Change is inevitable, and rather than push against it, evolving becomes the way companies continue to compete. Change is largely a response to customer needs.
Contact centers are delivering personalized care that expands the customer experience to cover customers’ increasing needs. For companies that have yet to outsource to experts in customer service, now is the time to make that jump, because your customers deserve it.
Making the Personalization Effort
For quite a few years, consumers have demanded more from the brands they spend money on. To cater to customer needs, brands need to know as much as possible about them, including their behaviors, and their history with the company, and track every interaction with them. This is how the best brands can anticipate consumer needs.
Contact centers can take this data and create opportunities to take huge steps to surprise their customers in personalized ways that will help create loyalty.
It’s a complex process that involves aggregating data, analyzing it, and implementing real-time solutions via tools that are specific to the contact center industry. This is part of the reason why it is exceedingly difficult for DIY customer service departments to even come close to what a professional contact center can offer.
The Future of Customer Service
Leading contact centers have established best practices that allow for more consistency across channels. While the majority of consumers prefer to have their major concerns managed via telephone conversation with a knowledgeable agent, contact centers offer multiple channels through which consumers can connect with their preferred brands. This journey must be seamless if brands are going to keep winning back their customers.
This journey must not rely on reactive solutions. As mentioned earlier, top-rated contact centers are collating data on consumers and thus have the insights necessary for taking more proactive action. The predictive nature of engagement contact centers work within actually minimizes the effort it takes to offer personalized care.
Cultivating Talent
It takes special talents to be successful in customer service. Contact centers have perfected their recruitment processes, which involve bringing in only those who possess the communication skills required to give consumers what they want today.
Today’s workforce also requires something special from their employers, which is why leading contact centers have stepped up their training programs, which provide agents with the knowledge they need to assist customers with any issue. The workforce also demands a career path, which is why promoting from within is a best practice held by the top contact centers.
The company culture within a high-functioning contact center has a trickledown effect, in that the happy employees take their positivity with them on every customer interaction. While consumers will rate customer service on the agent’s ability to problem solve, the lasting impact of the interaction has everything to do with the attitude of the agent. Happy agents create happy customers.
Relying on Tech
Most contact centers will chalk up their success to their knowledgeable employees, but they can only do so much without high-tech telecommunications equipment at their side including:
- Quality Monitoring
Team leaders can track their team members’ performance using various monitoring and analytics tools. These provide all the insights they need to continue training agents to be their best. - Automatic Call Distributor
Routing customers to the right agent is incredibly important, as misrouted calls can lead to customer churn. - Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Simple problems can be quickly and efficiently handled via an IVR. Over-reliance on IVR is a big complaint among customers, so knowing when and where to use it is important. - Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools
Personalized service is easier to offer when all the data on your customers can be properly managed, which is what CRM software provides contact centers.
Technology is constantly evolving, which means contact centers need to keep up and continue to provide stellar services. Again, this is something few DIY customer service departments can keep up with or afford.
Overcoming Attrition
If the customer service industry is notorious for anything, it is the poor employee retention rate. Some contact centers will see upwards of 60% of their employees leave in a year. Talent management is the way to prevent this level of attrition.
While some employees will be perfectly happy to perform the same duties year in and year out, the majority of them are eager to grow and expand their roles. Contact centers that fail to create a path for employee growth often have unhappy employees which can affect how they serve customers.
Employee growth begins with training – giving them to the tools to succeed at their job. The training should be ongoing and they should know that a job done well is rewarded with opportunities. This has positive effects, the first being that the employee is happier and performs better. Another positive impact this has is that the customer experience is much improved.
Trends in 2025
According to this report from SalesForce, 85% of decision-makers say their level of customer service is going to be a bigger part of the revenue picture in 2025. Why? Because customer expectations continue to go up, which means they demand better service. “When companies meet those expectations,” the report says, “88% of customers are more likely to purchase again – making quality interactions essential to keep customers coming back for more.”
Other trends include offering omnichannel services, hyper-personalized services, talent management that focuses on better agent performance, integrating new technologies, and going above and beyond to prove to customers that they are appreciated.
Are the predictions about social media finally taking a back seat to other forms of customer engagement going to come true in 2025? Not likely. Consumers still spend a lot of time on social media, and some prefer using social media as a means of interacting with their favorite brands. So, look for social media to continue to be an integral part of your strategy for improving customer satisfaction in 2025.
Self-Service Options
For customers without highly complex problems looking for a fast answer, self-service should be an option. Around 73% of customers say they want to solve these easy problems on their own. Fortunately, AI and various automation tools on the market today offer that luxury to consumers, whether it’s a real-time chatbot an automated email response, or anything in between. Make sure your contact center is providing your customers with these options.
Related to self-service is the community approach, which is where consumers can reach out to others like them and start discussions. Remember, people trust fellow consumers more than anyone or anything, so providing a platform for them to create their communities and hit on all the hot topics as they come up will be a vital resource for them.
Nearshore Excellence
Rather than outsourcing to the other side of the world, finding a nearshore contact center that is located in geographically close countries that share cultural and linguistic similarities, is a way to get the kind of services your customers will love, but without the high cost.
Nearshore centers also operate in similar time zones, which is a bonus. For example, Belize, which is in the Central Standard Time zone, is a hot spot for the contact center industry, as the official language is English and the residents are highly immersed in American culture. Belize has a stable government and an adequate infrastructure, which ensure overall stability for contact centers based there.
Final Thoughts
One thing Belize does not have is high overhead, which means the savings are passed down to the customer. At Protel BPO, we can offer savings of up to 60% of what our customers spend on domestic, in-house services, but what we’re more pleased to discuss is our level of professionalism, which is evident in all of our agents.
If you’re looking for premium service without the premium fees, contact us, and let’s discuss how we will improve your customer satisfaction levels and create more loyal, long-term customers.