Companies may not specifically set New Year’s resolutions for themselves, but those with a vested interest in helping the company succeed certain do, even if it’s only mentally. For a significant portion of companies today, the driving goal for this year (and most years) is to improve the customer experience. There are simply too many studies that demonstrate that customers will quickly abandon any organization that doesn’t meet their expectations. If a company is going to succeed, excellence in the customer experience is critical.
The latest study to bear this out was based on a survey of contact center executives conducted by the Bethesda, Maryland-based conference company Consero Group. The survey found that nearly one in four (24 percent) of contact center executives identified improving the customer experience is the most important priority for the year. Unfortunately, it also found that only one in three of these individuals reporting having sufficient resources to do so. For this reason, 2016 may become “The Year of Fruitlessly Trying to Do More with Too Little.”
Writing about the Consero Group study for CMS Wire, Matthew Brodsky pointed out that technology was the greatest barrier to improving the customer experience. Most managers reported being unhappy with the solutions they already have in place – they may be outdated, or the solutions were a poor fit to begin with – and even data analytics aren’t helping them: 68 percent of respondents said they weren’t happy with the data they’re extracting. This is a dangerous situation, because it may be causing call center managers to take a perspective that expects customers to fit in with the contact center’s existing processes…not something customers are keen on today.
“Call center executives named phone and email as the top two ways to receive customer feedback (at 37 percent saying the former is the primary channel, and 22 percent saying the latter),” wrote Brodsky. “But the problem is that those channels are too limited for what today's customer's want.”
Customers want an omnichannel customer support experience by a wide variety of properly integrated channels. They want a personalized experience, and they expect it via phone, Web, self-service, mobile app or social media. They also expect their experiences to be low-effort on their part. Most companies’ call center solutions today simply aren’t up to the task.
Choosing a call center solution that easily handles the complexity of an omnichannel customer experience while at the same time reducing customer effort in a more complex environment isn’t going to be an easy task. It will require investment in the form of new, integrated call center solutions, and it will require a great relationship with a vendor to ensure the solution is being optimally used by employees. It is, however, a necessary task for companies hoping to win, wow and retain customers. Continued budget cuts and scarcity of IT and human resources isn’t going to get companies to where they need to be for 2016 and beyond.
Edited by Maurice Nagle