Customer service isn’t something you set and forget. It needs to be routinely updated to keep up with customer demands. An article by Ron Lambert says that this applies to contact centers as well, but many centers are holding themselves back from their true potential. For one thing, only half of the contact centers measure important metrics such as customer satisfaction, and even fewer measure customer experience and customer effort.
The other barrier that keeps contact centers from improving is that a high percentage of them don’t prioritize keeping up with technology. Lambert believes organizations need to reorganize to put their customers’ needs as the top priority before the customer service can be updated properly.
If you’re outsourcing your contact center services because you need scalability and the ability to serve more customers, you’re looking for more than a cheap price. We’ve worked with many companies that wanted a partner that would be an extension of their own business. They included the outsourced agents in their gamification and celebrations and held them to the same standards as their in-house agents.
Finding a call center that can provide its service up to your standards is a challenge. Not all contact centers are high quality, and it’s important to properly research and vet potential partners. The following are only a few things your potential partner should take seriously.
- Tracking CSAT: “According to West UC’s research, just over half (53%) of contact centers measure customer satisfaction.” – Ron Lambert
This number is shocking, even to somebody who works in the BPO industry. There are many KPIs your contact center partner should measure, but CSAT should be near the top of the list. To see that 47% of contact centers aren’t even tracking it seems borderline criminal.
Hyperbole aside, CSAT should be a key stat you look for when you’re vetting potential outsourcing partners. It’s a vital metric that can give your business insight into how customers feel about your service methods, so you can figure out where you’re doing well and where you need to improve.
- Keeping Up With Technology: “Less than half (45%) of contact center agents can view a customer’s prior contact history (regardless of channel) in a single desktop system.” – Ron Lambert
Your brand’s customer experience is going to fail without keeping up with technology. It’s brutal, but it’s reality. Customers have the world at their fingertips and they expect their digital experience to be fluid and blended with customer service. Agents should be able to provide service that’s tailored to customers based on their past experiences, so they need virtual assistants and updated CRM system to give them the information they need.
- Offering Multiple Channels: “Only around half of the contact centers have embraced social media (51%) and email (49%) as customer-facing channels, with even fewer capitalizing on chat or online self-service platforms (39% and 21%, respectively).” – Ron Lambert
You don’t need to provide service on every channel available. That would be inefficient, especially when certain channels don’t work for every industry. However, your outsource call center should be capable of providing an omnichannel experience in case you do decide to expand your reach in the future.
This blog post is based on an article from CustomerThink. To read the article, please click here!
Need a call center to drive an elite customer experience? We can help!
Outsource Consultants are call center experts with over 25 years of outsourcing industry experience who have spent thousands of hours vetting and analyzing the strengths and specializations of the industry-leading nearshore outsource call center vendors. If you’re considering nearshore call center outsourcing, simply call 888-766-4482 or request a free call center cost proposal today and we’ll help you find the solution that best fits your exact requirements.
