Turning challenges into customer contact centre opportunities

“Challenging” is a word most businesses will relate to in 2023 – whether it’s derived from rising costs or the supply of labour to meet your customer service needs.

 

Yet challenges can also lead to opportunities and a better customer experience. 

 

It goes without saying that the key to business growth is a positive customer experience. The stats back this up, with 83 per cent of consumers citing good customer service as the most important factor when deciding what to buy, outside of price and product.

 

Digging deeper we can find that a positive customer experience can help drive retention, with 77 per cent of consumers saying it is critical to earning brand loyalty. Impressionable CX also minimises defection too. Consumers are increasingly disloyal, with 50 per cent willing to switch to a competitor after only one bad experience (rising to 80 per cent after more than one)

 

It’s not a surprise that in an increasingly challenging marketplace, your business will struggle to gain market share and remain profitable without a great customer experience.

 

So how can you ensure you can deliver industry-leading CX? Should you work with a specialist experienced in the now-wide variety of potential inbound and outbound contact centre solutions? Or upskill and redeploy your existing internal resources? Or should you take a hybrid approach, and work with outside help to complement your own teams?

 

 

Companies outsource customer service for a number of reasons. They may not have expertise in customer service practices such as outbound telemarketing. They may also want to implement industry best practice by working with a contact centre specialist.

 

Entrusting a third-party call centre also means you usually only pay for what you use, such as the number of calls taken, or time spent on the phone. Some firms only need to use a contact centre helper on a campaign basis, or for out-of-hours customer service.

 

Insourcing, on the other hand, is a viable option for companies with strong CX as their core competency who have the internal resources and scalability to develop in-house expertise.

 

 

Working with customer service experts enables you to benefit from their experience with current industry best practice, and dealing with the wide variety of different types of contact centre support, such as:

 

 

Outsourced contact centres can also help retailers, brands and the public sector remedy operational struggles, such as:

 

 

Consumers increasingly expect an on-brand, omnichannel customer experience. This places greater importance on customer service resource and the supporting technology that orchestrates all customer contact support across telephone, email, live chat and social media. At Whistl, we can work with your own CRM or CEM (customer experience management) platform, or our in-house technology.

 

Working with a telemarketing or telephony support specialist is usually on a contract basis, and part of this contract is to agree on deliverables and metrics that are reviewed on a periodical basis, such as:

 

 

Clients may also measure their NPS or CSAT scores before outsourcing customer service and set clear objectives to improve on these metrics within a set time-period.

Best-in-class CX can be achieved through a variety of channels rather than purely contact-centre customer service. For example, Freshdesk identified the following customer experience industry leaders for their technology, self-service and proactive approaches:

 

First, you need to identify your competitors’ customer service performance to identify that you are best-in-class – industry bodies such as The Institute of Customer Service (ICS) measure customer service for organisations. Then aim to beat your competitors with metrics detailed in the last section, such as your CSAT score and average time to answer.

 

Customer surveys can also identify if your customers are particularly impressed with your CX, over and above other elements such as your products, speed of e-commerce fulfilment and delivery.