Having made a significant impact on the CX (customer experience) world two decades ago, NPS (Net Promoter Score) continues to be one of the most important metrics for CX professionals, marketing managers, and businesses alike.
In the fast-paced world of customer service, the contact centre is at the heart of a company’s engagement strategy.
It’s where customer relationships are strengthened or weakened with every interaction. In fact, 89% of organisations compete primarily based on customer experience in their call centres.
Therefore, understanding the voice of the customer (VoC) is crucial in shaping a responsive and efficient contact centre that exceeds customer expectations.
Beyond that, organisations should implement the latest voice of customer tools, equipped with AI and NLP technologies to automate operations, reduce average handling times, and boost first call resolution rates in their contact centres.
To achieve these goals, creating a comprehensive VoC strategy is necessary. In this blog post, we’ll first understand why contact centres are so important for overall customer experience and evaluate the common challenges encountered by most contact centres.
Then, we’ll explore how to craft a winning VoC strategy with the Artiwise VoC platform to address these challenges.
Importance of Contact Centre Services for Overall Customer Experience
Contact centres play a pivotal role in shaping the overall customer experience due to their direct interaction with customers across various channels.
Firstly, they serve as the frontline representatives of a company, offering personalised assistance and support to address customer queries, concerns, and issues.
This direct communication channel allows businesses to build rapport with customers, fostering trust and loyalty.
Moreover, contact centres serve as a valuable feedback mechanism, gathering customer insights into customer preferences, pain points, and satisfaction levels, which can inform strategic decision-making and drive continuous improvement efforts with detailed CX insights.
By providing timely and efficient resolution to customer issues, contact centres contribute to sustainable customer satisfaction and retention.
Imagine contact centres as a black box of a plane; it is an indispensable channel for ensuring a great customer experience, understanding customers’ negative and positive attitudes, and continuously improving quality standards of customer support.
Therefore, it is essential to invest in robust AI-driven contact centre capabilities to optimise operations, streamline processes, deliver more personalised experiences, and improve customer experience in contact centres.
The global call centre artificial intelligence (AI) market is projected to reach $7.5 billion by 2030, showcasing the potential of AI in enhancing call centre operations in the future of customer experience.
Common Challenges of Contact Centres
Contact centres face a variety of challenges, many of which stem from the complex nature of managing customer interactions efficiently while maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction.
The top challenge faced by contact centres is increasing operational costs (54%). That’s because all of the bottlenecks and inefficiencies in back and front office operations add up to making operations costly.
Considering this, let’s take a look at the most common challenges almost every contact centre department faces.
Inadequate Knowledge Management
Contact centre agents rely heavily on access to accurate and up-to-date information to assist customers effectively. However, many contact centres struggle with disparate systems and databases, making it challenging for agents to find the information they need quickly.
This lack of centralised knowledge management leads to delays in first call resolution, increased average handling times, and frustration for both customers and agents.
High-performing call centres achieve an FCR rate of 70% or higher, which is one of the most significant KPIs affecting the cost of contact centre operations.
On top of that, customers now expect agents to know their purchase history and handle requests quickly in all communication channels. The omnichannel customer engagement market is forecast to grow 13% a year to reach almost $18 billion in revenue by 2030.
So, lacking an omnichannel VoC approach is one of the biggest challenges for call centres to operate effectively.
Lack of Personalisation
In today’s hyper-connected world, customers expect personalised interactions tailored to their preferences, past interactions, and demographics. McKinsey research shows that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalised interactions, and 76% of them get frustrated when it doesn’t happen.
However, contact centres often face challenges in harnessing customer data effectively to deliver personalised experiences.
Limited visibility into customer information across channels and siloed data repositories hinder contact centres’ ability to anticipate customer needs and provide tailored recommendations or solutions.
Lack of Motivation in Agents
Contact centre agents are the backbone of customer service operations, yet many face low morale and motivation due to various factors such as repetitive tasks, high-pressure environments, and limited growth opportunities.
High turnover rates exacerbate the issue, leading to increased training costs and reduced service quality. One of the main reasons for high employee turnover rates is stress and anxiety, responsible for 87% of staff leaving or sickness and absence rates.
Additionally, happy and engaged employees boost profitability by 23%.
These data show that addressing agent motivation and investing in smart employee experience (EX) solutions is crucial for maintaining service excellence and fostering a positive work culture within the contact centre.
Inadequate Quality Assurance
Maintaining consistent service quality is essential for building trust and loyalty with customers. However, without robust quality assurance processes in place, contact centres risk delivering inconsistent experiences that fail to meet customer expectations.
Ineffective call monitoring, coaching, and feedback mechanisms contribute to lapses in service quality, leading to customer dissatisfaction and potential brand damage.
Additionally, contact centre Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) serve as vital benchmarks for quality assurance by providing measurable insights into various aspects of operations.
KPIs enable organisations to monitor agent performance, track customer satisfaction levels, and identify areas for improvement.
By aligning KPIs with quality assurance goals, contact centres can ensure consistent service delivery, optimise processes, and ultimately enhance the overall customer experience. These metrics serve as guiding lights, illuminating the path towards excellence and continuous improvement in contact centre operations.
High Wait Times and Call Volumes
Long wait times and high call volumes are perennial challenges for contact centres, especially during peak periods or when faced with unexpected spikes in customer inquiries.
Prolonged wait times frustrate customers and contribute to a negative perception of the brand’s responsiveness and reliability. Additionally, high call volumes can overwhelm agents, leading to decreased productivity and service quality.
How to Improve Call Centre Efficiency with Artiwise Voice of the Customer (VoC) Platform
Most contact centres are rapidly adopting AI technologies, such as speech recognition, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and root cause analysis. Artiwise, as a comprehensive VoC platform, offers these capabilities and more.
The platform seamlessly integrates multiple channels to track customer feedback in real time, analyse customer sentiments with predictive VoC analytics, and support decision-making in both contact centre operations and overall CX initiatives.
To help you boost the efficiency of your call centre with a solid VoC strategy, here is your roadmap with Artiwise.
1. Gain a Holistic VoC Approach
As we explained before, one of the biggest challenges in contact centres is inadequate knowledge management. This is mostly due to the separated infrastructures and tracking inbound and outbound channels separately.
To address this challenge, Artiwise seamlessly integrates and analyses data from various communication channels, such as calls, texts, and online reviews. This provides CX and contact centre teams with a 360° approach, enabling them to convert real-time customer insights into aligned and informed VoC strategies.
2. Utilise Customer Sentiment Analysis and Voice of Customer Analysis for Personalised Experiences
Understanding customers deeply is significant to addressing both knowledge management challenges and delivering personalised experiences to each customer. Sentiment analysis is one of the best practices that artificial intelligence and natural language processing offer in this context.
Artiwise’s sentiment analysis tools analyse calls and chats in customer support to extract sentiment values using context, relationships, actors, and patterns. Then, identified sentiment topics display common negative and positive customer sentiments along with their root causes. This technique is called “Content and Topic-Based Dialogue Analysis.”
This not only empowers contact centres to create more personalised and effective communication strategies but also enables them to continuously improve their operations with actionable customer insights.
3. Empower Employee Experience
Agents embody the human touch that drives customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Agents’ expertise, empathy, and dedication empower them to resolve issues swiftly and effectively, transforming every interaction into an opportunity to create positive experiences and lasting impressions.
Therefore, it is essential to keep them informed and motivated with the right employee experience (EX) tools. Artiwise’s employee monitoring and evaluation module can be utilised to analyse employee feedback to:
- Understand employee sentiments as well as specific aspects, like the work environment, management, compensation, and more.
- Identify primary concerns and complaints raised by employees, categorising them based on severity, frequency, and impact.
- Capture employees’ suggestions, ideas, and recommendations, ranking them by relevance, feasibility, and potential value.
4. Evaluate and Monitor Contact Centre KPIs Effectively
Artiwise streamlines the evaluation and monitoring of contact centre operations, offering a range of features that enhance the management and optimisation of key performance indicators (KPIs).
Through Artiwise:
- Rapid Diagnoses and Identification: Call quality issues are swiftly diagnosed and areas for improvement are identified through comprehensive agent and call-based analyses.
- Actionable Insights: Supervisors gain actionable insights from these analyses, empowering them to effectively monitor agent performance by evaluating call recordings and identifying opportunities and bottlenecks that impact service quality.
- Performance Tracking in Real Time: Automated alerts enable instant performance tracking, facilitating timely interventions as needed.
- Hierarchical Dashboards for Detailed Analysis: The platform provides hierarchical dashboards for in-depth performance analysis, offering supervisors comprehensive insights into various operational aspects.
- CSAT Score Monitoring and Enhancement: Supervisors can detect Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores and leverage valuable insights to enhance customer experience and satisfaction.
- Agent Performance Enhancement and AHT Reduction: By monitoring agent call quality performance and identifying inputs to reduce Average Handle Time (AHT), supervisors improve operational efficiency and customer satisfaction levels.
5. Automate and Boost Customer Support Efficiency with AI
To automate and boost customer support efficiency with AI, organisations should integrate AI-powered VoC platforms with natural language processing (NLP) to handle routine inquiries, freeing up human agents for more complex issues.
They can also integrate VoC solutions with sentiment and root cause analysis capabilities to analyse customer interactions, enabling personalised responses and predictive support, ultimately improving response times and customer satisfaction.
Artiwise, a comprehensive VoC platform, is equipped with all of these capabilities. Here’s how Artiwise automates contact centre operations:
- Real-Time Insights and Proactive Measures: By analysing customer feedback data in real time, Artiwise identifies emerging trends and issues, empowering support teams to take proactive actions to address customer concerns swiftly.
- AI-Powered VoC Analysis: Leveraging AI, Artiwise conducts in-depth analysis of customer interactions, pinpointing critical bottlenecks in the customer experience journey and prioritising areas for improvement.
- Efficient Issue Resolution: Artiwise’s AI tools identify recurring issues and root causes, facilitating efficient resolution and driving continuous improvement in customer satisfaction.
- Tailored Industry Insights: Artiwise offers industry-specific AI modelling, delivering customised insights and recommendations tailored to the unique needs of each business sector.
- Granular Performance Tracking: With granular tracking features, Artiwise provides a detailed view of NPS and CSAT scores over time, enabling businesses to monitor shifts in customer sentiment and adapt their strategies accordingly.
With these features, Artiwise optimises customer support processes, enabling businesses to proactively address issues and enhance satisfaction through AI-driven automation and insights.
Let’s Collaborate to Create a Winning VoC Strategy for Your Call Centre
As an AI-driven VoC provider, we are aware of the potential that artificial intelligence will bring to organisations in terms of improving customer experience and contact centre operations.
To enable our clients to create a tailored voice of the customer (VoC) in contact centres, we are providing a complimentary Proof of Concept (POC) service, designed as a one-week project to showcase the platform’s capabilities.
Contact us now to get your tailored POC report, presenting key bottlenecks and opportunities in both your customer support operations and overall CX strategy. Discover Artiwise now to drive operational excellence in your contact centre!
