How to Improve Customer Experience In Your Contact Center

Your customer conversations are not a competition to determine who knows the most about your product. Each conversation is a team effort between customer and agent to solve a common problem. Every support professional knows that they have a primary goal to solve customer problems and a secondary goal to ensure that the customer leaves the experience happier than they started on every call. The problem-solving element can be handled through deep product knowledge, but understanding how to improve customer experience is more art than science and takes a little bit of finesse.

Consider the customer’s point of view: without a brick and mortar store to drop into, the only personal interaction they have with your company is the phone, chat or text customer support teams send. That places a significant responsibility on the support team as the face of the business. They are the customer’s guide through the entire journey with the company and nobody knows better how to improve customer experience quickly and efficiently. The customer is trusting support teams to solve their problem.

An easy way to make a customer feel stupid is to assume that they have the same level of knowledge as you. If you move too fast or use terminology they aren’t familiar with, the customer will either entirely miss your solution or stomach the embarrassment of asking you to slow down or repeat yourself. To avoid those negative outcomes, let the customer drive and empower them to improve their own customer service experience. Move the conversation at their pace, try to match the language they use and check to make sure they are following when you give them directions.

Remember, as a support professional, you are the expert on how to improve customer experience. Not everything you know is common knowledge. Your role is to complement their problem-solving efforts, not be a know-it-all. At the end of your interaction, the customer shouldn’t feel bad about needing to contact customer support, they should feel empowered to handle similar issues in the future.

How to Improve Customer Experience is part of our ebook, 8 Habits Support Professionals Need to Develop, by Dominic Sandoval, Technical Support Team Lead at Talkdesk. Talkdesk’s world-class support team has an average CSAT rating of 98%. For more tips on how to leverage customer support skills to build relationships, download the ebook.