This is the age of the customer! The more pervasive the Web becomes, the more informed is your customer. The asymmetric information advantage that businesses have traditionally relied on to acquire and retain customers is gone. The Internet and global competition have virtually eliminated all search costs and barriers to switching.
So, what do most customers want? It’s not that they have become unreasonable all of a sudden; they are simply more aware of their choices and less tolerant of poor service. They want easy and multiple ways of finding information, buying products, and getting support. They need both an online presence that is available 24x7 and the option to call or visit. They would like to receive quick, consistent, accurate service through all these interaction channels in a way that makes them come back for more. They want you to “recognize” them at every contact point—they hate being the “glue” that repeatedly provides context for the interaction. And, they’d like you to tell them how they can get more value out of products they’ve bought, how to troubleshoot, and even what else they could buy!
What makes this shift in power from business to customers particularly hard to maneuver for you, the contact center executive? It’s the need to do more with less—you have to meet increasing customer expectations in a time of shrinking budgets and resources. To provide better service at lower costs, contact center executives often resort to the traditional option of driving agents harder. In most such cases, agent attrition goes up and customer experience suffers due to inexperienced or unhappy agents, resulting in customer defections and higher customer retention costs.
Next practices
>>> Think like your customers: This is the first simple, and often overlooked, step to creating a customer-centered service organization. Think like your customers and design service processes and scenarios from their perspective.
What would make it easy for your customers to do business with you? What kind of help do they need in various phases of the customer life cycle? What would be “excellent service” in each interaction scenario? An easy way to find out is to just ask your customers!
One of our clients, a leading financial services institution, embarked on a customer service initiative by first surveying customers. When it realized customers wanted interaction choice more than anything else, the company implemented a customer interaction hub (CIH) to power a customer portal with a range of options for conducting financial transactions online. The portal has delivered tremendous improvement in customer experience and cost efficiencies, reducing the need for agent-assisted service (the same number of agents now handle twice the number of customers).
>>> Visualize an evolving multichannel customer interaction hub: Next, put together a road map for transforming your contact center and other customer-facing organizations in the light of changing customer expectations. A modular, multichannel CIH—with shared knowledge, interaction data, and service processes across channels—is the only cost effective way to providing the choice and service experience that customers expect today. Map out the priority for offering new interaction options (web self-service, email response automation, or web chat and cobrowsing) based on what your customers want, what your contact center objectives and overall business strategy are, and what your competitors offer. Any such road map should also incorporate measuring and marketing the strategic and operational business benefits to senior management (for example, revenue
impact, cost savings, customer satisfaction, contact center productivity, and first-contact resolution) that can be assessed before and after the initiatives.
