The Blind Spot in Customer Experience
Customer Experience continues to influence everything from market presence and brand reputation, to customer loyalty and sales revenue. It’s never been more important. Customers have greater choices and voices than ever before, making CX missteps particularly treacherous.
Customer Experience is defined as “The product of interactions between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship” (Wikipedia). This means it includes all associated product messaging, sales exposure, web presence, in-person interactions, and phone calls. And, it’s that last interaction point that can frequently be a customer experience blind spot for businesses — phone calls.
Caller Experience Visibility
As callers navigate the complexities of your voice network, they are forming brand impressions. And while business managers may be able to evaluate caller experience within specific call path silos (main IVR, switchboard, contact center A, contact center B, etc.), they are rarely able to see the experience that was delivered across the entire call path from the moment the caller rang in − through all interactions and transfers − until call conclusion. A global view of caller interactions can help fill in this missing perspective. Broader caller experience visibility can help prevent false assumptions or misleading caller experience assessments, and can reveal hidden problems within the voice network that are affecting callers every day.
Take for example one actual caller interaction that took place at a large hospital system. A patient called in to the main hospital number. They were placed on hold for 46 seconds while awaiting a switchboard operator. After reaching an operator the caller asked a few policy-related questions to which the operator did not know the answer. The operator transferred the caller to the ER for further assistance. The ER told the caller they needed to speak with Administration, and transferred the caller to that department. Administration phones, meanwhile, had been forwarded to the switchboard operators (who were acting as a “gatekeeper” to keep unnecessary calls away from Administration staff). The caller explained their need to an operator a second time, and the operator attempted to transfer the caller to an Administration resource. The caller was instead mistakenly transferred to the Admissions office. Through sheer luck, the Admissions resource was able to track down the answers to the caller’s questions, and 3 minutes and 53 seconds after it began the call was completed.
To recap, that’s a 46 second hold time, five interactions, four transfers, and 4 minutes of effort to get their need fulfilled. Examining the end-to-end interaction from this perspective makes it clearly apparent that this caller had a poor experience, and that there are some serious call management challenges to solve. First, there is the hold time at the onset of the call, which delivers a bad first impression. Next there are the multiple interactions and transfers the caller was subjected to, which make the organization seem disorganized and potentially unreliable. Then there is the issue of the mistaken transfer, which could have been caused by either human error or inaccurate data in the enterprise contact directory that the operator was using. Even with the insights delivered by just this single call, there is no shortage of areas to which business managers can apply further scrutiny in order to improve services.
While customer experience managers may have visibility into the performance of the individual service lines and contact centers the caller interacted with, the poor quality of this caller experience could easily have been lost in the details. It’s a classic case of not seeing the forest for the trees.
End-to-End Call Analysis
Executives and business managers no longer have to suffice with a lack of complete end-to-end caller experience visibility. A new solution exists which can track and evaluate the entire caller journey − from ring to hang up − to deliver caller experience insights that improve call management processes and enhance customer satisfaction.
Parlance CX Insights can give you deep visibility into who calls your company, what they’re trying to accomplish, how they interact with your voice network, and the level of effort they must expend in conducting their business. This powerful end-to-end call analysis solution can also help you identify problem areas within your voice network, such as ineffective (or even error-filled) IVR menus, areas of frequent and/or erroneous transfers, clogged contact center pools, call paths with high abandonment rates, and more. With these insights in hand, you can begin implementing incremental improvement to enhance interactions for different caller communities, streamline and accelerate the caller journey, eliminate hold times, reduce agent and operator call volume, ensure consistent and reliable customer engagements, and much, much, more.
Visibility Powers Improvement
The above call scenario was an actual customer call that was tracked and monitored using Parlance CX Insights. Combined with end-to-end analysis of additional calls and their respective insights, a clear roadmap to caller experience improvement began to emerge. This allowed Parlance to make actionable recommendations to the customer — recommendations that could
- 1. eliminate hold times,
- 2. reduce excessive transfers within the hospital network,
- 3. improve the accuracy of enterprise contact data,
- 4. reduce customer effort, and more