Analyzing the different stages of the customer care process is key to getting a better understanding of customer pain points as well as dealing with these more adequately. Find out what your customer is feeling and what their expectations are to provide a better service.
What are the different stages of the customer care process?
Contact
Evidently, the first contact with a customer is vital for the remainder of the customer journey. The user will reach out with specific expectations: receive a pleasant service, obtain a quick answer, resolve an issue etc. Whatever it is, the result and the first impression you give them will condition the customer´s perception for the duration of the relationship. And that’s a hard one to change, so make sure you’re giving them the attention they deserve from the start.
Information gathering
As a business, you must commit to listening to the voice of the customer and understand their request quickly. A proactive listening approach will avoid any risk of misinterpretation of the request, which would negatively impact the overall experience as the customer won’t be getting the answer they were looking for. It’s also a good idea to reformulate the customer’s request to validate understanding.
Resolution
Whether you’re helping your customer with a technical issue or simply clarifying doubts about a product or service, actually resolving the request is a decisive stage in the customer care process. It’s not just about providing the correct answer, it’s also about how you go about it. As such, customers tend to appreciate clarity and a genuine smile they can hear. Sometimes you may not be able to give the customer what they want, in which case make sure you’re offering alternatives. In any case, customers are likely to be a lot more understanding of issues if they’ve received outstanding service when they contacted you. It’s also important to note that First Contact Resolution is a huge lever in customer satisfaction, so if the customer doesn’t need to contact you again about the same problem, chances are they’re happy.
Closing
At this final stage, you will be confirming that you have dealt with the customer’s query in full and establishing whether any additional assistance is required. It’s a good time to introduce feedback request or survey completion, including where the customer may not be fully satisfied as this is the best way to learn. If you’re only directing happy customers to a satisfaction survey, it won’t be a helpful tool for the company.
Client pain points
When we talk about pain points, we mean any friction or possible issue across touch points in the customer journey. Customers rarely contact you to tell you how happy they are with your product or service, so the contact center is a real opportunity to turn a broken experience into a great one.
So what can you do once you have identified a pain point in the customer journey?
- Design or improve your product or service in a way that will resolve the issue
- Find a better way to present your product, be it through marketing or packaging, to connect with your customer and address the pain point
- Show empathy towards your consumer concerns along the customer journey
- Optimize customer interactions in the contact center to remove any friction points
The impact of customer care on pain points
There’s no doubt that the contact center is a key information source for a business. As such, implementing a good system to collect, cleanse and analyze the data will generate a significant return on investment.
Every customer interaction is the perfect opportunity to collect more useful data about their needs, pain points and perception. The right analysis leads to a number of situations being identified:
The product or service may not be relevant to customers’ needs
In this situation, the customer feels that your product or service is not adequate to what they are looking for. This means that you may have gone wrong in your market research or that the customer is not finding the value you thought you were conveying in your product
The product or service addresses an already fulfilled need
Here your product or service exists in an already competitive market, meaning you have to demonstrate your unique selling points and the quality of your customer care is definitely a big differentiating element
The product or service is relevant but doesn’t meet expectations
This is usually good news because with a little bit of focus, you should be able to fix the pain point by addressing the specific feedback about your product or service. Your customers made the effort to tell you that something had gone wrong so make sure you do the same once you’ve solved the issue, it will go a long way towards building trust and loyalty.
Takeaways
At the end of the day, analyzing customer pain points using your contact center is a powerful way to understand customer experience, satisfaction and perception. But collecting data is simply not enough. If you want to have a real impact on pain points, you need to go the extra mile by actually acting on the voice of the customer and changing your approach to a customer-centric product design. We promise you the extra effort will be worth it!
If you need more information to understand how an omnichannel software for your contact center can help you, please contact us. We will be happy to help you!
