Contact center is not only a customer engagement platform but also the hub of customer interaction data, giving enterprises more intelligence about products, services and customers. Contact center solutions play a huge role in meeting the expectations of businesses and customers.
Recent surveys, however, indicate contact centers still lag behind in terms of technologies and customer service expertise.
A recent study from WhitePages PRO and the International Customer Management Institute finds that contact center agents suffer from an overload of data from disparate sources, leading to poor customer service.
The study titled, “A Wow Customer Journey: Actionable Data in Today's Multichannel Contact Center,” finds major disconnect between contact centers and agents in delivering information about customers.
To be precise, the study finds that 60 percent of contact centers are unable to deliver customer service information to agents and 49 percent of agents report productivity and efficiency challenges when they have to ask customers for basic contact information.
WhitePages PRO identifies that part of the problem is that 40 percent of customer information is still manually inputted by agents rather than being fed through an automated API or Web-based system.
If agents are supplied with appropriate data, customer experience will improve significantly, according to 72 percent of survey respondents, with improved contact center operational efficiency (68 percent) and a more consistent customer experience (60 percent).
Meanwhile a recent survey conducted by Interactive Intelligence about the Middle East customer service experience shed light on the growing importance of customer service experience in call centers. Among the participants, 78.5 percent rated customer experience to be extremely important while 18.2 percent stated it to be important.
First call resolution, professionalism and a timely response are perceived to be the most valued parameters in customer interactions in that particular order.
Organizations perceive the contact center to be vital to providing excellent customer service. While 66.1 percent stated it to be very important 24 percent agreed that the contact center was somewhat important in this regard, Interactive Intelligence said.