Even in this digital age, the human element still matters to customers—a lot.
According to a PwC survey, respondents indicated that human interaction is important or very important for their loyalty to restaurants (58%), financial services (55%), pharmacies (53%) and hotels (52%).
Despite the widespread availability of digital self-service options, many customers prefer to speak with a customer service agent—especially when they have a complicated problem. Across industries, 69% of customers preferred making a phone call for customer support instead of using digital service options in 2023, up from 65% in 2022.
According to a Statista survey, 94% of customers are more likely to make repeat purchases after a positive customer service experience. Most (82%) are willing to recommend a company solely based on exceptional customer service, and 80% will forgive a company for its mistake after receiving excellent customer service.
To build loyalty and retain customers, organizations need to deliver exceptional call center customer experiences, using technology to assist—not replace—live agents. Understanding the call center customer journey through mapping is the key to success when your goal is to improve the quality of call center interactions.
What Is a Call Center Customer Journey?
A call center customer journey includes all the interactions a person has with the call center, starting with finding how to contact your company and continuing until they achieve their goal (pay a wireless bill, report a stolen credit card, schedule a medical or service appointment or report undelivered products). The journey may include speaking with one or more live agents during one or more calls. A contact center customer journey includes interactions that occur on all contact center channels customers use to reach out for support, including email, social media, live chat, and mobile app, in addition to phone calls. How can you improve the call center customer journey? Customer journey mapping is the first step.
Advantages of Customer Journey Mapping
According to Gartner, customer journey mapping is “a collaborative process of gathering qualitative and quantitative data to understand customers’ desired journeys and identify gaps between their expectations and their perceptions of the experience delivered by a brand at steps along the journey. The main goal of journey mapping is to determine the challenges and opportunities a brand faces in improving its CX and improve satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.”
Customer journey mapping can help call centers improve customer experience (CX) by understanding customers better and identifying friction points and inefficiencies that need to be addressed.
Better Agent-Customer Interactions and Experiences
Call center customer journey mapping helps businesses improve CX by understanding customer needs.
- Why are customers calling?
- Are they wondering why their cell phone bill was $30 higher this month?
- Did they have trouble finding information on your website?
- What are they trying to accomplish?
- Are they looking for instructions on returning an item?
- Are they asking when their internet service will be restored?
- What emotions are they feeling?
- Are they frustrated because they couldn’t find the answer to their question on your website?
- Are they angry that they’ve called three times and spoken with seven agents and technicians, and their internet still isn’t working?
By identifying what callers need, you have an opportunity to modify your processes (e.g., redesign your billing statement or use a digital bill explanation tool, add an FAQ page to facilitate self-service or send proactive outage notifications and updates) so people don’t have to call. When you understand callers’ emotions (stress, frustration, anger), you can train agents to respond empathetically, acknowledging how the person is feeling. More positive interactions lead to happier customers.
Opportunities to Identify and Resolve Inefficiencies
- Do they wait on hold for 10 minutes, listening to Muzak or outdated Covid-related recordings, before they reach an agent?
- Do they get transferred to four agents, repeating the problem every time?
- Does their call get dropped, so they must call back and start over?
Identifying inefficiencies and friction points allows you to proactively develop better call center processes that improve CX, such as providing proactive agent guidance, implementing intent-based call routing and having agents ask for a callback number in case the call gets disconnected.
Increased Customer Retention and Revenue
By improving the quality of call center interactions, customer journey mapping boosts customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention. These translate into greater customer lifetime value.
Enhanced Product or Service Development
Customer journey mapping insights can be incredibly valuable for product development. A better understanding of customer needs and friction points informs the development of new products or features to address them. For example, by understanding that many customers call because of bill confusion, CSG developed a new digital self-service tool. CSG Bill Explainer is a generative artificial intelligence-powered solution that generates a personalized summary of charges and reasons for month-to-month changes, reducing bill confusion and call volumes.
Call Center Consumer Journey Metrics
To improve the call center customer experience, you must be able to measure it. That’s where call center metrics come in. These call center metrics help you identify areas for improvement and evaluate the success of your improvement efforts:
First Call Resolution (FCR)
As the name suggests, FCR is the percentage of calls where the customer’s issue is resolved during the first contact with an agent. According to the Contact Center Satisfaction Index, satisfaction declines from 82 (out of 100) for issues resolved in one call to 52 when it takes four or more calls to solve the problem. FCR is simple to measure and a fantastic metric for evaluating your customer support. Your FCR rate can indicate the need to improve customer support, leading to higher customer satisfaction overall.
Average Handle Time (AHT)
AHT measures the average time spent by agents on calls, including hold time, talk time and post-call tasks such as note taking. Monitoring AHT can help you improve your contact center’s efficiency. A moderately low AHT means your agents are empowered and have the resources to deal with queries effectively. An extremely low AHT can be a sign that agents aren’t dedicating enough care to each consumer. Customer satisfaction declines significantly when call handle time extends beyond 10 minutes.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
The CES measures how easily customers can complete an action when interacting with your call center. Customers rate their effort on a scale of one to five or one to seven, with the higher numbers indicating they had to exert more effort to complete the task. To measure customer effort, ask questions like these:
- How much effort did you have to make to reach our customer service team?
- How much effort did you put into resolving your issue with our customer support team?
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score
CSAT scores are generated through customer surveys after a call center interaction. Post-call CSAT survey questions are typically administered by email, mobile app or text. For example, you might ask, “How satisfied are you with our company’s call center customer service based on your last call?”
Net Promoter Score
NPS measures consumer loyalty and satisfaction based on the likelihood that consumers will recommend your brand, product or service. NPS is by asking one question: How likely is it that you would recommend (organization x/product x/service x) to a friend or colleague? Customers provide a rating between 0 (not at all likely) and 10 (extremely likely). Depending on their rating, customers are classified as promoters (9 or 10), detractors (0 to 6), or passives (7 or 8). To calculate NPS, you subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. NPS helps you understand customer sentiment and find areas to improve customer experience.
Mapping the Consumer Journey Effectively
Quality management starts with examining your customers—and what happens when they contact your call center. Follow these seven steps to map and improve the call center customer journey:
1. Define Your Target Demographic
You must know who your customers are before you can map the call center customer journey. To understand your customers, create customer personas: fictional characters who represent the different users within your target demographic. Personas help call center agents envision who they’re talking to. Include these characteristics when creating personas:
- Name
- Age
- Job title
- Family status
- Work and personal goals
- Habits
2. Identify Customer Goals
For each persona, you need to understand what they are trying to achieve at various stages of the call center customer journey. Here are some possibilities:
- Find the customer support phone number.
- Activate a new credit card or phone.
- Question a charge on a credit card statement.
- Report a lost or stolen credit card.
- Pay a bill.
- Schedule a medical or service appointment.
3. Identify Consumer Touchpoints
List every communication channel customers use to contact your company for support:
- Phone calls
- Emails
- Text messages
- Live chat
- Social media
4. Detail the Consumer Experience
For each touchpoint, describe the customer’s actions, motivations, emotions and pain points. Customer journey analytics measures every interaction customers have with your contact center, via all engagement channels, telling you exactly what happened. For example, how long did the customer wait on hold before reaching a live agent?
5. Identify Improvement Opportunities
Examine the customer’s actions and friction points to determine where call center customer experiences are not meeting expectations. For example, customers may
- Wait 10 minutes while agents track down the requested information.
- Get transferred to several agents.
- Describe the problem every time they speak to a new agent.
- Spend more than 15 minutes to clear up a billing inquiry.
- Call several times to resolve a problem.
6. Implement Changes
The next step is to prioritize areas for improvement (based on your business goals) and make changes. For example, you could institute intent-based call routing to direct calls to the right agent, reducing call transfers. You could provide agents with the information they need (e.g., real-time call transcript, previous call history or account information) to resolve the caller’s issue quickly and accurately.
7. Measure the Impact of Your Changes
Did your process or system changes make a difference? Use call center and CX metrics to evaluate the success of your changes on CX.
Choose the Right Customer Journey Map for Your Company
Several types of customer journey maps give you different information about customer interactions with your call center. Choose the journey map(s) that best meet your needs:
- Current State Journey Maps
- What it Depicts:
- Customers’ present interactions with a brand
- How it Helps You:
- Understand the present CX
- Uncover friction points
- Establish a baseline before making improvements
- What it Depicts:
- Future State Journey Maps
- What it Depicts:
- Desired customer journey after improvements
- How it Helps You:
- Set goals for improving CX
- Visualize the ideal call center customer journey
- Create a roadmap for CX strategy
- What it Depicts:
- Experience Journey Maps
- What is Depicts:
- Customer interactions with your brand
- Thoughts and feelings at each touchpoint
- Actions and decisions
- External influences (such as competitor actions, industry trends)
- How it Helps You:
- Identify friction points and opportunities for improvement
- Design a more empathetic and effective call center customer experience
- What is Depicts:
- Day in the Life Journey Maps
- What is Depicts:
- Typical day in a customer’s life (interactions with your brand and other activities)
- How it Helps You:
- Understand customers’ habits and lifestyle
- Spot opportunities to incorporate your product or service into the customer’s daily routine
- What is Depicts:
- Service Blueprint Journey Maps
- What it Depicts:
- The customer journey, mapping customer actions, touchpoints, and the backend processes and interactions that support them.
- How it Helps You:
- Understand the internal processes (e.g., call routing, customer data retrieval) that support call center customer journeys
- Identify service delivery inefficiencies (e.g., transferring calls several times)
- Improve front- and back-end processes to meet customers’ needs
- What it Depicts:
Improve Call Center Customer Experiences with CSG Xponent
Building a better call center CX starts with understanding customer needs, interactions with your brand and friction points. CSG Xponent, our industry-leading customer experience solution, combines customer data analytics, digital communication and decisioning to help you track customer interactions and deliver exceptional call center customer experiences. Journey analytics helps you develop an experience map that tells you what is happening as customers engage with your call center. Automated self-service, proactive call deflection, intent-based call routing and proactive agent guidance reduce call volume—and provide faster, better customer service when customers speak with an agent.
