Gone are the days when store clerks were the face of customer service. indeed, ecommerce has transformed the way we interact with customers! Today, customer contact centers play a starring role in providing excellent customer service. Sadly, many call centers fall short and need to step up their game. In particular, they need to become truly omnichannel and customer-centric. All too often, customers find themselves waiting endlessly on hold, encountering clueless agents, or being bounced from one representative to another without any resolution.

If your ecommerce business is not delivering excellent customer service, it’s crucial to evaluate and start making improvements now, not later. In fact, one effective method is to analyze your operations using a call center maturity model. This approach helps identify and address shortcomings in your customers’ call center experiences. For detailed guidance on conducting an assessment and setting key performance indicators (KPI) to enhance customer satisfaction, read further below.

Increase Your Current Call Center Maturity Level To Achieve Excellent Customer Service.

If your business receives a call, e-mail or a social media message from a customer, your business has taken on all the responsibilities of an inbound call center. Realizing this, next ask the question how mature is your call center? Also, is it one that is chaotic, or worst negligent, or is it customer-focus, a champion of the customer?  From these questions, it should be obvious that you need an assessment of your call center.

For instance, a good way to assess the effectiveness of your call center is to use a call center maturity model. For examples of a call center maturity model, see Nice’s The Five-Stage Road to Customer Experience Maturity, and SmartCustomerService’s A Maturity Model for Delivering Superior Customer Service. To list, below are the 5 levels of a Customer Experience Management Maturity Model.

• Level 1: Ad hoc. No owners.
• Level 2: Centralize. IT team manages.
• Level 3: Manage. A business team manages.
• Level 4: Optimize. Led by a C-level change agent or COO.
• Level 5: Inform. Have reached both digital and CX maturity and focused on continuous improvement.

Without a doubt, more and more customers desire to contact businesses on-line. In fact, if you are an eCommerce business that is the normal way you interact with customers. So to reach a high call center maturity level, it is key that businesses transform their call centers into omnichannel contact centers. To detail, see my article, The Delighted, Connected Customer: Reasons Call Centers Need To Be Omnichannel.

The Delighted, Connected Customer: Sure Ways To Make Call Centers Omnichannel And Data Rich

Stop Losing Sales By Making It A Priority To Minimize Customer Churn And Bad Online Reviews.

In most cases if an existing customer contacts an ecommerce business, the customer has a problem that you need to solve. Obviously if you do not solve the problem to the customer’s satisfaction, you will probably lose this customer. Worse, the customer will write a bad online review, reducing your future sales revenues. Hence if you do not take steps to improve your call center experience for your customers, it is likely that you will be out of business sooner than later. Accordingly, what are you waiting for?.

Implement Key Performance Indicators (KPI) To Achieve Excellent Customer Service.

Call center maturity models help you to assess the gaps you have in delighting your customers. Additionally, these models suggest goals and characteristics for you to increase the maturity of your call center. Furthermore, this assessment can help you to identify your Key Performance Indicators (KPI). For example, KPIs for your inbound call center can include:

1. Reduce Average Handle Time.

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This is an indicator that the customer did not have to wait too long to get their issue addressed. Additionally, usually calls are longer if the agent did not have immediate access to the information needed to resolve the issue or possibly the agent has a training issue.

2. Increase First Call Resolution Rate.

Ideally, a mature help desk should solve most problems without passing the customer over to a 2nd tier support person. Without a doubt customers desire to communicate with the person who can solve their problem.

3. Eliminate Abandoned Call Rate.

If your customers are abandoning their calls prior to reaching an agent, this is a tragedy. To detail, they called because they have a problem, your call center puts them on hold, and then they give up on you and your business.

For more information on Improving call center performance and KPIs see ViiBE’s What is the call center experience?, Phdata’s  Improving Customer Experience In Call Centers With Data, and Convoso’s Top 15 Inbound Call Center KPIs and Customer Service Metrics.

A Spectacular Call Center Experience – Technology Applied The Right Way

For more information from Supply Chain Tech Insights, see the latest on Customer Experience and Data.