The customer experience is vital to businesses and brands with the customer success department tasked with CX optimisation. Without a mindset to continuously improve the client experience, it easy for a company to see their satisfaction metrics fall, ultimately leading to a dwindling client base and fewer sales.

Contact centres play a significant role in customer engagement and satisfaction, so it is essential to implement new processes and technologies to achieve the desired optimisations. A contact centre partner uses its expertise and experience from cooperating with many global brands to keep responsiveness, service, and productivity high while reducing their operating costs.

Streamlining and enhancing processes and implementing the latest tech helps business keep their customer churn rate low and reduce expenses, all while improving the quality of service. Here we look at several modalities that can contact centres can leverage as an approach to CX optimisation.

Speaking to a live agent to complete a need is not always the best solution for the customer or the business. For customers, troubleshooting small issues is often faster and handled more effectively by self-service solutions. For businesses, large volumes of customers attempting to complete or resolve the same tasks or problems will increase call queue times, annoy customers, and send the CX rocketing downwards.

A self-service resolution utilises digital platforms to enable customers to carry out straightforward tasks, such as checking order status, updating account information, or confirming a booking online. Instead of using valuable live agent resources to resolve issues, customers connect with mobile applications, conversational interactive voice response (IVR) systems, or interact with AI-enabled chatbots proficient at understanding the customer’s intent.

An essential step in CX optimisation is to identify if a self-service tool can handle a customer need currently managed by a live agent. Funnelling callers to a self-service solution is one of the most effective ways to improve CX and have fewer people on hold in a call queue.

Contact centres invest in improving the customer experience, and in doing this effectively, it is vital to recognise each support channel’s strengths and weaknesses. Identifying the nature of these strengths and weaknesses will arm the customer success department with the knowledge to ensure the task is handled through the right channel.

For example, confirming a booking doesn’t necessarily need the time and assistance of a live agent, and a self-service tool could handle this task more efficiently. However, if a customer wants to make a complaint, then a self-service tool will not allow customers to release their frustration of encountering a problem.

To achieve a sufficient resolution warrants the empathetic listening ear of a live contact centre agent, who can give guidance and personal assurance. Chatbots are not adept or advanced enough to provide this level of emotional support, or skilled enough to turn a disgruntled customer into a grateful advocate.

For CX optimisation, a hierarchy can be constructed to direct customers to self-service tools or to live agents with the right skills, patience, and knowledge, as the scenario dictates.

It is impractical or impossible to instantaneously boost the number of contact centre agents, should an incident occur that demands action from a business. Contact centres can use channel switching to guide and redirect callers to website resolution and service pages. Channel switching utilises digital assets often accessed through the caller’s smartphone.

Active channel switching will improve CX metrics such as net promoter scores (NPS) and self-service numbers. Crucially, call centres remain open as callers switch from a voice to a visual experience that encourages the use of digital self-service tools in the future.

Contact centres can use data to drive priorities and automate many manual tasks that overwhelm agents. AI desktop automation and systems integration can reduce handling times and hold time. Guided workflows, prompts for alternative courses of action, and automated call summaries all aid live agents. The contact centre has a business-critical role to play in CX optimisation. A focus on continuous improvement, utilising emerging technologies, and introducing new processes will protect brand reputation and drive satisfaction and engagement while creating advocates for the business that will ultimately see sales and the client base grow.