Call Recording Featured Article

Is the goal of offering a great customer experience only something for marketing to worry about? If marketing was the only department inconvenienced by bad customer service, that might be the case. But poor customer experiences lead to a drop in sales, a flagging of the brand’s reputation and more work to recover for everyone. In other words, lousy customer support is the entire organization’s problem. So why shouldn’t it be the entire organization’s responsibility?

A great customer experience (CX) comes from all departments. It not only comes from marketing and the contact center but also accounting (in case of billing errors or other problems), shipping and warehousing, operations and purchasing (in case of bad products), sales and the executive layer. In a recent blog post for Win the Customer, NICE’s Yair Lehrer writes that, though the goal to further the customer experience is the same, each department will have its own key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure how they’re doing on the customer experience front. And, of course, they need to balance keeping the CX high with their other tasks and purposes.

“For example, many organizations have to verify a customer identity at the beginning of a call,” wrote Lehrer. “To do this, often companies will ask a number of verification questions such as a mother’s maiden name, the make of a first car owned, or favorite ice cream flavor. Though verification may be a valid requirement, it is no less frustrating having to answer a string of questions when calling to complain about a problem.”

In this instance, the IT department or contact center would benefit from the purchase of an authentication solution that is both secure and easy (perhaps by using voice biometrics, which eliminate the need for every customer to remember their favorite childhood pet’s name). The result is that IT has done its job – kept customer data secure – but did it in a way that improved the customer experience.

“The key to balancing customer experience with other initiatives is by utilizing technology which can ensure CX levels are high, while simultaneously meeting other company agendas,” wrote Lehrer.

Likewise, workforce optimization solutions can help contact centers meet their performance metrics and ensure they’re not paying to over-staff while simultaneously ensuring that the customer experience isn’t suffering in an effort to keep costs down.

It’s tempting to let the customer experience slide so you can hit that sales target, that average handle time (AHT) metric in the contact center, or that revenue goal. But when these goals are achieved at the expense of a great customer experience, they’re not really worthy goals anymore.