3 tips to drive customer engagement and loyalty from the contact center

Contact centers are embracing their role as a strategic asset to drive customer engagement.

Historically, contact center strategy has centered around quickly responding to support requests while containing operational costs. However, contact center strategies are adapting to the need to do more with less. Organizations are re-evaluating their current systems, processes, and resources to maximize their efforts and achieve their goal. Contact centers are a strategic asset filled with untapped potential to drive business growth.

How does the contact center contribute to CX?

Contact centers impact CX, but they aren’t typically measured on this impact, so there’s been no way to measure improvement or success, and no accountability ensuring contact centers are aligned to strategic business goals.

However, organizations are quickly learning that customers value exceptional experiences in every industry—in financial services, healthcare, and retail this is more perceptible than ever.

In fact, if companies don’t ensure their contact center is aligned and set to achieve their CX strategies and goals, they’re at risk of losing customers.

Perhaps that’s why we’re seeing 75% of customer experience leaders rate increasing customer loyalty and retention through the call center strategy as a high priority (Talkdesk Research: The Patient Experience Revolution in Healthcare, 2021; The Customer Experience CX Revolution in Retail, 2021.), with the influence of the contact center on customer (or patient) experience increasing over the next two years.

By understanding the impact of the contact center on CX, companies can get buy-in across all departments to strategically position, equip, and measure their contact center as a customer engagement center.

Drive customer engagement and loyalty through the contact center.

Companies are learning to thoughtfully, proactively, and predictively engage customers on their terms to continue being the brand they love. To effectively engage customers, you must:

Measure customer engagement and loyalty metrics through your contact center.

While these metrics may vary from organization to organization, you have to ensure the contact center has insight and is accountable to the metrics that lead to successful customer engagement. Examples of customer engagement and loyalty metrics include:

Customer engagement scores

• Number of interactions on social media (comments/likes/reposts).
• Number and sentiment of direct messages on social media.
• Clickthrough rate (CTR) on texts and emails.

Customer satisfaction

• Net promoter score (NPS).
• Average CSAT.
• Number and rating of product reviews associated with customers.
• First call resolution (FCR).
• Volume of inquiries related to products bought (by product, by customer).
• Return rate.

Customer loyalty

• Loyalty program sign-ups by agent.
• Loyalty lifetime earnings (e.g. points or coupons related to a loyalty program) by customer.
• Loyalty redemption rate.

Prioritize retaining high-value customers.

Proactively send rewards, offer first-priority routing, and match them with your top-tier reps. Be proactive—convert customer intent into action. 52% of customers say necessary information was not provided to them proactively. Proactive outbound engagement is about the constant nurturing of customers after a purchase, to ensure continued satisfaction, provide ongoing value, and prevent problems before they arise.

When customers browse your website or use your mobile app, proactively message them to capture and convert leads. Identify key conversation points, such as competitor mentions, common objections, and more, to understand customer needs and market trends. Treat customers as individuals by personalizing their experiences with your brand. Meet and exceed expectations, through any channel, by applying the accumulated data you have on them to customize their experience and even anticipate their needs.

Meet and exceed expectations with data. 

Data within a contact center can be pivotal in driving a more proactive customer experience. Consider the number of customer interactions – (across multiple channels) – that live in a contact center daily. Gathering data is essential, but it’s the value of the data, and what it could mean for the business, that is critical.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is integral to contact center transformation from reactive to proactive. AI enables companies to proactively deliver customer service with personalized recommendations and tailored interactions, when and where the customer wants them.

Data within a contact center can be pivotal in driving a more proactive customer experience. Consider the number of customer interactions – (across multiple channels) – that live in a contact center daily. Gathering data is essential, but it’s the value of the data, and what it could mean for the business, that is critical.

Modern cloud contact centers offer AI tools that can help explore why customers are calling. With this data, companies can better understand the needs of customers, and then proactively address those needs, delighting the customers, and driving efficiency and a positive impact on the bottom line. This can deliver value across the entire organization from the contact center agent to C-suite leadership.

With AI and machine learning natively incorporated, as well as off-the-shelf API integrations to connect all core systems, cloud contact centers pull customer data from every interaction they have with the company and centralize it in the contact center.

Most contact center solutions offer expansive automated reporting features, historical and real-time analytics, performance analytics and some offer predictive analytics for recommendations and proactive engagement.

With so much customer data in one pane of glass, cloud contact centers have the technology and data required to improve outcomes like customer lifetime value, revenue generation, employee engagement, innovation, and collaboration,  transforming the contact center from a cost center to a growth center.