Connecting Customer Experiences – The Softer Aspects That You Should Be Wary Of!

According to a Maximize Market Research study, 84% of customers regard a company’s experience as much as its goods and services equally.

This emphasizes the increasing role of customer experience as a competitive differentiator in today’s business landscape.

Positive experiences lead to customer satisfaction, loyalty, and even recommendations to others. Satisfied customers are more likely to make repeat purchases and become loyal patrons. They are more inclined to spend more on premium products or services and are less likely to switch to competitors.

Conversely, poor customer service can lead to negative word-of-mouth, customer churn, and potential damage to a company’s reputation.

What Is the Most Fundamental Infrastructure You Need to Offer Exceptional Customer Experiences?

Businesses need to implement contact center solutions. A contact center is a centralized hub where customer interactions are managed across various communication channels such as phone, email, chat, social media, and more.

The contact center solutions streamline customer inquiries, complaints, support requests, and any and all interactions a customer has with your organization.

Businesses have understood the advantages of implementing cloud contact center solutions, such as scalability, low barriers to entry, remote accessibility, ease of integration, ease of updates and maintenance, and global reach.

This has prompted the shift to cloud-based contact center solutions for businesses across industries.

What Are the Softer Aspects of a Contact Center Solution?

Let us look at all the housekeeping features of a contact center platform. They include dialers, telephony, automatic call distribution (ACD), call recording, screen recording, interactive voice response (IVR), reporting, and analytics.

You can add value-added features like workforce management, list management services, business intelligence, voice analytics, and AI-powered solutions.

However, the most important attributes are the softer aspects, like integration & deployment, support & maintenance, and training & consulting.

Integration & Deployment

How do you ensure that your contact center platform seamlessly works with your existing systems like CRM, ticketing solutions, helpdesk software, and communication tools?

You should be able to integrate your contact center platform easily with these existing systems, which can lead to a unified customer view. Your agents will get to see a single view of all your customer interactions across all channels and interfaces.

Deployment involves setting up and configuring the platform to match the company’s customer service processes, including call routing rules and escalation protocols.

Integration and deployment are critical because they determine how well the platform fits within your ecosystem and how efficiently your team can utilize it.

What Should You Expect From Your Vendor?

Consultation – Vendors should assess your business requirements and guide you through the integration process, suggesting good practices.

Customization – The platform should be customizable and configurable to match your workflows and processes. Besides, every organization works differently, so you should see if the vendor is willing to customize their platform to fit your workflows as part of the implementation.

Documentation – See if the vendor offers clear documentation on integration procedures and deployment steps.

Testing – Vendors should help test the integrations and deployment before going live to ensure everything works smoothly.

Support & Maintenance

Every platform or solution would have issues that need to be addressed.

Support ensures that technical issues are addressed promptly, minimizing downtime and disruptions to customer service.

Maintenance includes regular updates, security patches, and system enhancements.

Reliable support and maintenance are essential to keep your contact center running efficiently.

What Should You Expect From Your Vendor?

24×7 Support – Access to support anytime across channels like phone, messaging, email, and WhatsApp. Does your vendor provide first-contact resolution to 90% of your queries? How proactive are they in letting you know of challenges and issues you need to know about?

Response Time – Has your vendor-defined response times for different types of issues? Have they provided you with an SLA that they stick to?

Issue Resolution – Does your vendor have a proven track record of resolving issues effectively? How does this statement sound – we haven’t had a customer churn from us in the last six years because of the exemplary support we provide.

Regular Updates – Scheduled updates that include new features and security improvements to the platform

Communication – Does your vendor clearly communicate about maintenance schedules and potential disruptions?

Training & Consulting

The most significant factor that derails any new implementation is the level of adoption by the users. How do you ensure that your users are comfortable adopting the new solution?

It is through training, and it should ensure that your users can fully utilize the platform’s capabilities to benefit your business.

Consulting service guides you through the implementation process, helping you make informed decisions.

What Should You Expect From Your Vendor?

Training Programs – Vendors should offer training programs tailored to different user roles. This should include use cases for various roles.

Onboarding Support – Ensure the vendors assist with the initial setup and onboarding process

Consultation Expertise – Access to experts who can provide advice on customization and workflow optimization

User Guides – Does the vendor offer comprehensive user guides and resources for ongoing reference

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Organizations often ignore the softer aspects of deploying a contact center platform, eventually leading to several challenges.

These attributes will ensure that the platform is well-integrated, efficiently maintained, effectively utilized by your team, and aligned with your business goals.

Thoroughly assessing these softer capabilities of the vendor can lead to smoother implementation and a more satisfying customer experience.

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