacting sales, visiting the website, or receiving print materials. It can also include indirect contact such as an online review that could still influence a person’s opinion of a brand.

 

How is it Possible for Individual Touchpoints to Go Well but Fail as a Complete Customer Experience?

There are many factors that can influence the customer journey as a whole that are not related to each individual interaction. For example, the sequence of interactions could impact the end results. Or each interaction could be positive, but not be aligned to result in the optimal outcome for the customer.  Improving the customer journey means paying attention to the experience as a whole.

 

Getting Started

In recent times, the number of touchpoints possible along the customer journey has grown exponentially. New technology is constantly adding touchpoints, from chatbots to smart speakers to even smart watches. The challenge is how to control the ever increasing number of channels, and how to obtain a complete view of the customer journey when it is always changing.   

Before you get started on your analysis, try and create a list of each touchpoint where a customer may have contact with the brand or could be influenced about the brand’s perception. Be sure to ask for input across departments, so no touchpoint is missed. Determine what the biggest pain points are and rank them.

 

Optimizing the Customer Journey as a Whole

After you have a complete view of your touchpoints, you can begin to step back and take a look at the big picture. How do these channels relate, or come together? How does one touchpoint impact the experience in future touchpoints?  

A Final thing to consider is that the last interaction you have is the most memorable. How can you make that a positive experience? Is there a way to rearrange the journey so the last experience is a positive one?

Call Center Agent

5 Ideas for Improving Quality Score in a Call Center

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Call Center Agent

Customer experience management is essential for all call centers. A customer-first call center strategy begins with adopting best practices for measurable improvements of the quality of your customer interactions. Quality scoring is one of the most important methods used to ensure adherence tocall center standards and metrics, which not only improves customer service, but identifies opportunities for training and development. Here are some tips for improving the quality score at your call center.

1. Provide Consistent Feedback to Agents

Consistent feedback to agents helps them to continuously improve and increase their overall contributions to the organization. When providing feedback, it’s a good idea to tie this feedback back to established goals and expectations. It’s important to provide tangible, objective, feedback. This way, your agents aren’t taken by surprise. Some examples of measurable goals are customer satisfaction ratings, call handle time, and first call resolution. Authority Software’s Quality Recording Manager helps call center managers monitor this critical data through interactive dashboards and configurable reports so they can provide helpful feedback to agents.

2. Don’t just focus on agents with low performance stats

Improving the key performance indicators of your lowest performing agents is one of the quickest ways to see improvement in your overall scores and improve customer experience. But there is valuable data to be mined from your high performers, which can be used to identify coaching opportunities as well as to help create best practices for the team.

3. Don’t let technology drive your business processes

Technology solutions need to meet you where you are. In a new call center, technology can be a great tool to help guide you through the development of processes, providing you with some organization and capabilities you may not even have considered. A mature call center with experience and well-established quality processes needs flexibility and a solution that can be used to increase efficiencies. Having a solution that is scalable, can easily integrate into your existing environment and can be completely tailored to enhance your processes without interfering with your production environment is critical.

4. Listen to Your Customers – invest in feedback surveys

No system or process can drive customer experience better than first hand feedback provided directly by your customers. Your customers are the best resource for learning both where you need to improve and where you are succeeding. And a CSAT survey doesn’t have to break the bank. It can be as simple as having your agents ask the customer how they would rate their transaction. But whether the feedback comes through an internal survey, an IVR or a third party CSAT survey provider, owning and incorporating this valuable and relevant data directly into your customer’s record will prove to be a key component in using the voice of your customer to improve the customer experience and create brand loyalists.

5. Refer to External Benchmarks

When evaluating your call center’s performance, it is important to look outside the call center as well. External benchmarking is a way to ensure your company is meeting industry standards and best practices. By comparing your call center against others, especially to industry leaders, you can better evaluate your strengths and weaknesses and use that information to improve. Continuous improvement is driven by an understanding your call center’s paint points. Is your wait time much longer than the industry norm? Are your customers calling you back more frequently than your competitors because their issues are not being resolved efficiently? Regular monitoring of competitive data can help drive performance and increase efficiencies.

Final Thoughts

If you are ready to take the next step towards improving your call center’s performance and exceeding your quality metrics, Authority Software is here to help. We can help implement the right tools to assist you to achieve this goal and guide you along the way with our years of experience in the creation, deployment and use of call center quality solutions that let you focus on improving the experiences of both your agents and your customers.