Today, customers are more demanding than ever. Being a business owner, you know that meeting customer expectation is not an easy thing. It requires a lot of time and effort to stay on top of things like responding to customer inquiries and complaints and providing them with personalized services.
According to HubSpot’s Annual State of Service in 2022, 90% of business leaders said that customers are now expecting more than ever. In the digital age, customers expect you to be available 24/7 and will be quick to ditch a company that doesn’t deliver.
To effectively cater to these expectations, businesses must streamline their customer service efforts using customer-centric technologies.
Contact center technology is one such solution that can help you meet your customers’ expectations by streamlining your customer service practices. The technology also makes it easier for you to provide them with the level of service they expect from you.
Provide Superior Customer Experience
As the world of customer experience evolves, so does the technology that helps businesses provide it. Contact center technology is in a state of rapid change, with new advances being made all the time.
One such advance is the ability of agents to use contact center technology to have a prior context of queries, meaning the information they need right away to provide superior customer experiences. This is important as The Future of CX: 2022 by Freshworks found that 38% of consumers feel more confident dealing with agents who already have the context of their query.
With the contact center technology at their disposal, agents can have a prior context of customers’ queries which helps them to offer more tailored solutions to customers’ problems.
For example, if an agent is helping a customer who seems to be having trouble with their account, they could look up the customer’s name and see what products or services they’ve purchased before. This would allow them to offer solutions more quickly and confidently than if they had no prior knowledge of the customer at all.
In addition, contact center technology is one of the best ways to help your agents deliver a personalized experience to your customers. The right software can help agents personalize their interactions with customers and make them feel valued.
Personalized customer experiences can help you unlock new growth avenues. The same Freshworks report also revealed that 4 in 5 customers are keen to interact and deal with companies that offer personalized experiences.
Boost Employee Productivity
According to The state of AI in customer service 2022, AI-enabled Contact Centers can handle over double as many calls. Not just that, roughly 50% of customer service agents believed they could save time with the help of AI, which also makes their jobs simpler, thus boosting their productivity.
Contact center technology helps companies achieve better employee productivity by automating many mundane tasks that employees are required to do daily. This helps improve their overall work experience by making them more efficient and productive.
For instance, employees can use an automated system to generate responses to common questions automatically. This means that employees won’t have to type out the same answers to similar questions repeatedly, saving them a lot of time and effort. And since they don’t have to worry about typing out those answers manually anymore, they can focus more on building relationships with customers instead.
Integrates Self-Service Options
If you’re like most companies, you’ve probably seen a decrease in customer service calls since your company began integrating self-service options into the customer care experience. According to the state of customer care in 2022 by McKinsey, 65% of customer care leaders experienced reduced call volumes after integrating improved self-service.
But what if you could do more to improve your business’s customer service? What if you could increase engagement and retention with every conversation with every customer? What if you could be more proactive about detecting problems before they arise? What if you could quickly turn around issues that do arise so that your customers never feel like they’re just spinning their wheels?
With contact center technology, all of this is possible. With seamless integration between chatbots and live agents, customers can get answers to their questions without ever having to pick up the phone.
Agents can see when a customer needs help or has an issue and get it resolved immediately without interrupting them. And because agents are able to work from anywhere, it’s easier than ever for them to provide top-tier support from anywhere in the world.
Reduces Average Call Times
It’s no surprise that call volumes increased during the global pandemic, but the way they did so was not what we expected. A study by Harvard Business Review found that difficult calls increased by 50% during that time. This made it difficult for contact center agents to effectively respond to customers, thus causing them to wait for more than they would prefer.
But what if there was a way to reduce average call times? What if you could make sure that every agent was equipped with the right tools and technology so they could handle customer issues quickly and efficiently?
That’s where contact center technology comes in. It helps businesses reduce their average call time by taking the guesswork out of what customers are looking for when they call or email you. Also, it helps agents understand exactly what kind of information customers are seeking and how best to help them find it, allowing agents to give customers the information they need as quickly as possible.
Final Thoughts
Contact center technology can help you improve your business’s customer service and make you more competitive in your industry.
Contact center systems provide phone agents with all the tools they need to be more efficient and effective while also providing management with valuable information on how their agents are working.