Striving for optimal customer experience is a constant battle that call centers must undertake and one of the sustainable ways to achieve this is through call deflection.
Yes, call deflection is a way for your contact center be more cost effective and efficient. However, by tweaking your overall call deflection strategy a bit and including the intent to improve customer service either directly or indirectly, you can positively affect call center customer experience.
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Providing more than one option for customer service
Your customers are diverse and naturally, they will have different preferences even when it comes to a way to reach out to you. Some customers prefer chat over voice while others would want to solve things on their own if given the chance through a comprehensive F.A.Q or resource center.
Just think about it. On your side, it might seem like investing a lot in your call center agents to take calls means giving the best one-on-one service for your customers. But from the introverted customer’s side who gets anxious whenever they have to deal with another person they don’t know, your customer service offering is limited. More choices mean more customer preferences served and, if done right, this will lead to a positive call center customer experience.
One of the ways you can increase your customer service channels is to adopt a feature-rich customer engagement platform which provides voice, video, text and social media chat. It even records every single interaction allowing you to understand the most common issues which are the foundation of every call deflection strategy.
Less stressed agents result in better service
Increasing workloads is one of the main contributing factors to employee burnout and attrition. Call centers are prone to high rates of agent turnover a lot more than other industries.
Losing experienced agents means hiring new, less-experienced ones that are less likely to deliver the same customer satisfaction that more experienced agents provide. And that’s just for the customer’s side. The company also suffers as any lost employee means any time and money investments you put into their training is wasted.
Also, by reducing call center volumes and letting your agents handle only the customers that really need one-on-one assistance, you are allowing your agents to give their full undivided attention to the customer without them having to worry about the collective team’s failing KPIs such as increasing customer wait times.
Online customer processes simplified
If, as part of your call deflection strategy, you perform immediate fixes to your online processes as soon as they are reported by your customers, then you’re bound to receive lesser calls since your customers won’t come back to you with the same problems in the future.
Eventually, as you and your customers go through the process of discovering and fixing issues, all your online processes that your customers go through will be simplified and perfected. Future customers that use them will also have less issues thereby improving your customers’ experiences online.
Less errors in the website
Your website is one of your flagship branches. For many organizations, there are even more prospective customers visiting their website than their actual physical branches. This makes your website very important and therefore it should always be updated, maintained and error-free. Otherwise, it could result in a negative impression and lost business from your customers.
Just like in the previous point, an effective call deflection strategy can help you identify where your website is the weakest and apply quick fixes to them. Eventually, you will reach a point where your customers will encounter lesser and lesser issues on your website.
Conclusion
Call deflection is one of the most effective ways to improve customer experience. Actually, if you drill down to the real essence of call deflection, it isn’t really just about call volume reduction or even cost cutting. It really is about generating the best customer experience possible.
Implementing a call deflection strategy can only be done if you know what your customers’ most common issues are and that starts will keeping track of your customers and their problems through software which have been designed with the necessary functionalities you need to adopt a winning call deflection strategy.
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