“Trick or Treat?” is a fine question to ask at doors on Halloween night, but when your customers come a knockin’ for service, there should be no response that isn’t a “treat.” In other words, with consumer experiences serving as a major differentiator in today’s marketplace, if you hope to remain competitive, your customers should always be “treated” to excellent service when they reach out to your contact center.

So, how do you make certain you aren’t frightening consumers away with scary, or just plain bad, customer service? The best way to ensure you are offering quality customer interactions is to employ well-trained, highly professional contact center agents. And the most efficient, cost-effective way to coach and train agents is to adopt Click2Coach—contact center software from Envision.

Does this sound familiar? You are a longtime contact center supervisor who has developed excellent instincts through the years. When a trend in customer interactions is emerging in your environment, you typically recognize it before most of your colleagues. The problem, however, is that your current contact center software solution—if you employ one—doesn’t have the functionality necessary to provide real-time data about interactions. As a result, you can’t confirm your suspicion that a trend is forming until it is too late to take any kind of meaningful action based on your intuitions.

For instance, let’s say you work for a retailer and as you walk around the contact center floor, you hear several agents answering questions about what clothing items are a good match with your company’s most popular winter coat. You think a trend might be developing, with many customers looking to make additional purchases after originally calling just to buy or ask questions about the jacket. But because you can only hear one conversation at a time, you can’t be sure this is anything more than just a coincidence. In other words, you are caught in a data silo.

With the new year underway, it’s time to ask yourself what you have done to prepare your company for success in 2015. As your call center is your most customer-facing department, have you made any resolutions to bolster operations there in the next 12 months? If not, you may want to consider adding some new tools and strategies to ensure that your call center stays ahead of the competition during the coming year. 

We live in a world more connected than ever before—that is a simple fact. Every indication is that the future will bring even more connectedness, making it increasingly easy for people to share information. That is especially true of customers, who are more likely than ever to share customer service experiences.

A successful voice of the customer program can provide a wealth of useful information to your business, which can be used to improve the customer experience. However, many companies fail to make use of the data they collect. In fact, according to Forrester Research, two-thirds of American companies have VoC programs, but less than one-third make decisions based on customer needs and voice of the customer data.

In today’s highly-competitive marketplace, your company needs every advantage it can get. If you haven’t considered using voice of the customer data (VoC) to help provide that edge and improve the customer experience perhaps it’s time to try it out.

Customer data enters a contact center via many channels—social media, telephone, live chat and more. So, it’s no surprise that customers expect to be heard loud and clear.

Now that you’ve gathered a wealth of customer data, what’s next? In today’s hyper competitive marketplace, it’s not enough to just gather customer intelligence; you have to put it to work. Below are four ways businesses can utilize voice of the customer data to improve their overall business operations: