How to use real-time agent guidance to reduce customer churn

If customers need to call your contact center service team, there’s a strong chance something has gone wrong. And when that happens, the risk of losing that customer is high. In the 2023 ‘Consumer Insights about Customer Service’ survey conducted by OnePoll, 73% of consumers said they would abandon a brand after just one bad experience.  

The survey also found that consumers' number one preference for communicating with a company's customer service department is speaking with a live agent. This highlights how crucial it is to support agents in delivering exceptional experiences. Every interaction is a make-or-break situation that’s likely to influence whether a customer stays or leaves.

Real-time agent guidance software delivers a solution that supports agents through every interaction. It provides agents with in-the-moment support through dynamic prompts, intelligent workflows, and targeted coaching. Real-time agent guidance empowers agents to handle calls with confidence, no matter how challenging or complex they are, significantly reducing the risk of customer churn. With this technology, agents have the right information and support precisely when they need it most.

Prompt agent behaviors that build trust and drive satisfaction

For contact center leaders exploring how to reduce customer churn, real-time guidance is an important tool to consider. It can be used to reinforce the behaviors that correlate with customer satisfaction, including demonstrating empathy, offering proactive support, and advocating for the customer. And it doesn’t just provide valuable support for recently onboarded agents. Even experienced agents can find it challenging to consistently embody these behaviors, particularly when faced with complex or emotionally charged interactions. Real-time guidance reduces the pressure of difficult calls by providing helpful, relevant prompts so the agent can focus solely on the customer without distraction.

Real-time guidance helps agents effectively steer conversations to the right outcome by surfacing contextually relevant reminders throughout a conversation. These prompts can be driven by behaviors, processes and regulations. Prompts could include anything from suggesting the agent acknowledges the customer’s frustration to proactively offering the best next steps in a process.  

These prompts build trust and drive satisfaction, positively impacting how customers perceive your brand, helping them feel valued, understood, and supported.  

Increase first call resolution rates with dynamic workflows

The longer it takes to resolve a customer’s issue, the more likely they are to become unsatisfied and ultimately take their business elsewhere. Research from the book ‘The Effortless Experience’ reveals that 62% of customers need to contact a company more than once to resolve their issue. The research also found any customer service interaction is four times more likely to generate disloyalty than loyalty. These statistics highlight the need for contact centers to increase first-call resolution rates in an effort to reduce customer churn.  

With real-time agent guidance, you can build out workflows that include probing questions. Using these prompts, agents can identify, diagnose, and resolve the customer’s issue during the first call. The prompts are particularly helpful to less experienced agents who don’t instinctively know which questions to ask or what the next best action is. Instead of increasing the call length by searching through notes or escalating the call to a senior agent, they are prompted with the right step at exactly the right time, increasing the probability of first-call resolution.

Identify churn risk phrases  

If a customer is unhappy with a business, they may not state the exact words ‘I’m leaving,’ but there are subtle, linguistic cues that can indicate an increased churn risk. AI-driven, real-time analysis can detect these cues as they happen, instantly triggering prompts that can help the agent retain the customer.

The prompts could suggest specific de-escalation language to diffuse tension or present tailored save offers to help retain the customer. Prompts could also direct the agent to ask specific, clarifying questions to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying dissatisfaction. Real-time agent guidance equips the agent with timely information during high-stakes calls, turning a potentially negative situation into a positive one and safeguarding the customer relationship.  

When agents are empowered with immediate, relevant support, they become proactive protectors of the customer relationship, increasing satisfaction and loyalty.

Use churn insights to shape future guidance

Reducing customer churn isn’t only about the actions taken during a live customer interaction. Post-call conversation intelligence plays an important role by analyzing and surfacing insights from past interactions.  

Contact center leaders can analyze conversation data to identify recurring themes in cases where customers were at risk of, or did leave. They can use the data to uncover how to reduce customer churn by pinpointing the underlying root causes of churn risk, and successful recovery techniques used by agents that can be built into the workflows and prompts.

Steve Trier, Creovai’s CCO, explains that conversation intelligence could reveal that a particular save offer is highly effective or certain language patterns tend to escalate rather than de-escalate customer tension. These insights can be integrated into the real-time agent guidance system, informing and refining scripts, prompts, coaching, and workflows. This constant feedback loop means agent guidance becomes increasingly intelligent and more precisely tailored to specific customer needs.

Real-time agent guidance reduces customer churn

Every single interaction a customer has with your contact center has the potential to strengthen or destroy their relationship with your brand. Real-time agent guidance helps you proactively plan for and influence the outcome in your favor. Agents are empowered to resolve customer issues during the first contact and take action when early warning signs of customer churn are triggered. Insights from past interactions are leveraged to shape future guidance, with the platform becoming an engine that drives continuous improvement and reduces the risk of customer churn. Real-time agent guidance helps businesses build stronger, more resilient customer relationships for the long term and sets agents up for success in every interaction.

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