Operationalising customer feedback in your contact centre

The contact centre is the heart of most businesses – often handling more customer interactions than any other touchpoint in your business. Much research has been conducted over the last 20 years that has highlighted the importance of the contact centre offering functional value to customers and doing so in a way that positively impacts customer experience. A recent Gartner research article highlighted VoC in the contact centre as an essential part of any customer experience programme since it provides vital insight into customer needs and perspectives. Gartner further emphasised that while capturing customer feedback is important; many organisations struggle with operationalising the data gathered, either because the platform selected does not enable this or by not implementing internal processes to support such. 

The challenge lies in setting up a VoC that is ready for operationalising from the get-go – and this takes planning to ensure the right solution is built to suit your business.

Select a VoC platform that enables, not hinders

Gathering customer feedback is essentially a data-gathering exercise – and to be effective, the process should seamlessly integrate into your telephony environment, support all customer engagement channels, and enable real-time data collection. While many platforms offer a way of gathering data from customers, selecting a solution that integrates tightly with your telephony platform means that triggering feedback surveys becomes seamless. This means that as the owner of the VoC programme, you can focus on the results of the data and not the collection mechanism. 

Recovering from service failures

While gathering feedback is important to improving over the long term, the ability to react swiftly to individual incidents of service failure is vital to ongoing, operationalised customer experience. For example, the service recovery paradox says often a customer thinks more highly of a company after the company has corrected a problem with their service, compared to how they would regard the company if it had provided non-faulty service. Within the contact centre, this means that your VoC programme should not only gather feedback but allow you to set up alerts that notify you of low scoring surveys and give you all the information you need to recover.  

Agent Performance

Your agents are your biggest asset when it comes to customer experience, and using feedback metrics within their KPI's is the best way to operationalise improvement within the contact centre. Overall customer feedback scores are useful indicators of satisfaction, but without individual records being associated with individual agents and interactions, the real-world value of VoC is diluted. Your solution should map CX performance against agents so that personalised interventions can be mode - both during daily operations and through long term programmes. By understanding which agents create delight for which customer segment or queue, team leaders can better resource plan their daily operations and identify high-performing individuals for recognition or growth.

Operationalisation of contact centre VoC data hinges on one key aspect – the ability to react to poor service delivery and then understand the causes of such to effect change. A simple enough concept but often harder to implement than expected.

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