As content curator and contributor to the Contact Center Solutions Community, part of my function is to review information and insights from around the Web and illuminate them to our readers. In this regard, I would like to recommend an insightful posting from IT-Online titled, “How to differentiate customer experience.”
I won’t spoil all of the insights from an interesting interview done with Sandra Galer, consulting executive for contact centers and customer service for Merchants, South Africa’s oldest and largest business process outsourcer, except to refer to a quote at the start, which was spot on. In talking about how thanks to technology adoption by the masses customer interactions are no longer confined to the telephone, they increasingly are omni-channel, i.e., involve email, text, chat and social media. The point Galer makes is that regardless of channel, at the end of the day the ability for an organization to provide customers with a compelling experience still resides in the hands of an experienced agent with access to the right tools. However, she notes:
“This means that there is now a gap between the agents you used to recruit for their verbal and telephonic skills and the new needs of the customer…Clearly, your ability to deliver exceptional customer service is compromised. Equally clearly, your approach to both staffing and measurement of operational activities has to change significantly.”
The point as I said is right on the mark, as has been confirmed to me through conversations not only with vendors in the contact center solutions community, but with their customers.
In fact, there is an equation I have referenced in previous postings that needs repeating:
People + Products and Services+ Processes = Performance
This is the simple formula for contact center success in delivering the differentiated value that goes to those who provide superior customer experiences. But, as Galer details in the interview it is devilishly difficult to execute.
The challenges are numerous. You need to hire the right people, train them correctly, put them in a work environment (physical) and give them the right tools and incentives. You also have to make sure that you have the visibility you need to create the metrics that are necessary to measure agent productivity as well as the efficiency and effectiveness of the channels and other tools they use. Having a great screwdriver is useless if your primary activity is driving nails.
The gap Gale is highlighting is real, and as many market studies have shown in the last few years, growing. There has been a gap between agent expertise and knowledge just when it comes to interacting over the phone, and this gap has become exacerbated by the requirement for omni-channel interactions.
What all of this boils down to is that part of the ongoing transformation of contact centers has to be more concentration on the metrics used for determining performance. This means human performance but in the context of how the nature of interactions are changing as we move away from heavy reliance on the phone.
The good news is there are some interesting new tools out there from a variety of vendors to address precisely both workforce management and omni-channel measurement challenges. Maybe the better news is there is ample opportunity for such solutions given where most organizations are, and where the speed of change in customer tastes is dictating where they need to be, sooner rather than later would be smart.