7 Tips to Manage Customer Expectations

Today’s customers are digitally savvy, more demanding and expect instant service. Contact centers face a constant challenge in managing customer expectations.

Here are some key customer expectations and some tips towards managing them

1. Save my time – Have your customers spend less time on wait times by providing a self-service option where the use case is best suited (E.g., Password reset). Reduce call wait times and provide faster connect to agents by leveraging global omnichannel routing across your centers so you can leverage global efficiencies
2. Resolve my issue – Provide call center agents with efficient and effective tools so that they can get all data they required to solve the customer issue, right at their fingertips. Maybe some of data they need would be all around who the customer is, coming from CRM systems, some could be around orders placed by the customer, coming from an order management system or some around pricing, coming from pricing systems. Provide agents with true omnichannel capabilities within an interaction, which enable them to pivot to the channel that is best suited to resolve the issue. If it is a modem issue, you are better off with video call options to resolve it, rather than a chat.
3. Don’t transfer me anymore – Give the right tools to your agents to have them resolve the issue without transfers. Leverage technologies like presence through integrated unified communications solutions, that can bring in live experts into a conversation and swarm solve issues.
4. Know me better – Integrate with CRM and other systems that provide a complete customer journey information including profile, preferences, past interactions and touch points across channels. Leverage omnichannel analytics tools to understand true customer insights.
5. Talk to me in the channel I prefer – With the proliferation of channels, it might not be efficient to invest in all the channels. Choose the channels that matter the most to your customers, not where you think the costs are less or technology is cool.
6. Empower me to solve my issues – Leverage newer and enhanced AI driven self-service options that can empower customers to solve issues on their own, rather than be on long wait times to connect with an agent. Segment your customers to see which ones prefer self-serve to live agent support and serve those accordingly – your millennials may probably demand self-service while baby boomers might detest it.
7. Listen to me – Leverage direct customer feedback through voice of the customer tools to get real customer feedback on what is working and what is not. Look for indirect feedback through advanced analytics that help identify frustrated customers. Integrate it with advanced quality management (QM) analytics to see where you need to train your agents the most.

Living in an all digital world, customer expectations are only going to get more demanding. Win your customers through some of the tips outlined above. Meet and exceed customer expectations, today!