Contact Centers: Gain Greater Insight Into Customers’ Shopping Experiences

While it’s common for contact center managers to track and monitor each agent’s calls to discern performance levels, tracking and monitoring individual customer calls often gives a merchant insights that can help it improve sales and goodwill. Customer Experience Management (CEM) is a strategy that seeks to answer the question: “Why are our customers acting and reacting in the ways that they are?”

“CEM looks at the transactional process from the customers’ point of view from the second they start interacting with the merchant,” either in the contact center or via the Web, says Kristyn Emenecker, product manager of contact center solutions for Mercom Systems, a Lyndhurst, N.J.-based, recording and quality monitoring solutions provider. “What was the turning point in the interaction that, if taken another way, could have resulted in increased sales or better customer goodwill?”

For example, did the customer service rep (CSR) not pick up on the customer’s buying signals? “It involves tracking an individual customer’s call through the transactional process,” notes Emenecker, “from when he talked to the CSR, to when he was transferred to a supervisor for problem resolution, to when he was put on hold for three minutes, to finally a sale taking place. CEM tries to understand the interaction from the customers’ experiences and then decides what the merchant can do to make it easier for customers to buy.”

CEM normally is initiated by a contact center manager, but those who are reaping the real rewards from this customer service strategy usually are marketing executives, she continues. “There’s an emerging understanding that a lot of intelligence can be gathered from the contact center, intelligence that can benefit the company as a whole or marketing in particular. Marketers can determine, for example, what’s appealing to customers. Those companies that are really successful at CEM involve the marketing department in the process.”