UK businesses must improve contact centre capabilities to meet customer expectations
While many UK businesses understand the value of a truly customer-centric approach—including healthy renewals, improved customer advocacy, and low attrition—there are still many who could benefit from adopting new technology to help them deliver outstanding customer service.
NewVoiceMedia, a leading global provider of cloud contact centre and inside sales technology, this month released new research demonstrating that many UK businesses lack the contact centre capabilities to meet customer expectations. A few of the key findings:
The challenge and the opportunity
40 percent of contact centre professionals surveyed indicated that their customers typically need to repeat themselves to multiple agents. Yet 60 percent of today’s customers expect a personalized, speedy, and consistent experience from every business.
Manual reporting and revenue
Organisations are failing to optimise their contact centres with technology that could make them more efficient, according to the study. The majority (70 percent) of respondents said they must manually update their CRM record after a call, and they spend an average of 142 minutes a week making those updates (equivalent to three weeks per year).
Service success across size and sector
Overall, respondents from organisations with the largest workforces were often among the least likely to have advanced contact centre capabilities. For instance, respondents from companies with 500 or more employees were less likely on average to have contact centre technology that presents them with information about previous customer interactions, can match a channel-switching customer to their previous contact, or automatically transfer callers to the most appropriate agent.
The sheer speed at which technology evolves may be what is preventing businesses from keeping up with customer expectations. This particularly plagues larger organisations where on-premise technology has a stronger foothold, resulting in even slower progress.
NewVoiceMedia’s study demonstrates that it is more important than ever for companies to offer exemplary service to customers. And one way to do that is to give employees the ability to view one single customer record.
Today’s businesses must also be focused on the cost-to-renewal—acquiring customers, retaining them, renewing contracts, or adding more services. In the Age of the Customer, technology has empowered increasingly-informed consumers who demand a personalized experience, so acquiring and retaining customers has become a major headache for many businesses. For a contact centre to function at its best, NewVoiceMedia discovered, it needs a seamless CRM integration. Integrating with a CRM system reduces common customer service frustrations and the time spent on manual entry data.
To gain even more insight, adding ERP to CRM can revolutionize your business, providing you and your teams with a single source of truth for the customer relationship. By increasing efficiency and providing real-time access to critical data, additional activities across the business can also be improved. Automating processes allow agents to focus on the conversation, eliminating repetition and delivering personalized customer service across all channels.
If you want to read more about NewVoiceMedia’s further findings on contact centre technology research and how businesses can keep up with customer expectations, see the full study here and check out the infographic below.
