There’s nothing like business for buzzwords, and one of the latest is CX—Customer Experience.  Lots of companies worry about their customers’ experiences with their products or solutions, but the challenges in addressing those concerns can seem overwhelming.

Here’s a place to start: your contact center.  Today’s customers are used to having information readily at their fingertips.  When you can get most of what you want by asking Google, Alexa, or Siri—your needs are likely reasonably complex if you’re making that phone call. In fact, the contact center has seen more change in the last five years than in the previous 30 combined, and much of that is around how to better meet the needs of today’s customers.  Remember, Net Promoter Score (or any other measure of customer satisfaction) is significantly higher for phone calls than any other channels.

How can you make that in-person contact more positive?  Start by remembering that your contact center employees are people, too. And, depending on the role they play, their needs are very different.  Consider four key roles in your contact center:

 

  • The focus of an agent is dealing with a high volume of calls efficiently. To achieve this, they need to sound clear and professional, and they need to be able to hear the customer on the other end of the call clearly as well. Having to ask people to repeat themselves can exacerbate any frustrations that customers may be having.

 

  • The customer service rep (or CSR) is less concerned with the quantity of calls, and more focused on high touch engagement for customers. Again, the need for clear audio is paramount for this role.  In addition to audio, there are opportunities for video to augment these engagements, particularly for interactions that would replace a face-to-face connection.

 

  • The key need for a supervisor is mobility. With contact center work becoming more complex, supervisors are increasingly moving away from the command and control approach into a coaching and mentoring role.  Moving around the office to engage with staff, assist them on queries, and being available for any escalation calls makes these interactions more powerful.

 

  • Social customer care members are predominantly handling digital interactions, but also using voice to collaborate with internal teams to resolve issues or answer questions. Mobility is key here with the quick timescales on digital channels driving a need for rapid response. Again, an emerging requirement for this team is video devices—creating a quick visual response to a query sticks in people’s minds as a great experience.

 

Solutions for Every Role

Regardless of the employee’s role, the role of voice and video in the contact center has increased in importance over last few years.  Why? The easy interactions are now handled by digital or self-service channels, and it’s only the more complex issues that are reaching employees.  Prospective recruits are now being reviewed for empathy, problem solving skills, and team collaboration.  When they have this right skill mix, they need the right tools to support them in successfully getting the job done.

How do you know what the right device is to help these employees create great experiences?

The right device can make a significant difference.  Putting the employee experience at the center, the device is the first three feet of their interaction path.  But you can’t give same device to everyone—purchasing decisions need to be informed by each individual’s role.  And that’s where Poly can help.

The newest member of our EncorePro family of professional headsets is the EncorePro 300. Designed for all day comfort, this device provides voice optimization for incredible audio quality for agents and customer service reps. Unlike headsets tuned for office workers that may also be used for music playback, the Encore Pro line of headsets is specifically designed to clearly transmit the human voice (not music).  That matters when you’re trying to hear clearly.

The EncorePro 300 is the ideal headset for organizations that are cost conscious but have not seen Poly as an accessible brand before.

(The Poly MDA 500QD audio processor bridging the gap between desk phones and softphones in a hybrid work environment)

Our newest audio processor The MDA500 helps agents and CSRs deliver great customer experience by enhancing the audio of the phone call—no matter what type of phone is being used.  Great audio, fewer mistakes, better experiences.  With acoustic protection built-in to help safeguard employees.

The MDA500 is the ideal solution for organizations moving their contact center to the cloud and want to retain that clear connection to the customer.

These new additions round out portfolio of great devices—wireless headsets such as the Savi, desktop cameras such as the EagleEye mini, and SIP phones such as the VVX350.

No matter where your contact center takes you, whatever your needs are, Poly is the only vendor offering every device matched to your employee’s needs—to help them improve the customer experience.