Five9 Blog

Losing customers to the competition should be your greatest fear. The cost of attracting new customers is significantly greater than retaining your existing ones. In addition, depending on your business, word of mouth referrals will often account for a large percentage of new business growth. All the more reason to keep customers satisfied, loyal to your company, and advocates for your brand. Recent research from ICMI indicates that customer satisfaction (CSAT) is the most important agent metric to contact center leaders, agents, and customers alike, BUT...

Guest Post by Joanna Jones of MHI Global: With customer service trends changing at lightning speed it is sometimes easy to miss the straight forward task of delivering excellent customer experiences. Take for instance call-back systems. It doesn’t matter how much money is invested in infrastructure and training agents if your customers are abandoning their calls out of frustration because of long wait times.

Contact center agents are the frontline of your company, and they have the greatest potential to affect the customer experience. In order to best make decisions about the frontline, it’s important to understand the DNA of the work they do, how they are compensated, motivated, stressed, and affected by decisions. ICMI and Five9 recently published a study that indicated that most agents may not be that much different from a historical version of you.

It's all about the tools you have on hand to do the job well. It's the same with contact center agents. If they are given complicated screens with incomplete information and outdated technology, how can they be expected to provide an excellent customer experience?

As a contact center manager, you’re always seeking to balance two separate factors: You want your agents to provide a superior customer experience, and you want them to perform as cost-effectively as possible. With these twin goals in mind, you probably monitor such metrics as first-call resolution and average call handling time. The fact is, however, that the most important basis for both customer satisfaction (CSAT) and agent performance is the general well-being of your contact center agents. A recent ICMI study shows:

Companies with a reputation for excellent customer service become the gold standard that everyone measures themselves against, for example, Amazon.com and Virgin America. Their excellent service and the low effort required for customers to get answers sets them apart from their competitors and builds raving fans out of their customer base. Yet the needs of contact center agents in any industry – the very people responsible for nurturing the customer experience – are often overlooked.

Imagine the chaos during peak times for customer service: florists on Valentine’s Day, retailers during the holidays, tax planners around April 15th and the application period for online schooling. One of the biggest challenges contact centers face is being able to quickly address staffing surges and peaks in activities in a short amount of time. Today, cloud technology and at-home agents are helping mitigate some of that chaos... Read on to hear advice from Liz Osborn on addressing contact center surges: