What CMOs Can Learn About Customer Experience from Contact Center Software

In our customer-centric world, customer experience (CX) reigns supreme. Better CX is linked to higher revenue, increased loyalty, and an overall boost to business performance. The problem for CMOs and other marketing leaders is measurement – a recent McKinsey survey found that only 15 percent of leaders are fully satisfied with how their company is measuring CX and 6 percent are confident their measurement process enables tactical and strategic decision-making. So, what can CMOs do to gain clarity? Think outside the box and look at nonconventional data sources. One that offers a treasure trove of useful data on customer experience is contact center software. Let’s look at what CMOs can learn about CX from diving into contact center insights.

4 Things CMOs Can Learn from Contact Center Data

1. How to improve customer interactions

Look at what channels your audience is using to interact with your call center agents. Are they using chat, voice, or email? Are there specific customer segments who prefer one channel over another, and are customers choosing a specific channel for a certain type of issue?

When you analyze this type of contact center data, you gain a clearer picture of how your customers want to communicate. From there, you can make changes to your channels to boost CX.

For example, if you notice an uptick in chat usage followed by decreased contact resolution, that would indicate a preference for chat messengers but a dissatisfaction with how your chat feature works. You could then take a deep dive into your chat conversations to see where customers are ending the chat or switching to call or email. Could it be a problem with your agent interactions, chatbot dialogue, or something else?

2. When the customer experience changes

With real-time insights on customer interactions as well as historical reporting, you can track changes in customer interactions over time. For example, if you notice the number of calls relating to customer complaints increases suddenly, that would be a red flag indicating there’s a new customer experience flaw.

On the other hand, if you look at your contact center software data and see gradual changes, such as a decrease in the number of complaint calls, that could indicate customer satisfaction is trending up. Once you have this information, you can dig into your other customer-facing analytics such as your sales and CRM data to figure out what’s driving the change.

3. Whether or not your customers feel heard and supported

When your customers call your contact center, they generally want a question answered, a problem resolved, or they want to share an issue they’re having with your product or service. With post-call surveys that measure satisfaction, you can gauge how effective your contact center agents are at supporting your customers. But, you can also gain insights into satisfaction levels with your brand.

Post-call surveys should be short. Most people won’t want to spend their time answering more than two or three questions. So, be tactical when it comes to crafting survey questions. Ask about the contact experience, but this is also an opportunity to ask individuals if they’re satisfied with your brand and your service level.

Keep it simple with a scale of 1 to 10 answering systems and watch how these numbers change over time. This is a great way to use your contact center software as a tool to gauge brand trust and sentiment.

4. How to improve the customer journey

Contact center software shows agents all of a caller’s recent touchpoints. This gives the agent context and helps them address an individual’s concerns faster.

Marketing leaders can also use this information to gain clarity over the customer journey and to identify problem areas that need to be improved.

• How many touchpoints is a customer using before getting on the phone with an agent?
• How long are they engaging at each touchpoint?
• At which touchpoints are customers ending their journey?

What Features Does Your Contact Center Software Need?

If you want to use your contact center software to learn more about the customer experience, you’ll need to have the right features and capabilities. Your contact center solution should include the following:

• A combination of real-time data and historical reports
• Customizable reports so you can focus on the data analytics that matters most
• Post-call surveys that are easy to modify
• Interactive Voice Response (IVR) functionality that’s easy to set up and customize
• Ability to integrate with your other customer-focused software

Don’t Stop with Your Software – Collaborate with Contact Center Agents

Marketing leaders can gain a wealth of information from digging into contact center data and setting up the software to deliver key insights. However, all the quality data in the world won’t give you a complete picture of your real-world customers.

To learn about the experiences your customers are having, talk to your contact center agents. These are the people who spend their workday interacting directly with your audience, helping them solve problems and listening to their needs.

• What insights are they learning from speaking with customers?
• Are there any issues that are starting to come up more frequently?
• How is customer sentiment shifting – are people frustrated, grateful, confused?

Ask them to record what they learn from customer interactions and invite feedback on what they believe could help to improve CX.

Bringing your customer-facing team into the conversation can provide more depth to your understanding of customer experience.

Elevate Your Customer Experience Game with On-the-Ground Insights

There’s no clear-cut way to measure and track CX and the success of your customer experience initiatives. However, by using the resources you already have, especially those that reflect real-world customer interactions, you can learn more about the customer journey and figure out ways to boost experience.

Intermedia Contact Center has all the tools and flexibility CMOs need to gain useful insights about the customer experience. Learn more about the data, features, and possibilities it offers.