How To Improve Experience And Performance With Customer Journeys

If you're like most leaders of call centers, you probably use different platforms or tools to measure how well voice, chat, and IVR interactions work, tracking various touchpoints in customer journeys. Each of these channels is usually watched over and optimized by the person who owns it, to improve the general performance of the contact center. But it's up to you to figure out how these interactions affect customer happiness and experience throughout their customer journeys. Also, you need to show the C-suite how your call center projects will help important business goals, like keeping customers, lowering the cost to serve them, and making more money.

There has never been a clearer reason to improve measurement across all service platforms and customer journeys. Adopting a digital approach to measurement is important if you want to figure out what causes bad customer experiences and how much contact center interactions affect business results at different stages of customer journeys. 

In this ebook, you'll learn how using a journey-based measurement approach can help you reach your business goals, improve performance, and increase customer and employee happiness all at the same time, ensuring that your call center strategies align with the latest customer journey trends. By gaining insights into customer journeys and understanding the impact of each interaction, you can make data-driven decisions to enhance the overall customer experience, optimize operational efficiency, and ultimately achieve success in the dynamic and customer-centric landscape.

Why We Need A New Approach

Owners of service channels like voice, chat, and IVR have usually worked on their own and used channel-specific tools to measure and improve touchpoints in customer journeys so they could meet their metrics. This method can tell you how well each touchpoint works within their respective customer journeys, but it doesn't show how interactions in one channel affect other channels or the general experience a customer has with your contact center throughout their entire customer journey.

Let's say, for example, that the average handle time (AHT) in the voice line is going up. It might be easy to think that agents need better training within their specific channel of interaction. However the trouble could be caused by the IVR, chat, or another channel that is outside the scope of the contact center and intersects with other customer journeys. Maybe customers are leaving chat more often, and total self-service rates are going down, which shows that other service channels aren't meeting customers' needs at different points in their customer journeys. 

Instead of putting time into teaching agents in their specific channels, the focus should be on making chat and IVR works better and optimizing customer journeys holistically. By adopting a journey-based measurement approach, you can identify these interdependencies between service channels and uncover insights that lead to more comprehensive and effective improvements in the overall customer experience across different customer journeys within your contact center.

What's at stake? The views of both customers and employees.

When your customers have to explain their needs over and over again, they get frustrated. Customers expect the people they talk to, whether it's a digital interface or a real person, to understand their wants, previous interactions, actions taken, and feelings. To meet these standards, all service channels need to be completely visible, and user journey mapping plays a crucial role in achieving this visibility. No longer is it okay to ask a customer to repeat their name, phone number, and reason for calling.

User journey mapping allows you to keep track of and measure cross-channel events, ensuring a seamless and personalized experience for customers at every touchpoint. It's important to make sure your workers can see what your customers' current goals are and how they've interacted with you in the past, using insights derived from user journey mapping. The results of this kind of anger can hurt customer satisfaction, customer retention, revenue, and total profitability. 

By leveraging user journey mapping, you can empower your teams to deliver a consistent and cohesive experience across all service channels, reducing customer frustration and enhancing customer satisfaction, retention, and ultimately your bottom line. With user journey mapping, you can gain a comprehensive view of your customers' interactions and pain points, enabling you to make data-driven decisions to optimize the entire customer journey and create a positive and memorable experience at every step.

A More Effective Approach To Evaluate Experience In The Call Center And Its Performance

Microsoft says that between three and five different ways are used by 49% of customers to get in touch with customer service. This shows how important it is to switch from measuring one channel to measuring and optimizing all channels. To deal with this, leaders of call centers are using journey-centered measurement methods more and more.

To measure customer journeys, you have to change your point of view and look at things from the customer's perspective. Instead of just keeping track of how well each channel is performing individually, the focus is on understanding how customers use multiple channels to reach specific goals, emphasizing user journey mapping to capture their interactions across different touchpoints.

User journeys are the steps that customers take to achieve certain goals, like sending money or moving Wi-Fi service. Taking this approach allows all stakeholders, including channel managers, agents, and contact center executives, to understand:

• The goals customers are trying to reach when they call the contact center.
• The paths each customer took (or didn't take) to reach their goals, as captured through user journey mapping.

By giving agents information about each customer's unique journey, they are better able to serve customers with sensitivity, which enhances customer satisfaction and contributes to the overall success of the contact center. Embracing user journey mapping and understanding customer journeys empowers contact center teams to deliver a more personalized and efficient customer experience, reducing the need for customers to repeat information and enabling agents to anticipate customer needs. With insights from user journey mapping, contact centers can optimize operational processes, identify pain points, and make data-driven decisions to improve the customer journey and drive overall success for the organization.

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