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3 seven Customer experience from the contact center standpoint José Ignacio Ruiz

4 The contact center: more than a cost center Call upon call, s and letters, service level and customer care, missed calls, repeat calls, claims, complaints, processes and systems, applications, dimensioning, coding, prerecorded scripts, scorecards and templates, induction training and skills upgrading, ring times, hold times, after-call times, notifications, audits, agents, supervisors and coordinators. The terminology associated with the day-to-day work of a contact center is virtually endless. But is this all a contact center is about? This is the outlook that leads many companies to regard their contact center as a cost center, rather than a profit center. But, although all these terms partake in the definition of a contact center, in reality it is something more than this. A contact center is a major channel for customer service and customer relationships. It is a key source of information and a powerful lever to create and manage our customers experience. From this standpoint, we could even come to view our contact center as a competitive advantage in its own right: an element giving us an edge over our competitors. Yet we must first ask ourselves, is customer experience a suitable strategic option for our business? To answer this question we would do well to give thought to at least the following two issues. We must bear in mind that customer experience is a means, not an end in itself. Customer experience is a strategic positioning that may enable us to stand out from the crowd and, leveraging this edge, to earn higher profits. This point needs 66

5 to be made, because customer experience is sometimes discussed from an overly theoretical, romanticized and almost mystical perspective. This may be a corollary of the intrinsic intangibility and subjective quality of experience. But customer experience must be brought down from the firmament of ideas and implemented in concrete actions. And these actions must be measured in terms of earnings, even in the awareness that this strategic bid requires investment and the results are not always visible in the short term. Moreover, we must realize that the responsibility for customer experience does not rest with a single company area, team or person. The responsibility concerns the entire organization, and must take shape within the organization in three dimensions. We might visualize this concept as in 3-D: Vertical dimension: Company management must send a clear message to the whole organization that customer experience is being adopted as a strategic positioning. The message must accordingly find its reflection in the company s mission statement and vision, in its corporate culture, and in the emergence of an organizational structure oriented to the customer and improving customer experience. The necessary resources must be assigned. Horizontal dimension: As we said earlier, customer experience is not the exclusive preserve of a single person or department. All company areas must be co-responsible, even those not in direct contact with the customer. In this dimension, it is essential to specify and align objectives, processes and communications and to bring all business areas into full coordination. Any failure of alignment will impair customer experience and, therefore, our business. Time dimension: Improving customer experience requires time. We must therefore follow a strategic plan that makes a good fit with our company s possibilities and can be implemented phase by phase. We should not regard customer experience as a sprint race; it is a marathon, and we need to achieve our milestones gradually and pace ourselves. These three dimensions should lead us to create a context in which the entire organization is sensitive to the customer s needs, and adopts an attitude that is inquisitive about and willing to improve customer experience. It should be a context in which every employee should ask him or herself What can I do to improve customer experience? 67

6 It s about people, not resources. The topic of customer experience inevitably requires us to consider the importance of the employee s role. We already know that employees are fundamental in all business sectors, but this truth is all the more powerful in service businesses because of employees direct relationship with customers. We should take on board that customer experience is subject to employee experience, and for this reason we must consider and measure employee experience. Running an experience-oriented contact center requires recruiting experienceoriented professionals, and to achieve this we must specify and implement suitable policies for selection, training, motivation, recognition and pay. What is the best form of organization for my contact center? In-house or external staff? Offshore or inshore? There is no single correct answer. Making a decision requires considering several issues. Questions we should ask ourselves include: Does my company have the necessary technology and know-how to undertake the management of a contact center? What are my goals? What will be the role of customer experience? Should I treat all my customers in the same way? What is our budget? These questions will provide us with the insight that the best solution arises from the specific situation of each company and its own objectives. Whichever model we finally choose, we must recall that one of the keys to success is to work in partnership with the people or suppliers managing the contact center from day to day. Failure to do so will adversely affect our customers and therefore ourselves. Systems, processes and times It would be pointless to speak of customer experience if we were unable to assure the factors that underpin the health of the product or service in question. In the contact center framework, these three aspects must be firmly in place: Systems: This point may seem obvious, but it is important to grasp that systems must be customer-oriented; it is not customers who need to be system-oriented. Remember that the time an operator takes to search and interpret relevant information, or manage an incident or coding event, is time taken away from customer care. We need fast, reliable systems, intuitive and integrated ( one-stop shop ) 68

7 applications, and minimal management and coding steps; and we must then ensure that the information handled by the systems can be usefully exploited. We must also have in place a systems department to provide maintenance and promptly troubleshoot any issue that may arise at the contact center. Processes: One of the main shortfalls adversely affecting customer experience in the contact center context is any lack of clear management processes to be followed by operators. When this happens, customers are subjected to long waiting times, procedures are carried out incorrectly, and mistaken information is provided. So it is of the essence to keep in place a framework of clear, intuitive, readily checkable and updated processes. In the field of customer experience, all processes should start and end with the customer. Times: We have seen that systems and processes alike give rise to a given time during which the customer must wait for the contact center to resolve his or her query or problem. We must therefore monitor waiting times, processing times, and issue resolution times; and we must make sure that we honor any commitment made to the customer. Systems, processes and times should be viewed as a set of interrelated variables, and we must always consider the implications that each of them has for the other two. Other key aspects involved in improving customer experience We have so far looked at the potentially strategic role of the contact center and the importance of employees, systems, processes and times in the creation and management of experiences. To wrap up, I would like to provide an overview of at least 10 key aspects that may help improve customer experience with a contact center: Identification: It is a common mistake to assume that you know what the customer thinks or needs. This mistake can prompt us to expend effort and resources to no purpose. We might be wrongfooted because of our recollection of personal experiences, the department s own interests, the use of unsuitable research methods or a mistaken interpretation of results. It is important to identify the customer s key 69

8 moments in terms of experience, and to achieve this we need to use a suitable research methodology. Planning ahead: The day-to-day work of a contact center is made up of both internal and external issues that we should try to plan ahead for. Examples include: Launching a new product or service, having available an operating procedure in the face of potential problems, and accurately estimating call volume and making sure staff size is appropriate to deal with it. Failure to plan properly may prevent us from suitably responding to the customer, which of course adversely affects his or her experience. Listening: We need to develop an attitude of listening - not only to the customer, but also to all people or groups within the organization in direct contact with customers, including stakeholders. Communication must be fluid and ongoing, and should enable us to improve or change any points at which customers are dissatisfied with our products or services. Listening also means equipping ourselves with the necessary tools to collect, measure and process what customers tell us. Response: It is not always feasible to provide an immediate solution to a customer s query, complaint or problem. A knowledge gap, the need to make checks or the time inevitably required to troubleshoot a problem are some of the reasons for this. However, there are certain intrinsic elements in any response that directly impact customer experience and which we can work on immediately. Answering politely, returning calls, properly and timely reporting on the progress of the issue being resolved, and apologizing when necessary are just a few examples. Multi-channel operation: This point is addressed in greater depth in another chapter of this e-book. I nonetheless wish to underline the importance of having in place a channels strategy embracing the contact center. The channels conventionally implemented by a contact center include: telephone, text message, , online chat service, fax or letter. However, customers can relate with the company via points of sale and social networks. Multichannel integration should be a way not only of obtaining information from customers but also of implementing cross-channel strategies for relationship 70

9 building, customer care and sales. This is one of the key challenges faced by companies today, in response to increasing demand by customers; this aspect may help improve customer experience with a given brand. Speed of execution: We constantly face new product and service launches, new offers, maneuvering by the competition, and new customer needs. To adopt the terminology of the sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, ours is a liquid reality to which the contact center must adapt. Adapting requires that the contact center have the flexibility and procedures to rapidly implement any necessary changes: scripts, codings, processes, dimensioning, training, etc. Flexibility: The need for control may prompt us to specify procedures for each and every one of the cases that a contact center operator might encounter. While useful in some ways, this approach may undermine the operator s flexibility in providing the customer with a solution. We need to give operators room to make their own decisions - empowerment - in problem solving and compensation procedures. This means taking a controlled risk that directly influences both the customer s and the operator s experience. Consultancy: The consultancy concept has been devalued by a lack of knowledge of customers needs and cross- and up-selling actions unrelated to the customer s profile and moment. Contact centers should be imbued with the essence of consultancy, while bearing in mind that it helps improve customer experience by building relationships. It nurtures trust, enhances personalization, and facilitates sales. Every contact with a customer is an opportunity to get to know them better and confirm that the product or service under contract with us is the one best suited to their needs. Follow-up: Following up, learning and improving are three principles we must never forget. We should put in place the necessary control mechanisms and related processes to detect, identify, resolve and eliminate the most widespread mistakes arising at a contact center. Innovation: The edge that a contact center provides is not the mere result of assuring that the service it offers is operationally healthy. A contact center can stand out from the competition by innovating. We must seek to exceed the customer s expectations via surprise and 71

10 originality. Innovation may take the form of changes in scripts, new consultancy approaches, cross-channel strategies, or in the way that the solution to an issue is handled, resolved and communicated. We have seen that customer experience may be a strategic option. This option has a major implementation lever in the contact center, because of its direct contact with customers and its ability to create and manage experience. The challenge now is to reflect on the potential that the contact center offers in this field, and to start thinking of it as what it really is: an opportunity for your business. 72

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