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Calabrio

Consumers judge brands based on customer service, but contact centre employees aren’t being empowered

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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Both consumers (97%) and contact centre managers (98%) agree that customer service interactions have an impact on whether consumers stay loyal to a brand. And a vast majority (88%) of contact center managers also agree that brand perception directly impacts overall company revenue. When positive customer experience (CX) interactions boost loyalty, revenue follows.

Calabrio has identified a direct correlation between contact centres, brand loyalty and brand revenue. The global research report, State of the Contact Center 2022: Empowering the Contact Center as a Brand Guardian, uncovered a surprising gap between the role contact center agents play in consumer brand perception and how much employers support and empower those same agents to be brand guardians.

“We know that contact center interactions can make or break a customer relationship, leading to increases or decreases in revenue,” said Tom Goodmanson, president and CEO of Calabrio. “How smoothly those interactions go is a direct result of how agents are trained and how they are supported with the right tools and technology. It’s critical for brand loyalty that agents feel confident to make the right decisions at any given moment. And the most efficient way to improve the customer experience is to empower contact center agents as brand guardians.”

The jump to the cloud revolutionized how agents work and learn, opening opportunities to build stronger customer relationships. To accelerate this, agents now need a more flexible and more autonomous work experience, accessibility to best practices, and digital tools that help them shape the optimal customer journey across all possible interaction channels.

In short, agents need to be truly empowered as frontline brand guardians to protect revenue streams.

Voice reigns supreme

AI-powered chatbots have gained in popularity, but nearly 80% of consumers still rank phone interactions as their preferred customer service channel. Yet contact center managers have a mismatched perception of how important voice channels are to brand image. Managers ranked voice channels third, behind email and web interactions.

This gap may be leading to a misplaced focus on newer channels, such as social media and apps. Instead, consumers overwhelmingly think contact centers should prioritize agent training (70%) and fill staffing gaps (58%), instead of adding additional channels like chatbots or virtual assistants.

Loyalty is fleeting. Bad experiences have BIG impacts

60% of consumers say they switched brands due to a negative contact center experience— most leaving after only two negative experiences. Even a single negative experience significantly damages consumers’ perceptions across future interactions. In fact, consumers with a recent negative experience were less than half as likely to say contact centers were doing a good job in any category. In other words, recency bias is powerful — and it is hard to recover once consumer confidence is lost.

Other critical disconnects

The study shows significant gaps between consumers’ experiences and the service contact center managers think they are delivering:

  • Availability of human agents – 80% of managers think they are meeting or exceeding customer expectations for access to live agents. But only 37% of consumers agree.
  • Quick response times – 79% of managers think they are meeting or exceeding customer expectations for response, but only 45% of consumers agree.
  • Needing to feel heard and understood – 84% of managers think they are meeting, or exceeding customers’ needs to feel heard and understood by the brand, but only 45% of consumers agree.

The study consisted of 500 respondents from the US, UK, Nordics and DACH, split evenly across consumers and contact center managers. To see the full report, go to: State of the Contact Center 2022: Empowering the Contact Center as Brand Guardian.

Making the move to cloud in contact centres: 3 key questions to ask

 960 640 Guest Post
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As organisations look to future-proof customer experience they are reviewing their contact centrestrategies with many turning to cloud-based technology for all-round agility. Magnus Geverts, VP Product Marketing and Management at Calabrio, shares his top tips for a smooth and successful transition to a cloud-first approach…  

As economies recover following the Coronavirus Pandemic cloud-based contact centres will become standard – that’s the verdict of over 300 contact centre professionals when asked about the future of their industry. Even before anyone had heard of COVID-19, the shift was happening but the acute pressures of managing virtualised home-working teams while meeting rising customer expectations have accelerated the rate of change. The statistics are revealing: one in ten contact centres is now fully cloud-based, eight in ten are ramping up deployment of cloud-based software and an astonishing 39% either plan to invest further in the technology or take the final leap into the cloud, if they haven’t already done so.

These results reflect what our own customers have witnessed throughout the pandemic. Organisations which have relied on an on-premise solution have often struggled to cope with the dual lockdown pressures of increased customer demand and a new working from home (WFH) workplace culture.

3 key questions to ask

With greater demand for remote working and employee flexibility there is no better time to adopt cloud-based contact centre technology, however, here are three things to consider:

Why move to the cloud in the first place?

Cloud-based communications systems offer far more flexibility, resilience and security than traditional on-premises solutions, without the need to hire additional IT staff or invest in expensive hardware. Strengthening your business case for cloud should start with people, the bedrock of great customer service. Cloud-based workforce management (WFM) solutions offer far more flexibility than traditional on-premise solutions. Agent autonomy and self-service including shift trades, booking time off and obtaining overtime shifts are made easy using a mobile app or secure staff portal. Wherever agents, planners or mangers are based they benefit from access to WFM for greater control of often tricky WFH environments.

The latest cloud solutions scale up and down flexibly, making it easy to add new channels, services and users in an instant, thereby boosting productivity, customer loyalty and longer-term profitability.

Finally, as customer expectations rise exponentially, organisations are seeking new ways to differentiate themselves through customer service. Now is the perfect time to combine the cloud with advanced, omnichannel Voice of the Customer (VoC) analytics. The cloud facilitates fast and simple integration between these sophisticated tools and other important applications, including CRM, to capture vital intelligence inside and outside the contact centre and add context to customer conversations. When agents know why a customer is contacting them in the first place, can understand their mood and have sight of their complete conversation history, they are empowered to deliver a far richer, relevant and satisfying customer experience. After all, brands that go beyond the simple ‘what happened?’ to ‘why did it happen? will be the outright winners.

What should I look for?

As contact centres prioritise moving to the cloud and investment pours into the marketplace, organisations are spoilt for choice. Big names and well-established vendors jostle alongside the new disruptive kids on the block such as Amazon Connect, who are introducing exciting new developments. Choice is undoubtedly good, but it can be confusing for cloud novices. The best technology vendors offer a blend of rich features and functionality with a strong service mentality and long-term vision.

When choosing a new vendor, be guided by a checklist of key qualities. One of the essential ‘must-haves’ is a cloud first value proposition. This means one single platform that is purpose-built for the cloud rather than adapted from a legacy system and is designed to deliver a single unified experience. A good technology partner must enable a flexible transition to the cloud while maintaining business as usual (BAU) operations. Meanwhile, opt for a solution set that scales readily with changing customer and business requirements and delivers quick win features to maximize ROI.

What could go wrong and how to avoid the pitfalls?

One of the main motivating factors for moving to the cloud is it simplifies contact centre operations while reducing IT and administration costs. However, choosing the wrong technology and aligning with the wrong partner can do more harm than good. Unwise choices merely increase the time and number of headaches associated with manually integrating standalone systems and trouble-shooting end-user issues. Avoid the pitfalls of choosing the wrong supplier. Look for a partner with an innovative outlook, proven experience and technology that is customisable, but comes with basic out-of-the-box contactcentre functionality as standard, is quick to deploy, easy to use and even easier to maintain.

Take the final leap into the cloud to enjoy the benefits of improved workforce flexibility, enhanced agent engagement and performance while gaining valuable insights across the contact centre and the overall business.

For more guidance, ideas and information about planning your shift to the cloud, download our “Making the Move to the Cloud” Ebook.

Complex customer issues number one challenge for contact centre employees

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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While customer experience continues to be the top priority for businesses, a new report reveals that 56 per cent of contact centre employees cite complex customer problems as their top challenge. And 60 per cent admit their company has left them ill-equipped to handle these problems, leaving agents stressed and unengaged.

The report, The Health of the Contact Centre: Agent Well-Being in a Customer-Centric Era, was commissioned by Calabrio, a provider of customer engagement and analytics software. It surveyed more than 1,000 contact centre employees in the UK and US to uncover the health of today’s contact centres, including agent confidence in the ability to be successful in their jobs, the challenges they face and how technology will dictate the future of the contact centre.

Empowering contact centre employees is more critical than ever as 32 per cent of respondents believe that customer problems will only become increasingly difficult over the next two years, and 45 percent worry customers will expect even more from companies.

The well-being of contact centre employees continues to decline and, if not addressed, it can ultimately affect their ability to deliver the desired customer experience. A quarter (25 per cent) of respondents say they feel stressed multiple times a week, and more than half (52 per cent) agree that their company isn’t doing enough to prevent teams from feeling burned out.

Kris McKenzie, EMEA General Manager at Calabrio said: “Brands are battling it out to deliver the right customer experience to get ahead of the competition and drive market share. What is clear, however, is if they do not rethink the contact centre strategy, they’re putting the entire customer experience at risk.

“As a cornerstone of the customer experience, brands need to implement the right technology in their contact centre but more importantly they need to focus on the people. In doing so, contact centre staff become empowered to quickly make informed decisions and deliver on the experience that customers have come to expect.”

Download the full report here.