The contact center is often overlooked,
yet it is a critical component of any organization’s service and experience architecture. It’s within the walls of this hive of activity that people, processes and technology come together to connect with customers one-on-one. Organizations spend millions for the same privilege during the marketing journey.
Traditionally, businesses have viewed the contact center through a short-term, cost-focused and technology-first lens. However, this approach falls short in driving long-term results. Rather, it is crucial to prioritize the service interaction moment when striving to achieve sustainable value. Organizations should aim to craft customer experiences that ultimately benefit both their top and bottom lines.
Rather than thinking with a transactional, cost-focused mindset, it’s time to develop a relationship-first mindset. It’s not enough to offer a decent customer interaction. Organizations must deliver a customer experience that maximizes collective value. The goal should be to balance an optimal customer experience with optimal cost.
Organizations can achieve this by earning customers’ trust and making it easy to interact with them. In many industries, customer experience is the last point of differentiation businesses can offer to customers in an increasingly crowded world clamoring for people’s attention. It’s prudent for businesses to transform the contact center encounter and elevate it to its rightful place: the heart of exceptional experience.
Throughout the journey, keep the customer at the forefront by offering seamless services that bring together people, process and technology to maximize collective value.
A layer of lunacy in the customer experience
Many customers dread the need to contact an organization. Once they navigate the maze of phone menus, they face a level of redundancy, such as typing in their date of birth, ZIP code and other details, only to have to repeat the same information to a human seconds later. Perhaps a “slow system” forces continual, contrived apologies from the other side of the line. Or, maybe the customer went the chat route, only to have the conversation dropped midway or finding out that they have to call anyway. It’s exhausting and does no one any favors.
Ironically, in the pursuit of pure short-term “bottom dollar” cost optimization, the long-term costs are high. Driven to despair, the even-tempered customer turns into the petulant, long-suffering customer (for whom seconds feel like hours). Ditching any modicum of sophistication, the crabby customer storms onto social media, transforming a conversation between two into a public situation for millions to opine on. Or, they simply leave for greener pastures, telling their friends to avoid doing business with you at any cost.
Not surprisingly, this interaction makes a mockery of what an exceptional experience should be. It becomes an absurd reminder of the madness that stalks the customer at every turn of their contact journey, threatening to diminish their experience from the first moment of their interaction until the last.
The Forrester Wave™: Customer Experience Strategy Consulting Practices, Q4 2022
Getting lost Behind
The gap between the average customer interaction and executive decision-making is significant. Jeff Bezos famously called the Amazon Contact Center during a meeting of thirty Amazon executives to test one leader’s assertion that Amazon could answer each call in less than a minute. When four-and-a-half minutes ticked by, Bezos was furious.
While a boardroom intervention can be a powerful case for change, most executives would prefer to be ahead of any corporate escalation. A central purpose of the contact center is to create a series of intimate moments where you have an opportunity to build trust, develop a relationship and impress and delight a customer. But the daily grind of needing to maintain what lies “behind the curtain,” such as process decisions, employee attrition and vendor conversations, all vie for executives’ attention. It’s easy to forget what it’s all about.
These interactions cannot be an afterthought. They must be intelligently designed and informed and enabled by data. Each decision you make affects that moment. Each moment to interact with a customer is a critical touchpoint for the overall brand in its quest to retain the customer and optimize their experience A few bad moments—even just one—and you might see revenue walk away.
We consider contact center interactions as conversational moments. Yet, the reality is that each service moment is typically fraught with inefficiency. So, what can you do?
A purpose-driven contact center
If solving customers’ problems and enhancing their experience is top of mind, businesses should make the contact center the customer’s playground by rethinking their spending priorities and growth strategies. The contact center experience is one that needs to be curated and cherished. Businesses must understand what supports those moments that oppose the customer, derailing their experience. As you embark on your organization’s contact center transformation, we offer three steps to craft a spot-on contact center transformation. In the past, cost considerations won, and customer concerns lost. For the future, collective value maximization will win.
1)Dissect the anatomy of each service moment
Start with the end in mind. Build an anatomy of each moment so that you understand what a typical interaction looks like. Examine the anatomy and identify the optimal way to handle a contact to maximize the efficiency and value of the experience. Use that as your guidebook to inform your people, processes, and technology. Look for opportunities to create moments that truly matter.
2)Build collective value
Collective value refers to a service that maximizes your investment in the contact center, while also enhancing both the customer and employee experience. Every customer is valuable, but expectations may vary by segment. Employees must feel valued and empowered to serve customers in the right way. Their experience is closely linked to customer satisfaction.
Deploy your limited resources in a manner that maximizes your customer service by examining the balance between upfront investments, cost per service and employee and customer satisfaction.
3)Create an experience hub
We’re redefining contact centers as experience hubs. An experience hub is an enterprise core that manages all service interactions and customer contacts across multiple channels. The experience hub bends the typical oscillating contact center ROI curve upward by enabling sustainable change at scale. This involves examining each service interaction to curate moments that are technology-enabled and operationally aligned, which prioritize customer and employee experiences.
