While contact centers spend heaps of time and resources on strategies to improve the customer experience, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, many industry experts say the rules are relatively easy to understand. They may just not be quite so easy to accomplish. It’s not that they are complicated; it’s that they require real dedication, a real effort and honest insight into the call center’s capabilities and weaknesses.

West Interactive (News - Alert), a provider of contact center solutions and services, believes that there are really only three principles  a company needs to engage with in order to improve the customer experience. The company outlined those principles in a recent blog post. 

Proactive engagement. Don’t wait for customers to come to you…go to them. Strategies for reaching out to customers proactively at the appropriate time in the customer lifecycle (from initial contact or purchase throughout the lifecycle of that customer relationship) to keep them from having to contact the company will go a long way toward improving the customer experience and building loyalty at the same time, says West.

Intelligent self-service. Self-service technologies should be there to help customers…not to help the contact center. Strategies for driving self-service engagement and adoption to ensure the ideal blend of self-service options and live contact (agent/CSR (News - Alert)) options are critical for a well run contact center with happy customers. Interaction intelligence, personalization and multichannel contextual awareness are key issues to driving self-service adoption.

First-contact resolution. It’s sometimes considered the Holy Grail of call center operations, and while many companies pay lip service to it, they don’t often achieve it. Strategies to ensure that the contact center leverages intelligent transaction routing, and data transfer from self-service to live agent environment to ensure the inbound (reactive) transaction is routed and completed within the best possible contact center environment are the most critical issues for a contact center seeking to improve the customer experience to address.

To read more about these three strategies to improve the customer experience, see West’s complete blog post.