As per an ASCI report, customer satisfaction across industries has fallen in Q1 2015 and it is the lowest it’s been since 2007. At a time when most industry leaders are concentrating on customer experience, this report seems baffling. So what is causing this slide downwards?

Why Customers Are Dissatisfied?

The answer is not straightforward. Take the example of the dilemma faced by a leading TV provider that kept on losing customers in bulk for three straight quarters. As company leaders started digging around the data, they uncovered the root of the problem. Most customers weren’t fed up with any one phone call, field visit, or other interaction—in fact, they didn’t care much about those singular touchpoints. What reduced satisfaction was something few companies focus on: the cumulative experiences across multiple touchpoints and in multiple channels, over time.

Customer Experience is Cumulative of All Touch-Points

Customers can, at any given point in time, engage with your brick-and-mortar storefronts, your digital storefronts, your social channels, your on-domain communities, your customer service team, and so on. And those are just your owned and operated properties. Add to that the myriad third-party touch points that your customers regularly tap to engage with your brand indirectly, and that customer experience net you cast becomes even wider.

Now, you may not have access to third-party touch points, but what about the data already present with you (especially your call center data)?

What People Do Not Like about Call Centers?

We did a quick study on Twitter data to identify what people are saying about call centers on Twitter and how the themes and topics are related to one another. What we discovered was that, apart from product issues, call centers were a major source for customer dissatisfaction.

In the above graph,

• The size of the bubble denotes volume for the topic
• Curved lines denote a relationship between topics
• The thicker the curved line, stronger is the connection
• Bubbles have been color coded for simpler understanding and grouping purposes
• Issues related to products have not been considered

As you can see, customer service teams seem to be a major contributor for customer dissatisfaction. And your call centers should be the epicenter of the customer experience revolution as far as the processes are concerned. At call centers, customers are proactively providing valuable information free of cost. This valuable source of insight could be used to improve the process and increase sales—but most importantly it can be used to identify pain points for a seamless customer experience.

How Do You Transform Customer Experience?

1. Organize around customers: To deliver an exceptional customer experience, rethink how your business addresses it. Marketing plays a part, but true customer experience management means organizing your entire company around the customers by using the right processes and the right technology.
2. Deploy text analytics to mine unstructured CX data: As several studies show, customers prefer to call the customer care when their issues remain unresolved on other channels. The call center agents create their notes on the interaction after each call. These notes hold the key to uncovering the underlying customer experience issues. Using advanced text analytics technology will help you extract the rich customer experience insights hidden in these post-call agent notes.
3. Let the insights be real time and be available: We live in an era of extreme customer expectations. A real-time view of the insights which can be accessed easily is an important part of the process of meeting customer expectations.

So it’s critical that your frontline agents, support, and POS systems are in lockstep with your enterprise-wide CRM systems to ensure that information and insights can both travel faster and be accessible anytime, anywhere across your organization.

By aligning your systems around customer experience and deploying text analytics to understand what the customer really wants, you can make managing a single streamlined and consistent customer experience across multiple touch points exponentially easier.