The world has changed on an astronomical scale. Digital transformation is happening faster than ever, and customers interact with brands across a wide range of channels. Yet, one universal truth remains consistent even in the face of all these changes: CX (the customer experience) is vital to success.
Regardless of where contact center agents are located or which platforms they’re using to serve your customers, you need to ensure you’re delivering consistently excellent interactions. Today’s customer expects more from the brands they support than ever before. For a business, failing to compete in CX can mean failing to survive in a post-pandemic landscape.
Unfortunately, while business leaders might understand the importance of CX, it might not be the same for your contact center agents.
So how do you make CX matter to your contact center employees?
The Facts: CX is Essential to Business Success
If you’re going to convince your contact center agents of the insurmountable importance of customer experience, you’re going to need some hard facts. Let’s start with a definition of “CX”.
“CX” or Customer Experience is the term used to refer to every touchpoint and interaction your client has with your company. CX is defined by every call to the customer service desk, interaction via live chat, or video demonstration your agents give. For companies to have a positive “CX”, they need every point in the customer journey to be perfect – from the moment clients start asking about your products to the point where you leverage their loyalty and ask for a review.
So, why is CX important? Without a good customer experience, your clients will abandon your brand. Let’s look at the statistics:
- More than two-thirds of companies compete primarily on customer experience
- 1 in 3 customers will abandon a brand they love after just one bad experience.
- 73% of people say customer experience factors into their purchasing decisions.
How to Make CX Matter to Your Agents
Your ability to excel with CX directly impacts whether or not you attract and retain customers. Since your contact center agents are the main point of contact for your customers, their ability to deliver fantastic CX significantly influences your bottom line.
So, how do you ensure your agents are invested?
1. Share their value
Agents need to be made aware of how vital their efforts are towards the overall goal of great CX for customers. Make sure to show the connection between satisfied customers and repeat business, positive reviews, and referrals. Let your agents know that the first impression they provide is what the customer will remember.
By highlighting how valuable they are, your team can take ownership of their efforts and look at their work as a valuable part of the business.
2. Set Goals
Your agents need to know how to define whether they’re achieving the right results with customer experience or not. By giving your employees goals to work towards, your agents will understand what is expected of them.
Pinpoint the important metrics you want to measure as an indicator of CX in your environment. Then give your employees benchmarks to work towards. For instance, you might want them to:
- Reduce abandon rate and call-wait time by 10%
- Increase the number of calls answered and first-call resolution by 15%
- Improve their overall CSAT and NPS scores by 20%
When you give your employees these targets, make sure they understand the rewards of achieving them. Awarding employees who achieve the highest satisfaction scores and the best first-time resolution rates will help to motivate your team.
3. Help employees monitor their performance
Aside from giving your staff goals to work towards, it would be helpful to provide them with visibility into their performance to know when and where they need to improve. Bring a custom Geomant Wallboard or gamification into the contact center environment to enhance employee engagement and get your staff excited about boosting CX.
With wallboards and dashboards, your employees will be able to monitor their performance in the CX landscape and compare their results to their peers. This will help staff, supervisors, and managers understand who needs help or requires additional training to improve their scores.
4. Make sure employees are well trained
It’s hard for employees to fully invest in improving their CX results if they don’t know how to get started. Make CX training a part of your onboarding process to ensure your agents get the training and support they need from day one.
For instance, if your employees struggle to achieve high first-time resolution rates, show them how to use your contact center technology to surface valuable contextual information about a customer as soon as they answer a call. If agents cannot keep customers happy when dealing with difficult calls, make sure they can reach out to specialists or supervisors for help with complex situations.
Get Everyone Invested in CX
Excellent CX is crucial to keeping your business one step ahead of the competition in 2022. However, you can’t achieve incredible results with customer experience unless the people on the front line are just as invested as you are.
Reach out to Geomant today for help making sure your teams are fully invested in CX. Our contact center solutions can be customized to provide support and the data you need to improve the experience for your customers.
