Investing in Your Customer Relationships

For many organizations, 2021 is the year to focus on enhancing the customer experience. Further, this time of year we tend to put a heightened focus on personal relationships. Let’s do the same at our contact centers by investing in our customer relationships.

Are your customer relationships in good shape? Ask yourself these three simple questions:

1. How do you make your customers feel?

Do your customers feel like a statistic being dropped through a funnel? Or do they feel like you are their advocate?

The old adage remains, “They don’t always remember what you say, but they’ll remember how you made them feel.”  Do they trust you with their data?

As we wanted to better understand the feeling and sentiment of consumers across the globe, we conducted a research study to get insight into their view of payments and security. In our research, only 3% (US), 9% (UK), 6% (Australia), and 15% (Canada) of consumers imagine there to be no problem with data security practices in their respective regions.

Put yourself in the consumer’s shoes for a moment and imagine having that concern in the back of your mind with each interaction you have with a company. Now imagine being able to put that insecurity at ease.

A robust data security strategy and a competent PCI compliance solution can do just that. With a cloud-based DTMF masking technology, you can deliver peace of mind to your customers by letting them know that their card data never enters your environment. Rather, they are passing their details directly to the payment processor.

You as an organization are putting their security and their data at the top of the priority list. That trust within a customer relationship is invaluable.

2. Are you equipping your agents with the tools to champion the customer experience?

Metrics such as average handling time and first contact resolution are all extremely important. However, without the right tools in place, these metrics add pressure to agents. Remove this pressure – and show your agents some love – by properly equipping them.

With the right equipment, contact center agents can focus on relationships with your customers. When the conversation is focused on the customer experience, the metrics are achieved naturally.

Further, when you take the pressure of hearing, repeating, and entering sensitive information off of your agents, you will see for yourself what they are able to refocus that time and attention on.

Allow your agents to deliver the good news to your customers that they are a priority to your business, and watch the trust and satisfaction grow.

3. Are you making the customer experience as easy as it can be?

When a customer wants to interact with you, are you allowing them to do so in a seamless and consistent way via their channel of choice? Can they make payments securely via all of your engagement channels?  A cohesive compliant payment solution can help deliver this experience.

Whether the customer connects over the phone to an agent in a contact center, an agent working remotely, or through a chat/digital channel, you can provide them with the comfort of knowing they will have the same security and experience when handling their sensitive data. Remove the need for transfer points by equipping any agent with the necessary tools to complete a transaction.

Once easier said than done, there now exists technology to help businesses descope from the requirements of PCI DSS, protecting their business’ bottom lines and reputation.

This year, rather than investing time and money in protecting data from would-be hackers, simply make sure there is nothing there to steal. The fewer customer data stored, the less risk there is of that data being stolen.

With the right tools, investing in customer relationships is easy. Show your customers some love, all while checking the compliance box.