Driving Growth with a Customer-centric Contact Centre (+7 Bonus Tips)

Did you know, experience-driven businesses have 1.7x higher chances of retaining their customers than other businesses? Not just that, the businesses that created great experiences for their customers see their revenue jump 1.4x faster than their competitors.  

What does it all boil down to? Customer-centricity.

‍What is Customer-centricity?

Customer-centricity is exactly what you would guess it is – putting customer at the centre of everything.  

Your business is customer-centric when your products and services are designed deriving insights from the customer’s behaviour, expectations, needs, and usage.

Your business is customer-centric when your business’s in-store and online store is prepped to deliver unique and engaging shopping experience for your customers,  

Your business is customer-centric when your customers have more avenues to connect and communicate with your representatives across mediums and channels that they frequent.

Mind you, customer-centricity is not limited to just the customer-facing teams. CX excellence begins at the top of the organisation, where the business objectives and the ensuing actions to meet those goals are tied together with a customer-centric vision, technology, data, and an agile transformational model.  

What Does Customer-centricity Mean for Contact Centres?

For most businesses, contact centre acts as a hub from where all customer experiences are managed. Unlike the traditional call centres that only exist to handle customer enquiries and act as customer support service hub, an omnichannel contact centre acts as an experiential hub.

‍A contact centre is a hub where:

• Your customers land up to resolve their doubts and complaints
• Your customers share their feedbacks and suggestions for product and service improvements
• Your customer facing team creates upselling and cross-selling opportunities
• Your internal teams gather their actionable-insights from
• Long term relationships and loyalty are forged between businesses and customers

7 Tips to build a Customer-centric Contact Centre

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1. Foresee Customer Needs

When a business is able to anticipate the needs of a customer, it can tailor its recommendations, offers, support, and services to meet the customer’s expectation.  

An omnichannel contact centre enables businesses to collate and pool the customer interaction and behavioural data from multiple channels, mediums, and systems by bridging the gap between traditional telephony modes of communication like calls and SMS and modern channels of engagement for digital-savvy customers like email, live chat, social media, web and video call, etc. Thus, covering the needs for every customer persona and their preferences, enabling businesses to anticipate their needs more accurately.  

For example, if a customer is lingering on the ‘deals and promos’ page on your online store and is repeatedly searching for a Demin jacket or has interacted with the support agent via Live chat to enquire about any ongoing offers or discounts on the jacket, then your customer support agent can leverage the learning from the browsing and interaction history to offer the customer what they want in real-time, making the customer feel understood and valued.  

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2. Collect Customer Feedback

Collecting customer feedback is an essential part of improving customer experience and business processes. It provides businesses with valuable insights into their customers' needs, preferences, and pain points.  

Customers tend to interact with businesses on multiple channels. Apart from seeking answers, customers also use these channels to share complaints and provide feedback. An omnichannel contact centre, by nature unifies all these channels of communication and thus provides these little nuggets of feedback and reviews on one platform. From social media, and phone, to email, and pre-chat and offline support forms on website, an omnichannel contact centre provides various avenues to gather customer’s feedback.  

Not just that, an omnichannel contact centre enables these unstructured interactions to be labelled with contextual tags that can then be compartmentalised basis business relevance for further analysis.  

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3. Partner with Your Customers

An omnichannel contact centre enables businesses to include customers in the process of improving their experience by providing direct context to their needs and preferences. For example, a business can leverage the power afforded by a unified communication solution to gather feedback, suggestions, and inputs from customers using various channels like social media, emails, or SMSs. A contact centre provides real-time data visibility for analysing and acting on these suggestions and feedback to shape the products or services to the satisfaction of the end users.

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4. Get Your Data Together

An omnichannel contact centre helps centralise customer interaction data by consolidating all customer interactions across multiple channels into a single, unified database. Not just that, it also helps various internal departments bring over necessary business tools that are essential to their day-to-day tasks, thus eliminating the need to jump from one platform to another. This not only helps in presenting a complete picture of the customer’s profile, needs, preferences, behaviour, and purchase history, but also makes it easier for the business to map the engagement outcomes to their business value.  

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5. Involve All the Teams in the Process

Delivering exceptional experience to the customers has never been the sole responsibility of the customer support team. If the product or service itself fails to meet their expectations, then no amount of ‘sweet talk’ or gift vouchers are going to retain the customers. It is the collective responsibility of all the teams to enhance customer experience. An omnichannel contact centre helps in doing so.  

Marketing team can derive benefit from the valuable data on customer behaviour and preferences that can be assessed through the labelled interaction data, which can in turn be used to create more effective and targeted marketing campaigns. Similarly, the product team can benefit from reviews and feedback shared by the customers to understand their expectation from the products or services and work towards meeting or exceeding those expectations.  

It is necessary for business leaders to think beyond the obvious and break free from the traditional practice of limiting the exposure of contact centre solution to the customer service team. By involving critical business units in the process, your business could very well gain the much-needed edge over your competitors.  

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6. Improve AX (Agent Experience)

An Omnichannel Contact Centre simplifies the customer support agent's workflow by providing them with a unified platform for managing customer interactions across multiple channels. This eliminates the need for agents to switch between different channels, which can easily frustrate and overtax them.

A unified contact centre also provides agents with real-time valuable insights into the customer's journey and history of interactions with the business across multiple channels. This can help agents to personalise their interactions and proactively address issues. When a business utilises an omnichannel contact centre to its full capacity and centralise their database from other apps and system onto one platform, the agents can perform their job effectively without burning out, with access to a range of tools and resources.

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7. Localised Support

When a company representative communicates with us in our native language it creates a sense of harmony and mutual understanding. As a customer, we tend to trust and rely on the person speaking our language more than others.  

Not so surprisingly, it is the ease of obtaining information in their language that influences the purchase decision of 57% customers, more than the price itself. Localising your experiences and services not only sets you apart from your competitors, but it also helps in establishing your brand as a market leader and expand the market.  

Onboarding a unified communication solution can help businesses leverage the power of International Toll Free (ITFS), local DID and Universal Toll Free (UIFN) numbers. Not just that, businesses can enable round-the-clock customer support powered by smart omnichannel routing capabilities that an omnichannel contact centre brings with it.

An important point to note is that localisation is not just about translation. It’s about thoughtfully crafting, curating, and adapting the content to be suitable for local culture.  

Another key point to consider is whether your customers recognise you through your local number. Customers may mark a promotional SMS from your business number as spam if they aren’t able to recognise the number or see an alien number. Thus, increasing fraud risk. Let’s face the fact, the possibility of a customer making an IDD call for a service is highly improbable. But they would be more willing to speak to a representative using a local number and see the same number consistently for the follow up services. Even when seeking assistance on a popular channel like WhatsApp, a customer would expect to chat with a local number.

Now all this might sound quite overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Going global with local presence does not mean a business needs to establish physical presence and build offices in different regions. You can train and equip your customer support agents with local understanding to work remotely by leveraging modern contact centre tools that helps them effectively collaborate internally to deliver contextual and localised experiences to your customers across the globe from one location.  

Choosing the Right Omnichannel Solution to Power Your Contact Centre

From first-time resolution to omnichannel engagement, and nurturing customer relationships to boosting customer advocacy, your business may have various objectives depending on your immediate tactical plan, and long-term growth strategy, but one thing remains central to achieving this goal i.e., equipping your team with a winning solution that can accelerate their productivity, and enhance your customer experience as the result.  

When evaluating the right solution, your business should not just focus on improving CX, but also prioritise enhancing employee experience as well.  

CINNOX is a powerful, unified solution that gives you the flexibility to set up a contact centre within the matter of minutes, while empowering your business with the agility to scale globally.