Pivotal CX Moments In Your Omnichannel Contact Center

It might sound crazy, but it’s true—one interaction with your contact center can totally make or break how a customer feels about your brand. No pressure, right? According to PWC research, 17% of American consumers will walk away from a brand after just one bad experience—even if they love your company or product.

Delivering a painless, positive experience can be the difference between a customer interaction being “the straw that breaks the camel’s back” or the “cherry on top.” But are all interactions created equal? Well, yes and no.

They all matter, but here’s the thing—certain key moments have an even bigger impact. These can really shape how customers view your business and affect your overall results.

We call these moments that matter.

During a recent webinar, Identifying the Moments That Make or Break Your Customer Experience, I had the opportunity to discuss these moments with contact center expert and industry veteran Laura Sikorski. Let’s explore some key takeaways and pearls of wisdom that contact center leaders should consider.

Contact center moments that matter

Your customer experience doesn’t happen in a vacuum. How customers experience and perceive your brand is the byproduct of three core areas in your contact center: customer experience, agent experience, and operations. The first is obvious; the latter two—not as much.  

You can have the best customer processes and interfaces, but if things are a mess behind the scenes, your customers will notice. So, it’s no surprise that Laura’s take on the most important moments in an omnichannel contact center included the agent experience and operational considerations.

Routing moments

How often have you tried to get customer support from a human and failed to get it? Just yesterday, I was trying to find a customer service number for a major online retailer (who may or may not share their name with a rainforest in Brazil) because I had a one-off scenario that I knew would require an exception to their return policy.

I could not find the phone number ANYWHERE. They’ve got tons of online help articles and FAQs—pretty intuitive ones, too—but none of them address my specific issue. My frustration kept growing with every scroll and Google search for their customer service number.

Getting in touch with customer service and having your issue sent to the right agent quickly and accurately—that’s what we call a routing moment. It’s super important for the customer experience, whether it’s their first time reaching out or their hundredth. And consider this: 90% of customers consider an immediate response as “very important” or “important” when resolving an issue. 

Laura emphasizes the importance of:

• making information and contact points easy to find.
• making your interaction voice routing (IVR) short, sweet, and intuitive.
• using intelligent routing to get the customer to the most knowledgeable agent the first time.
  

Customer complaint moments

According to Laura, customer complaints are a gift. Customer complaint moments matter because they 1) provide you with invaluable insight and 2) enable you to transform a negative experience into a positive one.

A startling percentage of customers stop doing business with brands every day without saying a word. Many times, it’s because of a process or experience issue that you’re not even aware of!

Luckily, modern AI-powered contact center analytics software helps surface many of these issues and bottlenecks without explicit customer complaints, but getting direct negative customer feedback is still a powerful way to capture their perception of the experience.

So, instead of being frustrated or annoyed when customers complain, be thankful that they took the time to bring it to your attention—giving you the opportunity to fix it and potentially make the customer happier than they were expecting!

The “Service Recovery Paradox” (SRP) suggests that if you effectively resolve a customer’s issue after a service failure, their loyalty to your company can increase. I’ve experienced this myself, from an airline providing a voucher for a significant flight delay to a hotel comping my night after a room mix-up.

The way the company handled the situation turned what could have been a total disaster into something I couldn’t stop talking about to my family and friends. How a company deals with customer complaints really shows what they’re made of. It says a lot about their brand, their integrity, and how much they actually care about their customers.

Agent empowerment moments

Your agents are key to keeping customers happy. When you make your agents’ lives easier and enhance their agent experience (AX), they work more efficiently and feel good about their job. This directly impacts how they interact with customers. By giving your agents the tools and support they need, you’re basically unlocking their hidden superpowers. You end up with a team that’s more engaged, motivated, and gets more done.

However, rigid policies and procedures often hinder agent problem-solving and frustrate customers and agents. In the webinar, Laura referenced a client that created a small pool of discretionary funds that agents can tap into to process refunds, waive fees, or resolve other issues without requiring supervisor approval. Giving agents some autonomy to make decisions and do the right thing for customers in the moment creates a more trust-based work environment and boosts agent engagement. 

Change moments

Change is inevitable in contact center operations. Change—in technology, processes, service offerings, and more—will keep your brand relevant and competitive. Moments of change in the contact center matter to your customers, agents, and the success of your business. According to Laura, contact center leaders should follow change management principles like:

• Involving agents in the decision-making and implementation process. She especially recommends involving your “complainer” agents, who can be the biggest skeptics and detractors, derailing adoption later. 
• Don’t make too many changes at once. It’s tempting to make many changes at once (sort of like pulling off a bandaid, right?), but this can overwhelm agents.
• Avoid making more changes than necessary. Too much change, even if staggered over time, can create a negative agent experience. Employees can experience change fatigue, negatively impacting costly metrics like agent engagement and retention. 

Three best practices to improve contact center moments

1. Always think like a customer

Contact center leaders should design every contact center process with one question in mind: Will this change make customers’ lives better, easier, more efficient, etc? If the answer is no, then go back to the drawing board! Answering this question requires deeply understanding your customer experience and walking in their shoes. A good best practice is having leaders and agents complete key transactions or processes as a customer would. 

Laura referenced a simulation she’d run many years ago with a client who sold products via catalog. The customer service agents would order something via the catalog order form, only to receive an incorrect or broken product. Then, they’d have to navigate the process of returning or exchanging that item to see what it looked like from a customer’s perspective.

She encourages supervisors to zero in on the moments that infuriate customers the most and then focus on improving them. For example, customers are commonly frustrated when they get stuck in an IVR and can’t reach a human. Many customer service teams spin their wheels with elaborate processes meant to delight customers when they only want simple and seamless service.

2. Consider zero-contact resolution vs. first-contact resolution (FCR)

All contact centers are familiar with first-contact resolution, but Laura challenges leaders to think about zero-contact resolution. This involves proactively mitigating or resolving customer issues before they happen so customers don’t need to reach out for support—meaning there is no first contact. For example, use AI-powered analytics, digital communication, and outbound engagement channels to alert customers of potential service outages, upcoming bills, account changes, etc. 

3. Set clear expectations with agents

True agent empowerment requires transparency on performance expectations and clarity about what they can and can’t do. Laura recommends documenting and sharing expectations for metrics, daily activities, service standards, and how they’ll evaluate agents. Also, she recommends supervisors require agent signatures to ensure a clear understanding and drive accountability by both parties. 

Sharpen the contact center moments that matter

When your contact center can recognize and respond during the critical moments that matter in your customer journey, you’re empowered to shape customer perceptions, transform satisfaction, loyalty, and, ultimately, your bottom line. While this blog explores some pivotal moments in your omnichannel contact center experience, we’re barely scratching the surface. 

Is your contact center keeping pace with evolving customer expectations? Let’s future-proof your strategy. Feel free to grab time on my calendar and we can discuss some ideas!

To dive deeper into how you can perfect these moments—and how Sharpen can help—check out the full webinar replay and our new ebook, Decoding the CX Moments That Matter for Challenger Brands.