May 08, 2020

UX design meets CX - Why does it matter?

Today’s customers interact with brands on different channels and devices. To deliver a smooth omnichannel experience that all tech-savvy customers expect from the brands today, their contact centers need to have excellent UX, professionally designed around a customer’s needs, behaviors, and preferences. Poor UX can lead to poor customer perception and business outcomes.

Imagine this:

You’re a customer, doing online shopping on a confusing website. You can’t find the item that you liked in the right color. So, you decide to pick a similar item. You add it to the cart and fulfill the online payment. But the package never comes! Then, you call the customer service and wait on hold for 20 minutes. In the end, they refund you because it turns out what you ordered was out of stock. Frustrating, right?

Here are some of the common roadblocks that sabotage the user experience:

• Complex navigation: It is the most common issue in UX. While building a comprehensive service or product with deeply nested information, it is tempting to use complex navigation that ends up becoming difficult to use and understand.
• Interruptions: Interruptions like channel switching, or from human and digital agents, can be annoying. Over time, they can lose a lot of customers and lots of sales.
• Disparate customer segmentation based on business preferences
• Lack of quality information: Misleading or missing silos of communication in multiple channels
• Unreliability: Inability to handle peak loads and long queues

UX is the shorthand word for the overall experience of a customer with a brand’s site, software, or app. The idea is to make it easier for customers to self-service in all channels. It’s an intuitive approach that lets the customer interact in more natural ways, whether they’re conversing with support, typing, or navigating the website.

UX takes into account things like usability, ease of navigation, and visual hierarchy. It can be measured by using the net promoter score, customer loyalty stats, customer satisfaction, abandonment rate, error rate, and clicks to completion.

The goal of UX is to present an optimized design that lets the customer navigate with ease. Not only will this improve the customer’s satisfaction, but it plays a big role in attracting and retaining loyal customers. Having excellent UI and UX can provide a competitive edge to your brand, making you stand out. As a unique brand differentiator, they improve your brand loyalty, ROI, and customer satisfaction.

Designing a better UX for contact centers

Designing a good UX for a contact center is a bit more complicated. The UX design is not just intended to serve one particular user type - instead, it needs to serve three different groups with totally different expectations and needs:

• The contact center agents
• The contact center managers or supervisors, admin, analytics
• The consumer

How to design the UX for contact center agents?

Contact center agents interact with customers in many ways, besides phone calls. They need to provide instant customer support solutions and close sales and deals on a strict timeline.

To accomplish this, agents need the right tools to access relevant information in a fast, easy way. These tools should empower them to provide the best customer experience as efficiently as possible. Here are some key things the UX should do for contact center agents.

• The system should be simple, intuitive, and easy to operate.
• Effortlessly provide agents with all necessary, real-time information in a unified dashboard to better serve the customers.
• Integrate all information into a single repository that underpins all customer interactions for easy access.
• The dashboard should have a clear, uncluttered layout, keeping the agents’ after-call work to a minimum.
• Display customer service metrics such as the number of calls waiting, average wait times, and other such performance statistics should be in an easy-to-understand format.
• Provide key performance indicator (KPI) data to show whether or not the agents are on track to meet specific objectives and SLAs.
• In addition to KPIs and metrics, the dashboard should indicate any compliance issues that may arise, especially during customer interactions.
• Straightforward reporting tools.

How to design the UX for contact center supervisors/managers?

The management team has the difficult task of keeping the contact center running smoothly. Their work is especially difficult when it comes to peak traffic times, and they’ll most often focus on agent management, and call monitoring.

What should our UX provide to make things as easy as possible for them, so they can help keep things running smoothly?

• the system should be easy to use and monitor agent productivity and call stats- including daily and hourly metrics.
• Critical KPIs formatted in text or graphs and charts to quickly make informed decisions on important subjects.
• Ability to handle several different queues at once.
• Contact center summary for overall status, performance, goals, and trends
• Ability to keep track of agents and queue metrics from their screens to streamline business processes.
• Provide filter preferences to improve contact center efficiency.
• Ability to review all of their Call Centers at once.
• Ability to change the availability status of each agent
• Provide a precise analysis of data to show whether certain goals are met.
• Identify the most efficient and least efficient agents.
• Throw up insightful, relevant real-time data.
• Allow easy communication between the manager and the agents.

How to design the UX for customers?

Here is, arguably, the most critical part of the UX. The customer’s experience is essential to the success of the brad, as we have previously discussed. Furthermore, we need this UX to be able to track critical KPIs with no compromise to the quality of the user. Here are some things to include in our UX, to help accomplish that-

• UX should work seamlessly across all communication channels, so customers can switch between channels as they please.
• No ambiguity. The system should be simple and straightforward.
• Ability to easily update the system with new features and channels
• Ability to adapt or customize the contact center workflow, menus, etc., to suit the customers’ changing needs.
• Combine multiple apps and tools into one. Avoid the complex combination of apps to respond to customer queries.
• Ensure that outreach is done, personalized to the date and time zone of the customer.
• Establish a seamless transition between channels
• Allow call-backs if a caller cannot reach an agent.
• Make it easy for callers to get to the same agent each time they call.
• Ensure clear visibility to the alerts on the customer accounts, to avoid financial fraud.
• Keep track of TCPA, Do Not Call List, GDPR, and internal regulations within the dashboard so that the dialer can Easily stay compliant with regulation.

High-quality UX is the key to delivering exceptional customer experience. UX is a significant component of CX. It plays a vital role in the overall success of a program, brand reputation, and customers’ loyalty to your brand. Failures in either area lead to horrible, overall customer experience.