Methods for Improving Customer Engagement in a Call Center

If you want to know how to improve customer engagement in a call center, consider this: When customers call you, what’s their perception of you? 

It may feel like they don’t respect your call center agents. It might even feel like they actively dislike you from the beginning of the call. These are telltale signs that your customer engagement levels are low.

But hold on! There’s good news in this story, too. A little can go a long way in engaging with customers and crafting a better customer experience.

These methods, when combined, are simple to follow but have a big impact. You’ll be meeting customer expectations and needs in no time.

Gathering and Leveraging Customer Feedback

If your goal is creating a unified customer journey and making every customer interaction a positive experience, it’s important to take stock of what’s currently going on. Hence, you should start with gathering feedback.

The first thing you need to do when thinking about improving customer experience is review the current state. What do customers think about your business when they contact you?

Fortunately, there are many tools and features at your disposal to gain immediate insights.

Post-call surveys

Want to improve your customer relationships? Then you need to hear what they have to say and understand their pain points.

At the end of every call, you can implement a brief survey to gather immediate feedback on agent performance and customer satisfaction. Typical questions involve a scoring system of 1 to 9, using the keypad to input answers. 

Questions usually include:

• How well did the agent understand your query?
• Did the agent fully resolve your query?
• Would you recommend our business to a friend?

When customers call you, they can select the relevant option to opt in or out of the survey.

Social media monitoring

Gathering feedback isn’t limited to calls. Here, we’re talking about omnichannel customer engagement. Thanks to its written nature, you can track every channel outside of voice one way or another.

On social media, you can track customer sentiment and address issues promptly. On the best customer engagement platforms, you’ll be able to track keywords and analyze how they’re being used. 

For example, if someone writes a post saying how GREAT customer support is at your company and then proceeds to rant about a bad experience, the platform picks up that using capitals in “great” is meant to be sarcastic.

When these messages are detected, you can respond from a single interface or store messages for future training and learning.

Customer interviews

Conducting regular interviews with random customers is a superb way to collect genuine feedback. During these interviews, ask in-depth questions to dive deeper than a social media interaction or multiple-choice questionnaire. 

You may need to book half an hour with a customer, so consider compensating them for their time. After all, your business offers terrific value, so it’s worth paying for.

Feedback analysis

As part of most contact center solutions, you’ll have built-in reports and analytics that help you identify trends and areas for improvement. If you’re gathering feedback via post-call surveys and social media monitoring, you can dig into graphs and charts that provide a bigger picture of each type of feedback.

You may want to export the data, run your own reports, and make your own conclusions. You can use good feedback as examples for training. Likewise, you may flag the negative customers for follow-up with account specialists.

You can use standalone customer engagement tools, too. Tracking and measurement go hand in hand. Use filters for locations, agents, and customer levels to dig deeper into the metrics and analytics you’re tracking.

Deepening Customer Conversations

Once you’ve analyzed where customers are receiving a bad experience, it’s time to introduce some methods to remedy it. Use these four customer engagement methods to improve the mood of your contact center.

1. Active listening

Agents focus on understanding the customer’s perspective and needs, which differentiates active listening from simply being on the other end of the phone. This really puts the “care” into “customer care.”

Agents should be free of distractions and ask questions to further diagnose the problem. It’s one thing to answer a call; it’s another to help solve problems. You must also be seen to be paying genuine attention. 

Agents benefit from the following skills:

• Being fully present
• Listening attentively
• Confirming understanding
• Paraphrasing and citing back the problem
• Withholding judgment
• Using verbal and non-verbal cues (“hmm,” “ahh,” “okay”)
• Asking follow-up questions
• Taking time to reflect on what’s being said

2. Personalization

When agents are armed with customer data, they can make conversations more personalized.

For example, if they speak with a customer who recently bought a new lawn mower from your business but has called about their faulty drill, they can ask them how the lawn mower is while they recall the drill’s warranty information.

Present this information seamlessly by integrating your sales, billing, CRM, and contact center systems. The more information an agent has, the more personalized the customer experience.

3. Proactive outreach

Rather than waiting for customer issues, initiate contact to address potential problems or offer help. The best customer service experience is one where nobody needs to call because you’ve made them aware of the problem.

For example, if you’re made aware of a system outage and you know a specific customer has been affected for a second time, call them to let them know they’re your highest priority and you’re already working on a fix.

They may not have noticed yet, so this may feel like creating a problem that doesn’t exist. But you can be certain it’s more rewarding than receiving an angry call in 10 minutes’ time.

4. Empathy building

When customers contact you, it’s usually because something has gone wrong. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes here.

If a product you bought doesn’t work, how does this impact you?

Encourage agents to connect with callers on an emotional level by showing empathy. Reflecting on how they’d feel and act in this situation may change the flow and atmosphere of their calls.

Automating Call Reviews

To take things a step further and make improving customer engagement more efficient, you must think about which processes you can automate.

Spoiler alert: It’s reviewing calls. Once a mundane and time-consuming task, reviewing calls is now easier thanks to three tools that speed up the process and flag the calls that need the most attention.

Speech analytics

With every call logged in your contact center, you can access tons of data points within each call.

You can not only track trends in call volumes and agent performance KPIs but also gauge customer sentiment. For every call, you get the overall customer experience rating, the latest sentiment, and any survey feedback.

These metrics contribute to an overall sentiment score per customer, which helps flag customers who may need further attention. Reach out to them to see how you can improve their experience.

Sentiment analysis also works in real time. If a conversation gets heated and customers raise their voices or use inappropriate language, sentiment analysis detects the need for supervisor escalation and notifies the relevant person.

Quality assurance

Quality assurance used to be a cumbersome and fruitless task. Supervisors spent hours reviewing random calls and not learning much about their customers or teams.

With automated quality monitoring tools, you can streamline quality checks to ensure adherence to service standards.

Instead of picking random calls, the software uses speech analytics and customer sentiment to select the calls that need the most urgent attention. 

You can still use the scripts and metrics to ensure quality, but automated tools ensure the calls you’re reviewing are worthwhile.

Agent coaching

The most important results of reviewing calls are targeted feedback and coaching opportunities. If you review calls but don’t act, you’ve expended considerable effort for nothing.

Coaching agents isn’t something you can automate entirely. 

Sure, you can use artificial intelligence (AI) at the moment to flag when agents have missed a potential upsell or notify them if they’ve missed a step in your identity and verification process. 

In fact, this is an extremely powerful tool that pays dividends almost as soon as you turn it on. For example, when a customer asks about deals, discounts, and referrals, you no longer rely on agents memorizing pricing or needing to ask a colleague if they’ve forgotten.

But one-on-one and group training for reps are equally important. With all the data you’ve gathered and the examples of good and bad calls (and chatbots, emails, social media messages, etc.), you’ve got a wealth of training material.

Schedule regular sessions for agents to ensure you’re never behind the eight ball for too long.

Monitoring Keywords and Trends

While you’re going about your day-to-day contact center routine, monitoring tools can be hard at work if you put them in place. They not only identify keyword usage, like when customers say “upgrade” or “cancel,” but also identify and report on trends. 

With this information, you can take stock of the real perception of your business and make decisions backed by real customers and data. Customer loyalty will improve, and more sales opportunities will be uncovered. While it may feel like the front line, the bottom line is the most impacted.

Identify trends

Monitor calls for keywords related to products, services, or customer experiences. If the same queries keep popping up, consider introducing self-service knowledge bases so customers don’t need to wait to get answers to basic questions.

If there is an issue with a specific product, take a proactive approach, such as sending a blanket email confirming you’re aware of the problem and will call or email when the issue is remedied.

Getting ahead of trends reduces the need for customers to take time out of their day. Sometimes, customer engagement is boosted without customers reaching your contact center.

Gather insights

Analyze trends to identify areas for product improvement or new service offerings. Once you’ve taken the relevant action to mitigate the problem, use these insights to ensure the problem doesn’t happen again.

If your software has a glitch at the same time every month, make sure your development team knows. If multiple customers report the same issue with a product, it might be time for a product recall.

Inform decision-making

While your customer service team receives the full force of angry customers, the root cause is likely elsewhere. This is why sharing insights with product and customer experience teams is important to drive strategic decisions.

By remedying the core issues customers complain about, you remove the need for them to call in the first place. Not only do you have more happy customers, but you also free up customer service agents to deal with (and pay attention to) customers who need you the most.

These customers get through to you and receive exceptional service. What’s more, your chance of first call resolution (FCR) skyrockets as you have more time and feel less rushed.

Engaging With Your Customers Made Easier With Nextiva

Simple methods like active listening and proactive outreach go a long way in improving customer engagement in a call center. When you add efficiency-gaining tools like social media monitoring and sentiment analysis, your business can always be on the front foot.

With the right tools, customer engagement becomes simple to manage. There’s less firefighting and more strategy.

For a unified customer experience, where everyone is happy across all communication channels, you need an omnichannel contact center that prioritizes customer engagement.

Nextiva’s unified CX platform puts customer engagement first:

• Contact center agents get a single pane of glass that integrates with their CRM and line of business apps.
• Supervisors get a platform that monitors sentiment, keywords, and unhappy customers. 
• Customers get the best experience possible.

Need an all-in-one contact center that boosts customer engagement? Check out Nextiva’s AI-powered solution!