How Customer Journey Mapping Improves Call Center Customer Experience

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• Do they wait on hold for 10 minutes, listening to Muzak or outdated Covid-related recordings, before they reach an agent?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.

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