With so much discussion in the contact center solutions industry relating to technology, I was struck by a recent observation by a customer service agent I interacted with in planning a future vacation. They explained that, “We take our roles as the company’s brand ambassadors very seriously. It is how we hope to assure every customer experience is a great one.”
It seems to me that this is a very important, and almost profound, statement even in its simplicity. It is one that is certainly worth considering as a new year gets into full swing.
One of the things catching my attention in the past several months has been mounting criticism from various industry observers. What they have been saying is that despite increased expenditures in words and money on contact center technologies and improved metrics to, “improve the customer experience,” it seems like the reality of customer service as opposed to metrics to most consumers is getting worse.
In fact, animosity has been expressed not just on the inbound side of things where frustration has been growing over: lack of responses to email, FAQs that don’t answer frequently asked questions, long holding times where they won’t reveal how long, poorly trained agents with attitudes, and an inability to actually talk with anyone about anything at most tech companies which are some of the pet peeves I see most often. Animosity also abounds, for reasons not needing long recitation, on the outbound side. Here nuisance calls persist, and multi-channel contact has become “creepy” as solicitations clearly using some type of information sharing about our online behavior/user profile are proliferating like desert flowers after a soaking rain. This has increased rage and consumer retribution in the form of bad online reviews. It is costing businesses real business.
If perception is reality, despite all of the hard benefits technology has to offer, what is going on? How can it change?
As a prolog, let me first acknowledge that I say this as a huge proponent of virtually all of the technology innovations going on in the contact center solutions industry. In fact, I think we literally on the bottom of the on-ramp of the learning curve on the best uses of social media (inbound and outbound) for improving the customer experience.
I am excited, for example, to see what this year will bring in the areas of cloud functionality, even better speech analytics, improved supervisor tools, mobility friendliness, and for lack of a better term “context mediation,” to name just a few.
Brand Stewardship =Customer Experience =TRUST
The above sub-headline may seem like a simplification of a complex set of issues but in reality it is about changing a mindset. It is meant to be more guideline than rule. It is about culture as much as it is about technology.
It is meant to create a different perception of not just customer-facing individuals but across all of those folks that the newly hired (fast growing C-level position globally) Chief Customer Experience Officer (CCEO) is supposed to get to work together seamlessly and effectively in the name of the customer.
For several years, the focus of contact center investment/transformation has been about doing more with less. It has been about improving metrics relating to holding times and times to resolution, and successful resolutions at that. With the advent of “big data” and sophisticated analytics driving an appreciation at the C-level of a need for “actionable insights,” technology has made the contact center be perceived by upper management, as others have observed, as the “Front door of the supply chain.” It is where customers learn about the status of their issues and enterprises adjust to problems in broad terms that fall into the category of “fulfillment” issues. The focus has been reactive on the inbound side and it time to be more proactive.
This has all been good for cutting costs and making workflow more efficient. It has been problematic in moving empowering agents to move the customer satisfaction bar upward in many instance in terms of generating or sustaining customer loyalty, or in obtaining permission to sell or upsell. It is why skeptics are on the war path.
Let’s start with the changing the mindset of everyone in the enterprise about the role of the contact center. It is not just the front door to the supply chain.
Back in the days when I was a freelance web content producer for some of the most prestigious law firms in the U.S., I used to tell the attorneys that their website was not an address, but was somebody’s destination. It was the way in which more people were likely to experience their brand in one week, than would actually physically visit their offices in a year or more. It meant in short that the website needed to be compelling on first visit, contain absolutely current content on all fronts, be easy to navigate and provide customers actionable insights. It also needed to include a click-to-call capability where a knowledgeable person answered the phone, and the requirement that emails were responded to promptly.
When it comes to the multi-channel contact center the same advice is true regardless of industry vertical you may occupy. If you and everyone in your organization do not realize that you web address, email contact information and phone numbers are somebody’s destination, i.e., they have arrived there with intent, you have already lost the battle. By the way, that holds true for outbound campaigns since they are designed to generate a return interaction.
People don’t contact organizations randomly. They always do so with some type of intent. The goal of all of the technology at the backend as well as the front end has to be focused on anticipating intent and then on how best to respond. It sounds easy, but of course it is not. What it also means is that calling something a “touch point” desensitizes what is an emotional/intentional activity.
For the reasons above the equation should resonate. Everyone in the organization can be rallied around the notion that the way customers, and also all entities and stakeholders in your ecosystem, experience your brand. It is a concrete idea rather than something amorphous like “customer experience.” Plus, intuitively we all know that most if not all of our transactions are based on some level of trust in who is on the other side of the table. It is why reputation management is one of the fastest growing job categories around the world. The goal is that trust then gets reinforced via human interactions as well as automated interactions that bolster the brand.
There is an old saying that many companies use as a tagline in one way or another. It goes something like, “We need to earn the right to do business with you every day.” In the all ways.always.com world in which we live this is no longer about days. It is about individual transactions in real-time. After all, trust is hard to gain, easily lost and extremely difficult to regain. We all know the impact of bad reviews. The wisdom of the crowd has never been a bigger force in business, and things can go viral in minutes when it used to take days or weeks.
As noted, the proof case for the equation is the growth of reputation management. Firms are investing big time to listen to social media to remediate bad impressions, and also to use the Internet megaphone to amplify good ones. The latter unfortunately has its dark side which makes hearing voices that can be trusted a challenge and has called into question not the wisdom of the crowd, but its identity.
There is a certain irony to all of this in that at its foundation the customer experience is nothing more complex than the centuries’ old saying, “Do unto others as you would like them to do unto you.” What executives sometimes fail to realize, is that what really has been the most jarring reality of the Internet Age is not that they have better information about customers, but that customers in turn have better information about them, instant access to competitors, and a place and absolute willingness to vent.
Recently, there was uproar over research that showed that companies that had less than stellar reputations for customer service did not see it reflected in their stock price or business. The problem with the analysis was that stock price as a measure of long-term sustainability as measured against customer satisfaction is not necessarily a reasonable metric in the Internet Age. Indeed, we may find out with a few more data breaches that are mishandled, like the one that hit Target (News - Alert) recently, just how important trust and proper brand stewardship really are. My suspicion is that there will be a strong correlation between how companies use their contact center and web interaction capabilities in crises and their stock performance.
In short, while it may be a chicken and egg issue of whether the customer experience is part of brand stewardship or brand stewardship (broadly defined) is part of the customer experience, it is about whether your brand can be trusted. This means the first time, and every time.
One of the most interesting developments in the last few years has been the fact that despite the contact center being the front lines for customer interactions, it has been marketing who increasing controls the social media purse strings. It is in the contact center where companies hear the real “voice of the customer.” In fact, the culprit for why customers feel customer service is not improving I believe is because enterprises do not yet get the distinction between listening and hearing.
This is not semantics. It is in hearing where there is an opportunity to be both proactive as well as reactive. And, if companies really want to make great investments in technology it needs to be on the hearing end of things.
Finally, I come back to the cultural issues involved in helping move the customer satisfaction needle in the right direction.
If there is not unanimous buy-in on all levels of an organization about making the customer experience job #1, the messaging internally that creates that buy-in is non-trivial. Everyone understands implicitly and explicitly that if the brand cannot be trusted people will look and or go elsewhere. It is fine to tell the outside world that you are customer-centric in everything you do, but when it comes to getting results internally make it about the brand. Every employee and not just contact center ones need to understand that they are brand ambassadors. The equation will pay off.
Edited by
Stefania Viscusi