Customer Experience Management

Ah, the Holy Grail:  Delivering Customer Satisfaction while meeting cost and business expectations. This is the primary problem faced by most organizations – the key to competitive advantage and profitability – the yellow brick road.  And while there was only one road to Oz, the different approaches marketed and sold to solve this problem are far too numerous to cover in any detail.  From process consulting to outsourcing operations, from operational audits to new productivity metrics and analysis, there is a grab-bag of solutions promising to reduce costs, improve operational efficiency, and deliver enhanced customer satisfaction.

 

The CRM industry was built around these promises and is now at a complete standstill.  Industry consultant David Raab says, “Customer relationship management has now reached the awkward stage in its adoption cycle.  The concept and its benefits are widely accepted, but few complete implementations are in place.”

 

So many companies are failing to see any return on their investments to improve contact center efficiencies and enhance customer satisfaction because the approaches they are using do not link the two in any manner that yields measurable results.

This article will address the Holy Grail noted above, “Optimizing the Contact Center to Meet Both Customer and Enterprise Requirements” in a way that is easy to understand – and we’ll include what we strongly believe are the steps necessary to march there directly.

Organizations that endure the test of time sell quality products and services to loyal and satisfied customers for less than the cost of delivery and support.  It’s that simple.

 

Resources are spent in two primary ways.  They are spent on reducing costs of delivery and support to, and on increasing revenue from customers.  There is only one thing that is common about this math, the customer. 

This is why, in business, who knows best?  Who comes first?  Who must always be most important?  Our customers are the only reason we are in business.  Yet, it is amazing how little we really know about our customers and how we affect their behavior.  It is critical to understand that, in order to get to customers to spend money on our products and services, we must first understand their purchasing desires, wants, and needs. 

 

Executive and management teams spend hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in efforts to better understand what their customers want, what they are willing to spend money on, and how their business is being perceived. 

 

Organizations building company cultures around Customer Satisfaction and Customer Loyalty programs are more common. Customer Satisfaction is declared priority number one, and he who makes the customer most satisfied, will undoubtedly have loyal customers and the most successful business.  While this is true, very few organizations can truly claim they’ve been successful in creating a measurable customer-centric company culture.  There is a lot of talk – but little content.

 

A lot of resources are spent on new technology, internal programs and organizations to chase after customer data.  There is big business for professional consultants engaged in collecting, analyzing, and reporting on customer satisfaction, market research, product, and services information.  All this resource expenditure while the contact center spends the entire day, seven days a week interacting with the majority of

customers, at the customer’s request. 

 

Undoubtedly, the contact center is the most powerful customer transaction point in an organization.  It is the key point of interaction for identifying problems, influencing customers, and creating satisfaction and loyalty.  This point of customer contact is also the greatest way to collect product, service, and other critical customer information.

 

The Contact Center today is under management pressure and continual scrutiny to reduce operating costs while maintaining efficiency, productivity, and quality of service.  There is no doubt that the Contact Center cost structure is largely driven by agent-related costs.  These costs are used for recruiting, employing, training, monitoring, and managing agents.  According to a recent Datamonitor report, agent turnover in North America in 2001 increased to 94 percent. 

 

To measure agent productivity, a plethora of statistical call data, gap analysis, and accepted measures of efficiency are used.  In fact, in many cases, there is much, too much data and unnecessary analysis.  The premise for all this analysis and data is that the better the productivity, the less required resources.  Organizations are using productivity metrics like the number of calls answered and average call times to reward and recognize agents - not the critical measures of customer satisfaction and quality of service.  Little if any metrics accurately track the customer’s perception of the transaction or their sense of satisfaction.

 

It is critical to understand that the most important key to productivity is customer perception and quality of service.  Keep in mind that customer satisfaction and loyalty are the key drivers to increase revenue.  The productivity pressure on agents in most contact centers is tremendous – and comes at a cost well beyond operational expense.  It is easy to forget about the customer and how they are affected in a contact center that focuses primarily on call data and productivity statistics.   

 

The Contact Center is the primary transaction point where customers build their perceptions. This creates an organizational paradox; how do you improve customer perceptions while reducing costs. Popular thinking today leans towards pushing customers away from expensive agent-based transactions and increasing the number of automated IVR, web, or other less-expensive channel transactions. 

But the fact remains that person-to-person communications are most beneficial to customer relationships. Customers prefer telephone based support with a live agent by an overwhelming majority – and that remains the primary form of contact for most support organizations averaging more than 60%[1].  In many organizations and industries, live agents still handle well over 80% of customer contact.   It is human nature to want to interact with another human.

 

An ideal system would combine agent and team productivity metrics directly with customer feedback regarding call satisfaction.  It would include ways for agents and managers to learn, and allow other parts of the organization to better understand their customers.  It would be in the context of the call and would be collected at the time of the transaction so as to capture critical information requiring company action or reaction – positive or negative. 

 

An ideal system would work seamlessly with existing processes and technologies without requiring significant change to the way things are done today.  An ideal system would take advantage of the customer contact point to collect other critical product and service data and make relevant information available to executives, marketing, sales, and general management.  A system like that would save hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars, time, and other resources in the contact center and across the organization.

 

Paul Greenberg, executive vice president of LiveWire Inc., talked about customer empowerment in CRM at that Speed of Light:  Capturing and Keeping Customers in Internet Real Time (McGraw-Hill, 2001):  “What is empowering is not forcing customers to do anything they don’t want.  Let the customers tell you what they care about.”  The ideal approach to bridging the contact center and the enterprise is letting the customer tell you what they interested in and not interested in, what kind of information they want, what the desired level of service is, and what they want to receive. 

 

Given an simple and convenient way to do so, customers will tell us what they want and what they care about.  According to a 2001 survey sponsored by Teradata, a division of NCR, 80% of Americans are willing to share their perceptions and personal information with companies if it means getting more personal service.

 

Giving the customer the opportunity to provide feedback and participate in transactions benefits the company and the customer.  The company learns an array of valuable information that can be immediately acted upon to improve the cost of delivery and support as well as ways to increase revenue.  The customer gets the opportunity to participate in transactions by providing valuable feedback and information.  This is a critical step in achieving not only customer satisfaction, but also loyalty.

Imagine how you might feel, as a customer, if your personal feedback regarding how satisfied you were with the transaction that just occurred was requested immediately after the transaction was completed.  It you had a positive experience, you could acknowledge the quality of service.  If the experience was negative, you would have the opportunity to express your concerns and dissatisfaction.  If the transaction was completely benign, you would still receive the message that your opinion and feedback matters.  In any case, even if you choose not to participate, you would have an increased sense of involvement.  It is a positive and natural process. 

 

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