Increasing the Speed of Customer Service Interactions – Part Two
The previous blog post in this series discussed the business impact of extended customer service interactions. There are many potential actions in a typical customer service call that can cause delays in the answering and processing of calls. Unfortunately, these delays harm the customer experience, as today’s consumers expect rapid handling of their issues.
Overcoming a Non-Intuitive IVR
The first potential delay is a nonintuitive IVR. Making customers repeat options or guess the right one creates a negative experience. This issue is relatively easy to prevent with modern contact center solutions. They provide simple, do-it-yourself IVR tools that can reduce and even eliminate the time spent finding the right choice.
Negating Excessive Hold Times
There are multiple options to help reduce the time spent on hold. Many contact centers provide advanced routing capabilities and call deflection. With intelligent routing, modern solutions can anticipate delays and more evenly distribute calls across different queues. By implementing a concept known as call deflection, businesses can offer their customers additional, digital interaction options (such as a website or text messaging) to handle their issues when queue length and estimated answer time reach an undesirable threshold.
Customizing the User Interface
Cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all user interfaces can lead to hesitation and confusion for service representatives if they are not user-friendly. Businesses should consider whether their vendor can help customize the user interface to streamline the experience for the service representative.
Integrating with CRMS and Other Business Tools
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution is often the lifeblood of a business. This robust database tracks each customer, their contact details, and their purchase history. Modern contact center solutions can integrate with an existing CRM system to provide an at-a-glance view of the customer journey, eliminating the need for manual data retrieval and streamlining data entry.
Expediting Customer Service with Mobile Business Contact
Mavenir’s Mobile Business Contact provides many capabilities that allow businesses to address these pain points, such as a feature-rich IVR designer and an open API interface to route calls. When used in conjunction, these tools can apply intelligent routing based on the customer or current system status, directing customers quickly to someone who can help them.
A previous blog post discussed how Mobile Business Contact could quickly move resources to respond to issues promptly. Having more representatives available reduces wait time and overall call time.
The user interface is fully customizable and can be adapted to meet specific business needs. This includes control over which options are available on-screen as well as designing tailored screen pops to maximize interaction efficiencies.
Mobile Business Contact provides multiple prebuilt integrations into the most common CRM solutions, and its Open API Engine can easily connect to other CRMs that provide a REST-based interface. This not only reduces the handling time but also helps ensure the personalized experience that 75% of customers expect.
Coupling the CRM with a Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) application provides a complete view of the customer journey; representatives can focus on solving problems, not collecting basic information. After the call, the system logs interaction details into the CRM, eliminating most, if not all, post-interaction data entry. This means the customer service representatives can quickly move from one customer to the next.
Finally, having contact center metrics is not enough. Mobile Business Contact can provide businesses with the tools they need to analyze and improve their metrics.
Learn more about how to improve contact center efficiency at https://www.mavenir.com/contact-us/.
