Workforce Management Featured Article
Why Voice Can Make or Break CX
We go to restaurants to eat food. But, even if the food is amazing, if the waiter is rude, slow, or otherwise unhelpful, it can ruin an otherwise lovely experience.
The same is true in other situations involving customer service interactions. That’s why real-time voice communications can make or break a call center encounter.
But how people feel coming away from a call center experience is a result of more than just the attitude of the agent. It also has to do with the amount of effort callers have to expend to get the results they desire. And it’s impacted by the amount of time callers must spend and the number of individuals they must interface with to resolve their problems and inquiries.
Agents may be good or even great, but if they don’t have the information and tools they need to quickly and efficiently resolve caller issues, the customer experience can suffer. That can lead to frustrated or lost customers, panicked or lost call center agents, and generally much less than ideal business outcomes.
In fact, research indicates 58 percent of people would stop buying from a company due to poor customer service. And, survey results published by the Institute of Customer Service suggest, 70 percent of people that have received poor customer service from a business would dissuade others from using that company.
When it comes to the call center, customers consider poor customer service to involve having to interact with rude or unhelpful agents, being transferred to another person, having to repeat their issue to more than one contact, and/or having to expend a lot of time and effort to get what they want.
“Research has found that 89 percent [of] customers switch their loyalty due to poor customer experience,” says Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert). “Moreover, 86 percent of them are willing to spend more with a customer centric company with superior customer experience which could eventually uplift profitability by 35 percent. Customer experience has become a major growth driver for businesses to keep pace with customer preferences and beat competition.”
Edited by Mandi Nowitz