Improving the customer experience is the heart of a QA program. Because of this, call centers should strive to enhance that experience with every metric and process they implement. Customers not only want convenience and quick solutions at their fingertips; they also want to feel trust in the companies they work with. Trust, in turn, creates loyalty, which will help with retention. That’s why call centers must make improving the customer experience a top priority.
What’s the Difference Between Customer Service and Customer Experience?
Customer service and the customer experience are intertwined. But they are not interchangeable. The customer experience (CX) encapsulates the entire journey a customer takes with your call center. This includes initial search, communications, and final purchases.
On the other hand, customer service is how the customer is treated in person-to-person interactions with employees at your call center. The primary difference is that the customer experience is much broader, whereas customer service is a small but essential part of the bigger picture. Think of customer service as one snapshot in the album of the customer experience.
Why Does the Customer Experience Matter?
Customer service continues to evolve with a greater focus than ever before on the best customer experiences possible. Today, customer interactions are increasingly complex, and with many interactions happening online, it’s more than a simple, quick fix. Customers expect care, empathy and, in some cases, an emotional connection.
A great way to create this connection is by prioritizing customer service in each process, interaction, and policy in your call center. There are many ways prioritizing the customer experience benefits call centers:
- Businesses that focus on the customer experience see an 80% increase in revenue.
- 86% of customers say they are willing to pay more for a better experience.
- 89% of customers will leave a company they love after a single bad experience. And over 25% of those customers will post a public review on social media.
Now that you understand why the customer experience matters, you can understand how to implement experience improvements in your call center.
Understanding the Customer Experience
CX is the whole picture of every customer's interaction, from landing on your website to buying a product or service and any follow-ups. Everything you and your contact center do impact those customers’ perceptions and their decisions to return or not. As a result, great CX is critical to your overall success.
Best Practice Customer Experience Examples
Customer experience varies by channel and business. However, there are some excellent customer experience examples that successful contact centers should follow in their daily routines:
- Listening to customers. Analyzing and collecting customer feedback is a great way to develop a deep understanding of the customer experience.
- Creating a personal connection with customers. It takes only seven seconds to make a first impression. And a personal touch can go a long way in making a customer feel heard. What happens in those initial seconds is crucial to whether the customer will be impressed or disappointed. This is important because 95% of customer purchase decisions are based on emotions. That’s why QA is so vital to the customer experience.
- Respond quickly. Nobody likes to be left hanging. Even if a call center agent can’t resolve an issue right away, a simple “we will be right with you” can go a long way.
- Use small gestures to thank customers. Here is where the personal connection comes in. Use first names while talking to customers. Always use polite language, and make sure to thank them for their time and feedback.
- Creating a monitoring system. Like a QA program, a monitoring system can collect feedback, analyze and understand it; a QA program can collect feedback, analyze and understand it and action it. Learning from past mistakes and understanding why they happened is a crucial way to improve the customer experience in the future.
- Monitoring and improving KPIs. Measuring specific KPIs, such as wait times or unresolved inquiries, can dramatically enhance QA in call centers.
- Learn from your mistakes. QA helps improve the customer experience and can also be used as a coaching tool. When call centers recognize poor customer experiences, they can update procedures to mitigate similar experiences in the future.
Keeping these best practices in mind is a great way to evaluate your call center’s customer experience goals. But it’s most helpful to see these best practices in action. Read on for a few customer experience examples straight from our portfolio.
Here Are Some of Our Favorite Great Customer Experience Examples
- TomTom: Great omnichannel support. Customers rely on an array of different channels to communicate with call centers. As a result, omnichannel support needs to be prioritized when improving the customer experience. A quality QA program can analyze various channels when evaluating agent/customer interactions, as seen in the Tomtom case study.
- World Wildlife Fund: Use feedback to improve customer experience. Agent feedback is a crucial part of improving the customer experience. Self-scoring allows agents to process what they are doing well and recognize where they may need improvements. A great example of self-scoring in action is the World Wildlife Fund’s use of QA software in its fundraising efforts. QA tools are used in WWF agent donation phone calls, ensuring all agents follow processes that increase customer comfort and trust levels.
- VoxPro: Increasing Productivity through Improved Customer Service Standards. Switching from an antiquated QA model to a modern, improved version increased VoxPro’s productivity. Still, it also improved the customer experience by allowing agents to get a first-hand look at their performance. When agents see their strengths and weaknesses, it empowers them to improve and evolve, a win-win for customers and call centers alike.
Improving the customer experience is the overarching goal of any quality assurance program. When you choose to use a QA program in your call center, you prove your commitment to your customers. By keeping these customer experience best practices and examples in mind, call centers will always hit the mark when providing an exceptional customer experience. Get more real-world examples of how QA can improve the customer experience in our case studies today.
