Safety region Rotterdam-Rijnmond wants to deal smarter with reachability through cross-media contact channels such as telephony, e-mail and chat, and was looking for a solution that also offers good reporting capabilities. The region was therefore looking for a flexible and future-proof application for their contact center. In two weeks time, Contact Center Live made sure that Safety Region Rotterdam-Rijnmond was ready for the future. Are you curious how this went? Aimee Desaunois, project leader Customer Contact Center at the Safety Region, shares her experience.

As a customer contact manager, you want to be able to deliver with focus, but how do you do that? Four elements not to be missed.

1 The right strategy

Everything starts, of course, with the strategy you choose. What are your goals and what do you want to achieve with your customer service? This study by Forbes Insights, for example, shows the goals of major retailers. In first place is stopping customer turnover, followed by selling more to existing customers, converting visitors into customers and staying competitive.

2 The right application

Your strategy hinges on the application you choose for your customer contact center. It has to match your objectives and fit your organization. Only with the right solution will you respond better and better to the needs of your customer and make your customer contact efficient, affordable and profitable.

3 Clear reporting

Your goals determine what you need. In doing so, good reporting is crucial. Data analysis is key. After all, that’s how you measure the health of your organization. Whereas the customer contact center used to be seen as a cost item, today it is the department that ensures that your customers remain customers. It’s no longer about handling customer contacts in the shortest possible time. No, you need to make sure that customer hangs up with a smile from ear to ear. As a manager, you want tools in your hands that allow you to prove your added value. By analyzing your data, you not only measure – and know – whether your quality is good, but you can also prove, for example, that you are cross-selling.

4 The right employees

Without employees, of course, you are nowhere. You choose an application because it fits your goals, but also because it fits your organization, your team. Your employees should feel comfortable with the application, they should be the ambassadors of the application, so to speak, so that together they form an integrated whole. The less employees have to think about the application they are working with, the more attention there is for the person sitting – virtually – in front of them.

Curious?

The ideal customer journey, the optimal customer experience, is the primary factor by which you can differentiate yourself from the competition. By structuring your quality process, you contribute to the future-proofing and success of your organization, both in the short and long term. Do you also want to stand out in the market? Then contact us without obligation. We will gladly work with you to find the ultimate solution for your customer contact center. Want to get acquainted first? Stay informed by signing up for our newsletter.

Digitization has gained momentum. Consumers have also embraced digitization en masse. That means quite a bit for you as a customer contact manager. In this blog, Rob Wegdam, founder of Contact Center Live, talks about how you as a customer contact manager can keep your head above water in that acceleration.

Gear

According to a McKinsey study, the coronavirus outbreak has accelerated digital transformation by seven years. Even within e-commerce, where digitization is at the forefront, development has accelerated by a factor of 3. That means consumers have also embraced digitalization en masse. But we see this acceleration all around us. I recently read an article on LinkedIn. Because of COVID-19, there has also been a huge acceleration in the use of the number of social media channels for customer contact. From Facebook to Snapchat to Instagram to Whatsapp, people want to be able to connect with an organization in a variety of ways. Of course, it is very important that you regulate that very well within your organization. With a modern tool, you can manage all those contacts centrally. It is not only important that you can see which channel an employee has used to contact you, but also that your customer feels that he or she is dealing with an organization that understands how to deal with such a channel.

Targeted search

Developments happen so fast, as a customer contact manager it is important to keep up. As a doctor, pilot or driving instructor you have to keep up with the latest developments, but as a customer contact manager you do not. But as a customer contact manager, you also need to maintain your credibility. In doing so, you can of course choose to attend online seminars, webinars or online trade shows. That is at least one advantage of the corona crisis. We used to have to go out all day to visit trade shows and scour all the booths until you found something that was of interest to you, now you can search very specifically by topic. For example, the Customer Service Federation regularly has interesting online expert sessions on various trade-related topics. Their knowledge base is also a source of inspiration.

Keeping up

In addition to actively looking for subject matter information yourself, it is also important to choose a modern application. An application that grows with you and does not stand still. And don’t just choose an application, a product and a license, but also look at the organization behind the application. Choose an organization that understands you and can advise you on certain processes.

Curious?

When you use our application, you get all the functionalities with it. If something new is added, we will inform you about it. This way you can be sure that you never stand still and that the application never becomes obsolete. With Contact Center Live you choose for 150 years of customer service experience. We are a good partner that not only helps you create the optimal customer experience, we also help you keep up. Subscribe to our newsletter here and we’ll send you a piece of inspiration every two weeks.

We wrote it in our previous blog: an optimal customer experience begins with insight. Insight into both quality and content. But as a customer contact manager, how do you monitor quality? In this blog, we share 4 tips.

1 Look at the raw data

If you use a good solution, it is very easy to spin out a summary of the raw data. This gives you insight into how long the phone rings for a particular employee, what was discussed, how long the conversation was, what the conversation was about, how many conversations there were on a particular topic and whether they were positive or negative conversations. This gives you a good initial picture of how your team is performing.

2 Check the details

After the raw data, you naturally want a deeper look. If the raw data shows that customer satisfaction is down, zoom in on that. Are there many calls on the same issue, which employees made that call, is there perhaps one employee where many of the calls are negative. With this drill down, you’ll arrive at specific action items to coach an employee, a group or perhaps the entire team. Has the customer name been mentioned often enough? Was the connection broken by the customer and not the employee? Things like that are important. If you don’t have a good tool for that, you have to sit next to an employee to assess their competence. That, especially today, is not easy. Listening back to all the conversations or reading back chats is way too time consuming. With a good tool, you can easily pick out the contacts with the most striking results. That saves a lot of time.

3 Sample assessment

Then you can randomly review the customer contacts, whether they took place by phone, email or chat. In doing so, it is important that you develop a standard way of assessing. For example, always use the same form of questions. That way, you can calibrate the outcomes, and you can properly compare results regardless of the coach, team leader or manager who conducted the assessment. Because the results are comparable, you can also print overall reports. Based on those results – individually or as a team – you can decide if employees need further training.

4 Set triggers

Apart from the customer contact an sich, it is of course also important how much time an employee spends on follow-up work. Information must be entered into the right systems and the right follow-up actions deployed. By setting triggers, you are always aware if a campaign is taking too long or a certain employee is always overdue. Then you can take very targeted action so that quality goes up and employees become more productive. Moreover, this allows you to better assess how many employees should be assigned to a campaign and when the peak times are.

Curious?

The ideal customer journey, the optimal customer experience, is the primary factor by which you can differentiate yourself from the competition. By structuring your quality process, you contribute to the future-proofing and success of your organization, both in the short and long term. Do you also want to stand out in the market? Then contact us without obligation. We will gladly work with you to find the ultimate solution for your customer contact center. Want to get acquainted first? Stay informed by signing up for our newsletter.

An optimal customer experience begins with insight. Insight into both quality and content. Insight in history, but also in real time. Thanks to all that insight, you take your employees – and therefore your organization – to a higher level, and it even helps you turn a negative message into a positive one.

Understanding quality

It all starts with good reporting. The more data you collect, and the more valuable information that comes from it, the more insight you have. For example, with a good reporting system, you can see how your employees are performing and the quality they are delivering. Based on that, you can make decisions about how to coach your employees to keep quality high. But you can also see, for example, how many calls and e-mails you receive, how often a customer calls back and how often you meet or fail to meet a so-called “first time fix.

Content understanding

But you also want insight into content: what are the contacts about? Are there a lot of questions about invoices? Then there must be something wrong with your invoicing process. Have you introduced a new product and are the questions about it flooding in? Then chances are there is room for improvement in your communication. In this way, your customer contact environment – if it’s set up properly – involves many more insights than just the service process. It touches on all your processes.

Real-time insight

Besides historical reporting, from which you can get a tremendous amount of information, you also want real-time insight into what’s happening. If there is a sudden spike in your calls at 2 p.m., you want to see immediately what those calls are about so you can respond to the situation. For example, a newsletter may have been sent that raises questions, or perhaps there is a delivery problem, caused by a third party.

Manage expectations

Take Black Friday. For many web shops, especially during the corona pandemic, a very important event – which these days is no longer limited to that one Friday. A huge number of orders are placed during this period. Naturally, you’d prefer to deliver these within the deadline as stated on your website. But by now we can all dream of the message “Due to heavy traffic, orders may be delayed a few days”. Such a notification is very important. By telling customers that you will not deliver within the normal 24 hours, but within – say – 48 hours, you proactively inform your customers and manage expectations. This way, you can even turn a negative message into something positive. The same goes for a product that appears to have come out of production with a defect. By proactively approaching buyers, you avoid a lot of hassle and ensure that buyers continue to look at your organization with a positive outlook.

Curious?

That ideal customer journey, the optimal customer experience, is the primary factor by which you can differentiate yourself from the competition. It determines the future sustainability and success of an organization, both in the short and long term. Do you also want to stand out in the market? Then contact us without obligation. We will gladly work with you to find the ultimate solution for your customer contact center. Want to get acquainted first? Stay informed by signing up for our newsletter.

Being transferred, answering the same questions over and over again. We all know how it feels as a customer not to be heard. Frustrating for the customer, but also for the employee. An efficient customer contact environment ensures happy customers and satisfied employees. A win-win situation for you as a customer contact manager.

Holding up too many balls

In a traditional customer contact environment, the moment a customer rings the – digital – bell, an employee has to pull data from various environments. Like a madman, he – or she – must switch between applications to retrieve bits of information from everywhere to come up with that one, correct answer to the customer. Nine times out of ten, that doesn’t go well. We have all experienced it at one time or another: you are transferred, you have to answer the same questions over and over again or it takes forever for your question or complaint to be dealt with. Frustrating for the customer, frustrating for the employee, and frustrating for you as a customer contact manager. In this way, you incur too many costs, have to keep up too many balls and miss the insight into the customer contact processes.

Golden combination

If you can use your employees more efficiently, you will save costs and have happier staff and happier customers. Your employees within the customer contact environment need to feel at one with your product or service. Whatever channel the customer contact goes through, if the employee can immediately handle the question correctly in terms of content, that means profit in all respects. Technology can support your employees in this. Not every employee is the same. Everyone has their own talent, knowledge and experiences. Nevertheless, you want every customer to be helped optimally. Again and again. By using the right technology, you can guide your employees. You help them not only in terms of content – what is the right answer to the question – but also through the entire process. When they find the right information about the right customer conveniently together in one screen, they have a 360-degree view. This allows the customer contact to be handled as efficiently as possible. This not only makes the customer feel recognized and known – regardless of which employee is on the line – you also ensure satisfied employees. Two birds with one stone: you create the ideal customer journey, and at the same time ensure the optimal employee journey. A golden combination.

Curious?

That ideal customer journey, the optimal customer experience, is the primary factor by which you can differentiate yourself from the competition. It determines the future sustainability and success of an organization, both in the short and long term. Do you also want to stand out in the market? Then contact us without obligation. We will gladly work with you to find the ultimate solution for your customer contact center. Want to get acquainted first? Stay informed by signing up for our newsletter.