Genesys (News - Alert) has recently sponsored a white paper titled, “-Channel Customer Building a Great CrossExperience: How to Foster Intimacy and Create Value Using Self Service,” dealing with the fact that “as enterprises strive for greater customer intimacy through personalized service, customer based sales and proactive outreach, the value of the contact center increases.”

The paper describes an approach called “customer intimate contact centers.” Not only do they work differently, the paper said, “their organizational structure may be different because their focus is on customer intimacy. Depending on how customers are segmented, they may have specialized agent groups to work with specific customer segments, or agents as part of customer teams that include all customer lifecycle touchpoints, such as account management and sales.”

In what’s truly a good idea, “agents are empowered to resolve customer issues rather than hand off a problem. They are trained to look at the entirety of the customer relationship and use their judgment rather than make a convenient decision because it shortens their talk time.”

Contact handling is based on “customer centric, flexible business rules that ensure a customer is treated appropriately within the channel,” the paper says, adding that the concept is even spreading to ATMs, which are “getting face-lifts to become more customer centric and offer more personalized service.”

Of course the main focus of customer-intimate contact centers is that they’re “focused on customer needs,” the paper says. “Map out the ideal experience from the customer’s perspective. Where are there gaps? Gaps may be part of processes, training, tools, and data. Understand where the right types of data will improve the experience.”

Again, a fine suggestion they make is to “empower CSRs by providing them with guidelines but letting them use their judgment about a payment extension, rather than force them to adhere to strict and arbitrary rules.”