How the Contact Center Can Help Optimize the Customer Journey

Enhancing the customer experience is a top priority for many companies — and with good reason. Myriad studies show that CX investments deliver a huge return. The Temkin Group found that companies can increase revenue by 70 percent or more within three years of investing in CX. According to a report from PwC, consumers are willing to pay 16 percent more for a great experience.

On the flip side, a bad experience can be devastating. The PwC study found that 32 percent of consumers will abandon a brand after just one bad experience.

It’s impossible to ensure a great customer experience without optimizing the customer journey. An experience is a point-in-time interaction between the customer and your company. The journey is the sum of all those experiences, from initial brand awareness through post-purchase support and nurturing.

The contact center plays a central role in improving the customer journey. In addition to streamlining interactions, the contact center can help identify pain points so you can tailor each stage of the journey to the customer’s needs.

Omnichannel Communication Is Key

A contact center enables omnichannel communication via voice, chat, email, text messaging and more. That distinction is important because 67 percent of today’s customers prefer using self-service options for most inquiries. If they have a more complex problem, they want to interact with an agent seamlessly using their preferred communication channel.

As an initial step, it’s critical to recognize that self-service tools are part of the customer journey. Incomplete information, confusing navigation and other issues can doom a purchase from the start. In the awareness stage, you should strive to make a good first impression with engaging content and effective ad and social media strategies. Once they advance to the research and evaluation stages, you need a well-designed website and effective, personalized interactions.

The post-purchase stage is when personalized interactions become important. By now, you should have collected some data on the customer, enabling you to follow up with timely, relevant communications. User guides, tutorials, information about new features and products — these engagements all play a role in building a long-term relationship.

Mapping the Customer Journey

Interactions with contact center agents often play an outsized role in the customer’s experience. Long wait times and the need to repeat their issues multiple times can quickly frustrate customers. Worse, if they navigate all of that and don’t get an effective resolution to their issue, they’re unlikely to buy from you again.

Generic interactions also lead to dissatisfaction. According to Startups, 81 percent of customers expect a personalized experience that shows your company understands and values them.

The contact center plays a central role in improving the customer journey.

Customer journey mapping can help contact centers gain that understanding. The first step is to define personas based on your typical customers, including their demographics, preferences, behaviors and more. Next, identify every point at which customers interact with your company and what they aim to achieve at each touchpoint. From there, you can create a visual representation of each stage of the customer journey. There are a number of technology tools that facilitate this process.

Optimizing Contact Center Interactions

Armed with a visualization of the customer journey, you can begin fine-tuning your contact center to optimize interactions. First, you should ensure that your contact center supports all of the communication channels your customers prefer, and that customers can switch from one channel to another seamlessly. The right contact center platform will also enable you to customize communication flows so that the customer and associated information is routed to the right agent regardless of communication channel.

Data collection plays a key role in continuously optimizing the customer journey. Best-in-class contact center solutions track and monitor customer interactions and provide managers with real-time metrics and historical reporting.

Companies that deliver an outstanding customer experience generate 5.7 times more revenue than competitors that don’t. GDS can help you optimize your contact center to create an outstanding experience across every step of the customer journey.

Transform Your Customer Experience (CX) with GDS Contact Center Solutions

Elevate satisfaction, boost revenue, and ensure lasting customer relationships with our advanced contact center solutions platform. Schedule a discovery call and demo: https://www.getgds.com/schedule-a-discovery-call 

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