Improving CX on the Customer Service Moments that Matter
Our lives are made up of moments: big and small, important and inconsequential. While most fall into the latter category—do you even remember what you ate for breakfast yesterday?—there are key moments that matter more than the rest. You know…births, weddings, graduations, making it through a one-mile run (OK, maybe that last one is just me).
Similarly, some moments matter more in your customer experience. Moments that matter are specific customer service interactions or contact center experiences that significantly impact a customer’s perception of your brand. They have a disproportionately significant effect on customer satisfaction, loyalty, repeat purchasing, customer lifetime value, and brand preferences.
Understanding the moments that matter
Sharpen is intensely focused on helping today’s companies perfect the CX moments that matter, but the concept is far from novel, with roots in Richard Normann’s 1970s “moments of truth” research. Normann discovered that it takes 12 positive moments to counteract a single negative experience, highlighting the significant impact of each customer interaction on overall satisfaction and loyalty.
While these moments transcend every customer touchpoint in the customer journey, the evolution of the moments of truth into the moments that matter framework has been extra transformative and critical for contact centers, which have an outsized impact on CX.
The contact center is a primary channel for doing business—from completing a purchase and resolving issues to simply getting product or service information. So, it’s no surprise that your customer service team influences most (if not all) of the moments that matter most in your customer journey.
At Sharpen, we categorize the moments that matter into three buckets: agent-supported moments, customer self-service moments, and contact center optimization moments. Let’s talk about the moments that matter for each and explore how three Sharpen customers transformed their agent, customer, and operational experiences to transform business results.
Agent-supported moments
Agent-supported moments are related to—you guessed it—interactions where an agent is involved. Agents are crucial to customer satisfaction. Enhancing your agent experience (AX) boosts efficiency and morale, which directly improves customer interactions. By perfecting moments in your agent experience, you can tap into your agents’ potential, fostering a more engaged, motivated, and productive workforce.
However, don’t just limit your thinking to the seconds and minutes agents engage with customers. Rather, think of those off-phone moments—like wrap-up and motivation moments—that directly impact agent engagement and morale and indirectly impact your CX.
- Answering moments
- Solving moments
- Wrap-up moments
- Motivation moments
- Flexible working moments
- Optimization moments
- Waiting moments
AGIA refines agent moments
As the largest privately held third-party broker, marketer, and administrator in the affinity marketplace, AGIA’s contact center team works tirelessly to deliver fantastic member experiences. AGIA prides itself on being a people-powered organization committed to building diverse, multi-talented teams and providing the support and resources necessary to see its associates thrive.
That’s why empowering agents, managers, and supervisors to monitor performance in real time is critical to both AGIA’s contact center performance and organizational culture. However, when AGIA’s team started (and then continued) working remotely in 2020, agents could no longer see contact center metrics projected on office wallboards—losing their visibility into performance.
However, they left these issues behind when they switched to Sharpen in 2021, enabling them to perfect motivation and flexible working moments in the agent experience.
With Sharpen’s Performance Tiles, agents can quickly see their performance against AGIA’s most important metrics, motivating their performance and enabling them to course-correct. Additionally, while AGIA’s Member Experience Center is based in Phoenix, AZ, using a cloud-based, agent-centric platform has enabled them to adopt a hybrid work model. Agents can work in the office if they choose to, but as long as they perform well, they can work from home.
Performance transparency and empowerment, coupled with AGIA’s hybrid work model, contribute to the contact center’s outstanding five-year average agent tenure. They haven’t had a new hire class in two years, and their leadership team believes that has a lot to do with their culture—and tools.
Moreover, refinding the moments that matter in the agent experience has contributed to major business results. AGIA team has decreased average handle time by 12% since implementing the Sharpen platform, resulting in an estimated savings of over $87,000 or 1.5 full-time equivalents (FTEs) per year.
Customer self-service experiences
Today’s customers value autonomy and efficiency, making self-service and omnichannel engagement must-haves in your customer experience strategy. Refining your self-service moments enables you to empower your customers with swift and convenient solutions while optimizing contact center operations.
This includes meeting your customers where and when they want to engage—think, preference, and out-of-hours moments—and making it easy and safe for them to do so during contact routing, authentication, and cross-channel interaction moments.
- Preference moments
- Routing moments
- Authentication moments
- Automation moments
- Cross-channel moments
- Out-of-hours moments
- Safeguarding moments
Protectall perfect customer-facing moments
Protectall is one of the largest furniture, appliance, and electronics warranty providers in the US, partnering with top retailers to provide protection plans to their customers. When consumers need help making a claim, ProtectAll service agents handle inbound support interactions to repair or replace their valuable items.
After a more than five year battle with their old cloud-based contact center software, ProtectAll’s leaders evaluated various contact center platforms to find one that was reliable, robust, and gave agents the tools they needed to service customers fast. They picked Sharpen for a variety of reasons, including the platform’s ability to meet their customers’ channel preferences, enable cross-channel engagement, and improve routing to resolve customers issues more quickly.
For example, ProtectAll uses features like chat, SMS, and email to connect with customers across channels. Agents frequently need to see receipts, photos of damaged items, and other documentation to determine how they should handle a claim. Instead of requiring customers to upload photos into a different system, they can quickly and easily text pictures to the agent. This gives agents the information they need to make decisions quicker, contributing to ProtectAll’s decreased call abandonment rate from 5% to just 1%.
With Sharpen, ProtectAll can also intelligently route interactions and tier its support to focus on gold level clients or complex issues instead of spending time on routine tasks. Now, the company’s average speed of answer is just 30 seconds or less.
Contact center optimization moments
What happens behind the scenes in the contact center significantly impacts your customer and agent experience. Contact center optimization is all about the practices, routines, integrations, and technology that enable excellent service—streamlining manual processes, using data-backed insights to drive decisions, and acting quickly to correct issues when they arise.
Focusing on moments that matter and using analytics as your guide can enhance decision-making, improve customer interactions, and foster a culture of excellence and innovation.
- Real-time moments
- Sentiment moments
- Coaching moments
- Process automation moments
- Alert moments
- Augmentation moments
- Data science moments
OLE Health optimizes operations with data
California-based OLE Health’s contact center handles inbound support calls and outbound appointment calls for a seven-clinic system that serves approximately 40,000 patients. The OLE team transitioned to Sharpen in 2020, looking for more stability and deeper, more actionable data insights than their previous vendor could provide—and found it in spades.
Though they’ve experienced benefits across all facets of their contact center experience, their biggest wins boil down to four letters: data. With Sharpen’s help, they’ve perfected real-time and data science moments. How?
Reporting with their legacy system was subpar, and the OLE Health team could not create custom metrics. Sharpen enables them to create their own reports, use default report templates, or even get help from the Sharpen data science team—for free. The data science team worked alongside the OLE team to create new metrics to analyze and monitor agent performance in creative ways, such as agent short and long-call ratios. They adjusted metrics based on how the OLE team preferred to calculate those fields.
For example, a minimum abandon threshold was developed for each call type to adjust for expected minimum customer patience—because the standard abandon definition didn’t apply to OLE. Similarly, Sharpen enables custom definitions for all important contact center metrics and reports. So while Sharpen is happy to help design reports free of charge, Sharpen Insights empowers them to build their own custom reports and dashboards.
Additionally, managers and agents alike now have real-time access to performance insights, enabling proactive coaching and self-management.
Perfect the moments that matter with Sharpen
Sharpen is passionate about helping companies create contact centers people love (or at least don’t hate as much)—and that includes perfecting the moments that matter. We could give you best practices and tips on optimizing and improving the moments that matter until we’re blue in the face (and we have in our ebook).
But the biggest takeaway? Focus on these pivotal moments. You’ll significantly enhance your customer satisfaction, foster loyalty, and drive business growth, all while optimizing your contact center operations and resources.
Ready to dig deeper into the moments that matter? First, download the full ebook, Decoding the CX Moments That Matter for Contact Centers. Then, take the Moments that Matter Assessment to discover how you score against the critical moments that make or break your CX in your contact center, and receive guidance on what to do next to improve both customer and agent satisfaction.