By Uthaman Bakthikrishnan, Executive Vice President, ClearTouch
The shift towards remote and hybrid working environment of businesses in recent years has unlocked the potential for multichannel customer services. However, to keep up with the increasing trend of inbound and outbound customer service operations in various industries across BFSI, e-commerce, healthcare, telecom, businesses are adopting outsourced contact center operations to extend the horizon of customer service. As per insights from Gartner’s 2022 Customer Service and Support Poll, majority of business focus on improving operational excellence to provide better CX to their customers.
In order to ensure strategic CX, planning is critical to maintaining and improving a business’s customer service operations. Due to increased customer demands and the advent of the digital age, contact centers are always running a risk of losing customers in the long run.
Thus, it becomes vital to optimize a contact center’s efficiency at every level, to ensure that customers always receive the best service and that their expectations are exceeded with each interaction.
There are numerous ways to improve planning and efficiency in a contact center to exponentially improve customer satisfaction by equipping agents to serve customers efficiently.
Strategies to improve planning and efficiency in contact centers-
1. Identify customers: Knowing your customer is the first step towards scaling operations in a contact center. It will also help build character personas of your customers or potential customers that engage with contact centers, and will ultimately help understand the best way to interact with those customers.
2. Determine key customer trends and insights: To better serve customers and gain a competitive advantage, organizations should analyse customer insights and more importantly provide recommendations for actionable insights.
3. Leverage strategic analytics to optimize performance: To optimize contact center operations, metrics like First Call Resolution and Average Handle Time should be adopted to gain insights into the agent’s performance, the effectiveness of an interaction, etc.
4. Implement reporting for scheduling and forecasting: One of the best ways to improve planning in a contact center is to adopt forecasting that will help create an accurate schedule. An automated scheduling system with reporting allows for proper adjustments.
5. Scaling operations through cloud: As per a report by MarketsandMarkets, the cloud contact center market is set to reach USD 54.6 billion by 2027. Cloud-hosted solutions and interfaces help agents easily access data, thus scaling their operations.
6. Strategizing CX through BPM: It is no longer enough to focus on BPM strategies that automate transactions. It is vital to differentiate business offerings through the experience that companies offer to their customers.
7. Ensuring security and compliance: It is imperative to protect your customer data. In order to achieve that, contact center platforms should be PCI-DSS, GDPR, SOC 2, and HIPPA compliant. These standards ensure security, confidentiality, and privacy of customers.
Inaccurate planning, lack of metrics, and the use of outdated technology solutions often result in inefficient planning in contact centers that ultimately affects the CX of businesses. In order to achieve customer satisfaction, addressing the above factors can significantly enhance a contact center’s performance metrics, provide agents with tactical, actionable insights and ultimately improve the overall planning of contact center operations that will lead to strategic scaling of operations.
