How do you feel leaving voicemails or interacting with automated systems? Happy? Frustrated? Would you prefer to talk to a normal human being? Well, you're not alone.

While automated systems are growing in popularity within call centers due to their ability to reduce costs and workloads - these systems aren't perfect. This is why complex customer queries are almost certainly answered by your agents, as they can listen, respond, and act better than any machine.

However, with the right number of handpicked tools, you can answer customer queries faster and more accurately, which has a direct positive impact on customer experience. In short, quality matters more than quantity when it comes to tools to improve customer experience.

Do more tools improve customer experience?

Adding the right new products, platforms, and systems to support your growing or changing business is nothing new, but it comes with certain advantages and disadvantages. Yes, these tools and systems - and the features that come with them - can help your call center teams interact better with each customer. But these experiences are often implemented without a single source for capturing or seeking critical information.

Leveraging a large number of tools creates operational challenges through your agents needing more time to learn their roles and longer coaching or briefing times - leading to more agent downtime. In turn, this increases the workloads of your agents, which directly impacts operational cost-to-serve. After all, a reduced number of agents means everything takes significantly longer - including handle, hold, and resolution times - which generates poorer overall experiences for your customers.

Worse, these issues can cause your customer interactions to be less fluent, leading to important information getting missed and mistakes being made. All of which can negatively impact your net promotion scores (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT), and customer retention. This low performance can lead to a reduced employee experience, and can even impact agent retention attrition.

In conclusion, a smaller number of handpicked tools side steps all of the issues stated above, so if you genuinely want to improve your customer experiences the less tools you use the better.

Less tools = happier customers

To overcome these challenges you need to invest in the right customer interaction tools that give your teams the information they need to resolve customer queries quickly - all from one place, while providing a complete, end-to-end view of your customers.

For example, integrating Zendesk Case Management within your toolset can deliver an easy-to-use, self-service interface to your customers. While collecting data and analysis can help your agents continuously improve by providing greater insight into their customer's activity or issues, while providing all the operational oversight and data they usually lack.

Good customer experience - more than just tools

Keeping the number of tools you implement to a minimum reduces agent effort significantly, and helps drive customer experience and productivity further. This means ROI can often be achieved much quicker than expected.

It's important to note that tools are just one aspect of the bigger picture and won't produce the customer experience results your organization is looking for on their own. To truly generate better customer experiences you need to examine the processes surrounding your customer journeys and the goals you want to achieve, while designing a proven roadmap that delivers these outcomes.

This may seem like trying to scale Mount Everest with little or no supplies, and it can be difficult to know where to start. But the end goal will enable you to drive a more meaningful and frictionless relationship between your agents and your customers.

To learn how Capgemini's Intelligent Customer Operations solution enables you to drive a more personal and emotive relationship with your customers through delivering a frictionless customer experience, contact: [email protected]

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