Customer Contact Week Nashville: 5 Lessons from Day One

At monolithic CX events for illustration Customer Contact Week 2024, attendees bask nan opportunity to study from keynotes, demos, and unrecorded adjacent lawsuit studies.

Yet, nan champion learnings often stem from nan on-the-fly conversations pinch customer acquisition leaders, casually sharing impactful lessons that person helped shingle up their CX operations.

During time 1 of CCW, nan CX Today squad engaged successful galore of these discussions and stopped by respective scheduled sessions.

In doing so, we narrowed down each our learnings into nan pursuing 5 fascinating pieces of proposal for interaction halfway leaders, rubbing connected everything from transmission to workforce management.

1. Don’t Good Cop, Bad Cop Your Contact Center Channels

Customers often default to nan phone, sensing that it offers them nan champion changeable of getting their ain way. Unwittingly, interaction centers tin reenforce these perceptions.

“A cardinal logic customers escalate is to execute amended experiences,” noted Brooke Lynch, Divisional Director of Digital astatine nan Customer Management Practice. “Don’t promote this by giving “special compensation” to group who reason complete nan phone.”

To debar this, delivering a accordant acquisition crossed channels is crucial. Yet, that’s tricky to do pinch nan detonation of integer communications.

For this reason, immoderate brands are considering: which transmission is champion suited to each customer intent?

From there, they’re crafting nan champion imaginable acquisition connected that transmission – blending modalities, AI, and a quality touch – and, via a front-end virtual agent, routing customers to that experience.

So, while interaction centers are gathering customers connected their transmission of choice, they’re not needfully keeping them there. Instead, they’re signposting and guiding them to nan champion imaginable solution.

As a result, much customers are apt to refrain from defaulting to nan phone.

Sometimes they’ll escalate to voice, and that should stay an option. Yet, if nan lawsuit has nary irregularities, agents should consciousness assured successful staying beardown and navigating nan customer done nan pre-set experience.

2. Consider Slant Schedules & “Flex” Outsourcing

Typically, a interaction halfway experiences a higher influx of calls astatine nan opening of nan week than astatine nan extremity of it.

As such, they prosecute much part-timers and/or propulsion harder connected nan outsourcing lever astatine nan commencement of nan week – adding complexity to workforce operations.

That’s why much interaction centers are weighing up nan merits of slant schedules. Here, an worker still useful a 40-hour week. However, alternatively of doing nan afloat 8 hours each day, they’ll do 10 hours connected Monday, 9 hours connected Tuesday, and truthful connected until they scope six hours connected Friday.

Not only could specified a displacement shape simplify scheduling, outsourcing, and recruiting processes, but agents often for illustration this displacement shape arsenic their workload lightens done nan week.

Caleb Scott, a WFM Manager astatine CHHJ, discussed nan imaginable merits of nan strategy alongside really his squad is amended managing peaks successful interaction volumes.

That’s a captious attraction arsenic highest guidance is simply a important situation crossed nan collections industry, for illustration galore different spaces. After all, erstwhile an unexpected incident crops up – for illustration a terrible non-forecasted upwind emergency – forecasts spell retired nan window.

Yet, by choosing to activity pinch an outsourcer pinch a “flex” action to connection emergency support – which doesn’t travel astatine a premium – CHHJ has a much-strengthened expertise to soft complete highest periods and guarantee accordant customer service.

3. Develop a Flywheel for Contact Center Innovation

The unreality offers nan anticipation for continuous capacity optimization. That’s a important displacement successful mentality for interaction halfway leaders and IT teams that person ever leveraged on-premise systems.

After all, nan attraction moves from attraction to innovation, and that move is thing nan interaction centers must clasp if they’re going to get payback from nan cloud.

To guarantee this happens, Matt Bange, Solutions Consulting Manager astatine Five9, urged CCW attendees to create a flywheel of innovation.

For Bange, that’s a four-step cyclical process that involves customer and worker listening, analyzing nan feedback, tailoring nan experience, and applying innovation.

By processing this cycle, interaction halfway leaders tin germinate their operations astatine a reasonable gait and reply that captious post-CCaaS deployment question: what’s next?

4. Closely Consider nan Cultural Fit of Your Contact Center Vendors

When choosing a interaction halfway vendor, galore brands opt for nan information of a big-name player. After all, fewer group get successful problem for choosing a well-known, heavy platform. In this sense, prestige and characteristic extent bring a consciousness of safety.

Yet, this norm whitethorn place nan value of taste alignment betwixt nan marque and vendor, which should beryllium a captious portion of nan action process.

That’s according to Frank Wassenbergh, CX Tech Practice Leader astatine Cloudlinx, who notes that taste fresh must beryllium intimately considered alongside capability, economic, and contractual fit.

Sharing more, he notes that immoderate interaction halfway providers will deploy questionable tactics, for illustration promising a characteristic during nan procurement process, omitting it from nan deal, and past – post-purchase – telling nan customer: that’s not what you bought! From there, nan customer must salary complete nan top.

As such, referenceability and networking are important to intimately see those “warts and all” stories and side-step sneaky practices.

5. Split Customer Intent Into Consultative and Interactional Buckets

Customers person moments wherever they request human-to-human relationship and authentic connections, particularly during much emotionally challenging journeys.

Yet, location are besides journeys wherever they crave ease, simplicity, and speed.

Recognizing this, Torrin Webb, a Customer Experience Strategist astatine Nationwide Insurance, splits customer journeys into 2 groups: “consultative” for nan erstwhile and “transactional” for nan latter.

In doing so, Webb takes each customer interaction logic and – depending connected nan bucket – intends to optimize nan travel by adding consultation aliases digitization and automation.

For Webb, it’s captious to beryllium this intentional and activate much tailored experiences that leverage customer and worker feedback, considering: really tin we beryllium much consultative aliases transactional?

Live from CCW 2024, he shared overmuch much connected this maneuver for blending integer and quality experiences successful an exclusive video question and reply pinch CX Today.

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