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.”

Emenecker offers a short case study of a successful CEM program initiated by one of its clients, a T-shirt manufacturer. “We started tracking customer calls for them, and found that newer customers were getting a bit flustered. The CSRs dealt with so many repeat customers that they expected callers to understand the ordering process. They were giving numbers, for example, that newer customers didn’t really understand the importance of. It was an intimidating process for newer customers.”

Luckily, Emenecker notes, the manufacturer had a system in which it could route newer customers to another phone number, which was staffed by more helpful CSRs specially trained to handle new customers. “Sales increased from that customer group, and more of them became repeat buyers,” she says.

To initiate a CEM program, she advises catalogers they’ll need basic call recording and monitoring solutions. But don’t fall for the misconception, she notes, that simply buying the technology means you’ve started a CEM program. “It’s not that simple. You need a process in place, time and resources to make use of the information you’ll be gathering by listening to customer calls.”

But the benefits can be substantial, she continues. “CEM is a strong revenue-enhancer. Companies doing it have recorded increased customer retention and average order values, because they’ve made the process of ordering more appealing to customers. I hear this a lot: ‘I lose less customers now.’ Plus,” Emenecker notes, “it helps merchants know how they can get more sales out of their existing customers, how to cross-sell and upsell effectively.”