However, if contact centers are not optimally managing the customer experience, they risk alienating customers and prospective customers with repetitive and outdated interactions that fail to meet their needs.

Key considerations include:

• How adaptive and effective is your engineered customer experience?
• Is your interactive voice response (IVR) system set up so that each customer receives the same high-quality treatment?
• Do your customers get the “Your call is important to us, please continue to hold” message every 60 seconds?

These are just a few questions to consider as contact centers strive to create personalized experiences for their customers. With the right customer experience strategy, you can make sure that your contact center serves its core purpose while enhancing customer satisfaction. Investing in technology, processes and the people necessary to provide constant and personalized customer experiences is an essential part of contact center success.

Think of it as a formula-driven experience. Determine why the customer is calling and then queue the call to the most qualified and available agent.

With data collected through ACD systems and then correlated with your Customer Relationship Management, let’s look at how you can optimally create a unique customer experience for all callers. In doing so, you can bring both significant and organic returns to your organization along with improved customer satisfaction.

Leveraging the combined customer data available, let’s start to shape a significantly better contact center experience, tailored to your customer.

Here’s how to personalize your customer experience strategy:

Area Codes

When a customer contacts your contact center, you can use their phone number to provide them with more targeted and accurate information that is specific or regional. A utility company might be able to provide customers with an outage update handled through the IVR rather than having a large volume of customers requesting to speak with your customer service representatives.

Customer Profile Information

You have a wealth of information on your customers. Use it to your advantage! Instead of sharing the same, generic sales offer to all your callers – whether or not they are customers – you can tailor these messages by determining what products or services they currently have and promote new, personalized offerings.

Sales vs Support

By using customer data, contact centers can differentiate between sales and support calls allowing for customers to be handled by the most appropriate contact center agents. When contact centers are equipped with an understanding of why the customer is calling, they can use this information to personalize their interactions and create a tailored customer experience that builds loyalty and enhances the customer-brand relationship.

A Potential New Customer and an Existing Customer

Using an upfront unique key capture, such as an account number, you may want to consider using more tenured and experienced agents to handle your current, valued customers. A caller who is only considering using your organization’s services can be handled by an entry-level agent or a department that is more sales-focused.

Depending on the situation, you may even provide them with an entirely different customer experience and informational messaging through your IVR or in queue process as part of your go-forward strategy.

Self-Service Opportunities

Using the connection between your CRM and ACD data, there are opportunities to leverage self-service functionality. Paying an account or adding additional services to a customer profile can be easily accomplished, thus freeing up agents from handling a certain percentage of your call mix.

A Revamped in Queue Treatment

Now, let’s look at non-data driven solutions that can impact your customer satisfaction. Personally, when I call a service provider’s contact center, I find it frustrating when I am forced to wait to speak with an agent – though it’s not the waiting that I mind the most as it’s expected. The repetitive nature of the treatment during the wait time is what frustrates me and your customers the most! That same “muzak” followed by the predetermined frequency of “your call is important to us” over and over… Eventually, this same sequence of events causes your customers to “tune out” to your messaging serving only to increase frustration levels.

Instead, consider creating a more dynamic and personalized experience while a customer waits in the queue. You might want to provide them with a selection of music genres that they can choose from while they wait to speak to an agent. A little jazz for Bob, or soft rock for Mary.

Rather than playing the same “please continue to hold” message, consider having variations on a theme with more sympathetic or playful messaging depending on your audience, and informational messages that are pertinent to the customer’s call intent.

Humanize and personalize The IVR customer experience

With so many new and shiny communication channels, sometimes we forget the tied and true IVR system. According to Zendesk, although digital channels are trendy, most consumers still prefer to use the phone for customer support.

A customer’s contact center experience begins the moment their call is answered. It’s time to rethink how your customer’s IVR experience impacts their satisfaction by providing a personalized customer experience from start to finish. By leveraging customer information and data, contact centers can create tailored journeys for customers that are intuitive and efficient – to increase satisfaction levels.

Want to create a dynamic and adaptive customer experience strategy? Let Inoria be your guide.