Contact Center Quality Management Featured Article

Excellent customer service is very high on consumers’ “wish lists” when it comes to choosing a company to do business with. While price and value figure high, there is some evidence that customers are willing to pay a little more for fast, easy and effective customer support. There is no doubt that today’s customers are certainly willing to ditch a company in a heartbeat due to a bad customer service experience. Even if the customer remains after a lousy experience, it will take a company about a dozen good experiences to “erase” the bad one. With social media playing such a large, influential part in how potential customers choose new companies, it’s more critical than ever that companies get their support ducks in a row. Unfortunately, too many companies would appear to be floundering in this department.

A recent study conducted by customer support solutions provider Pega, in conjunction with research firm Forrester (News - Alert), found that organizations with older contact center technology are finding it more difficult to deliver ‘quality’, the type of fast, integrated and omnichannel service that customers expect today. The research conclusions were drawn from a survey of 225 global contact center decision-makers. Only 21 percent of survey respondents believed their organization is consistently delivering excellent customer support across multiple channels. (Consider that contact center executives are far more likely to overestimate the quality of their customer support, and the data becomes even scarier.) The study also found that half of all respondents have a current system that is at least five years old, and 28 percent of those are more than seven years old. This guarantees that the contact centers are not optimized to offer a multichannel experience that includes mobile and social media support.

There may be a strong disconnect between the executive layers of companies and the contact center management, observed Nathan Eddy writing for eWeek. Contact center managers, after all, spend their days on the front line listening to customer anger and frustrations. At the top of the organization, the only drive may be cost-cutting. If the executive layer isn’t hearing the customer complaints, they become “out of sight, out of mind,” and cuts to customer support budgets may seem like a good idea. Evidence shows that it’s most certainly not.

"Organizations struggling with older desktop technology can't innovate to offer differentiated experiences to keep customers loyal to their brand," according to the study’s authors. "With the increasing popularity of self-service and mobile channels, this inflexibility threatens their brand and their bottom line."

While your organization may be trying to save money, doing so at a customer’s expense is a huge mistake. Customer are more fickle and less loyal than at any time in history, and e-commerce and a sluggish economy (not to mention consumer rating apps) make it easy for customers to switch. Ensure you’re providing your contact center with a robust, omnichannel platform that allows them to make customer support fast and easy, both for the agent and for the customer.