7 Essentials of a Customer-Centric Call Center

Call centers increasingly understand the importance of providing excellent service to their customers and are adopting a customer-centric approach as a result. If your goal is to transform your call center into a customer-centric call center, this blog post is an excellent place to start. It applies findings from the Deloitte white paper, “Customer-centricity; Embedding it into your organization’s DNA” to call centers.

Below are the seven essentials of a customer-centric call center:

1.Visible, customer-focused leadership

Customer-centricity requires a top down approach. This is so important that organizations like Oracle developed a Chief Customer Officer (CCO) to ensure a consistently amazing customer experience across all touch points. If you don’t have the resources for a CCO in your call center, try out some of these suggestions from Deloitte:

• Formulate a clear vision of what customer-centricity entails for your call center and convey this to your agents
• Articulate what customer-centricity looks like in practice and give your team concrete examples
• Educate your team about the impact that changes in business policies or procedures have on the customer
• Ensure that customer service leaders have a voice on your social media channels
• Ask higher-ups to get their hands dirty by personally responding to some customer complaints
• Motivate and inspire your team by telling stories of exceptional customer service interactions

Creating a customer-centric culture starts with you. Get the ball rolling with some of the aforementioned tips and your team will likely follow suit.

2. Understand your customer

Providing amazing customer service requires that you truly understand your customer base and then tailor your approach accordingly. How do you accomplish such a feat? Try out some of the suggestions below:

• Organize a Customer Insight Team and encourage them to leverage data to drive decision-making
• Adjust your approach to organizing and grouping customer data to be more in line with your customer service strategy
• Acquire in-depth information about each customer (e.g., socioeconomic status, location of residence, household details, etc.) as this will enrich your understanding of your customer base
• Provide customer data to other departments (e.g., sales, technical support, marketing, etc.) so they can use it to inform their approach to interacting with the customers
• Leverage call center software that will display this comprehensive information in the browser as the customer calls to enhance interactions

Gaining a more comprehensive understanding of your customer, and providing that relevant information to your agents in real-time will enable your agents to provide more personalized and effective experience.

3. Design the experience

In order to be a top-notch customer-centric call center, every interaction, from the first to the last, should be perfect. What is perfection in the eyes of your customers? Minimize customer effort and maximize customer value. This entails:

• Embedding company values in training and promoting them to increase awareness amongst agents
• Staffing your frontline with knowledgeable agents to increase first call resolution
• Providing a seamless experience throughout all touch points to reduce friction
• Maintaining a coherent voice on social media, apps, printed branding and website to reduce confusion

Providing a seamlessly amazing customer experience from beginning to end is imperative for call centers aiming to boost their customer-centricity. Doing so will not only reduce customer frustration but will enhance customer loyalty.