3 Vital Pieces Of A Solid Customer Experience Foundation

According to this infographic from Parature, it takes 12 positive customer experiences to make up for one negative experience.

What exactly is the “customer experience” and who contributes to the shape and form it takes? You can look at it in two ways;

1. A customer experience is the culmination of all touch points along the marketing funnel, starting from the first advertisement they see for a product or brand, all the way to the purchase, delivery and use experience.


2. The customer experience is a single moment that a consumer has with a company and its representatives (a phone call, email, etc.).

Knowing that one experience affects a person’s overall impression of a company and everything to do with that company, a bad occurrence creates a lot of making up to do by many in the company including customer service agents, sales reps, executive management teams, etc.

Whether you focus on the overall compounded experience, or a moment in time, building an ideal customer experience plan will help you analyze the current state of the experience your company provides, and will help you develop and improve that experience.

The ability to understand the state of customer experience takes at least these three building-blocks:

1. Voice of customer data to monitor and analyze their wants and needs.


2. Training and coaching programs to educate and empower agents/employees.


3. Actionable insights to improve operations and fine-tune strategies.

Capturing the Voice of Customers to Analyze Their Experience

Much of the data that is required to assess the ways in which customer calls are handled, how they are processed, quality of service, and the overall customer experience they receive is contained within phone conversations between companies and customers. However, more often than not, this data is not being used to improve operations, strategies, and quality assurance or employee performance.

As consumers continue to use the phone as a communication channel with the companies they do business with, call tracking, monitoring and analytics will become more necessary and widely used by companies in order to monitor, manage, and improve the customer experience.

Contact centers use various technology solutions to monitor their performance, track business to the source, and stay on top of their contact center agents for insights on training opportunities and employee evaluations. There are complex workforce optimization suites that require hardware and software installations and maintenance, all the way down to simple, cloud-based call recording and speech analytics solutions that focus intently on the actual voices of customers to learn their wants and needs.

Knowledge Empowers Employees

There are many reasons why monitoring conversations between customers and agents and employees is valuable to the employer/employee relationship, and there by, the company/customer relationship. By monitoring calls between customers and agents companies can:

1. Track agent performance and use the knowledge to improve productivity.


2. Identify training opportunities to improve adherence to company procedures and policies.


3. Identify top-performers and reward those agents to motivate them to continue their good work, and use these examples as motivation for mid-low performing or new agents.

By motivating and rewarding agents, companies are sure to achieve a higher overall quality of transactions due to the foundation of a happy, satisfied, and empowered workforce. To do this effectively, technology is a necessity. Once an effective call recording and monitoring technology is in place, it makes it much easier to monitor call center agents and identify the top performers, which also tend to be the most satisfied and happy employees. Then, companies have a resource to lean on and leverage – using top-performers and their conversational habits with customers as benchmarks for training other employees.

On the other side of that equation, call quality monitoring tools will also reveal the agents that may need to improve their call-handling process, script compliance, and other company-specific goals.

Leverage Actionable Insights to Foster Customer Relationships

Finally, the customer experience is fluid, changing every moment with each interaction between a company’s employees and customers. The technology that contact centers use to monitor and analyze the customer conversations need to also be fluid, providing near real-time data for analysis and action. And, that is the third vital block of the CX foundation; actionable insights.

Having the data is one thing, but making sure it is used to implement the necessary changes to continue moving the customer experience and relationships forward is fundamental.

After all, companies that are in tune with their customers’ experiences and needs see a 28 percent (28%) year-over-year increase in revenue, and that is nothing to overlook.

Resources are available to learn more about improving the customer experience, empowering employees and contact center agents, and turning the voice of customer data into action items, which will impact your company’s bottom line.

3 Vital Pieces Of A Solid Customer Experience Foundation