What do the world's best contact centres do differently?
Simon Blair
CX Skills Training Partner | ACXPA GM of Quality Insights | Five Degrees Founder |
If you manage or support a dedicated inbound contact centre team or a blended operation that takes both sales and customer service enquiries, your key business objectives are to drive first contact resolution, maximise sales and to create strong customer advocates through delivering exceptional customer experience.
The challenge for all Contact Centre Managers and other key support personnel is to ensure that the fundamentals of managing a Contact Centre on a daily basis are in place and consistently executed well. Such operational matters are critical to allow you to just get in the game.
Most Contact Centres for medium to large service based organisations in Australia do this quite well. If they didn't, there would be a severe price to pay in terms of increased costs to serve, disgruntled customers, poor sales outcomes, retention issues, low employee engagement and high turnover.
But as most know, it's not enough just to be 'OK'. Having satisfied customers doesn't translate to increased brand loyalty and buying behaviour. The customer experience for those that interact with your Contact Centre needs to trigger a clearly positive emotional response in order to drive feelings of goodwill and trust and confidence to buy.
Customer experiences that exceed expectations can in some cases drive strong customer advocacy which enables companies to tap into the greatest marketing force on the planet - word of mouth referral. Exceeding expectations as the norm, rather than the exception, creates a powerful sustainable difference over your competitors and in your ability to acquire and retain customers.
The vast majority of sales experiences with Contact Centre staff are poor to average at best due to the high propensity to pitch products and to make assumptions around customer needs (measurement of 10,000+ inbound sales interactions confirms this). The inability to have effective sales conversations that makes it easy for customers to buy and which avoids 'pushing' product is what holds most Contact Centres back.
The BEST Contact Centres across the globe do a number of things differently and better than the majority of operations who are inconsistent and struggle to have impact. Despite their many unique differences, there are a set of five core methods that they apply as essential ingredients to drive their success.
These FIVE methods to avoid mediocrity and convert more sales are revealed in detail in my just published Blueprint that I'm making freely available to all. So if you're a Contact Centre Manager or other key support person...
... you can download this for free here.
Enjoy!
Simon Blair - Five Degrees Owner & Customer Experience Coach