A Customer Centric Approach for Senior Management

By TMCnet Special Guest

Marco Pacelli, CEO, ClickFox

 

How well do we really know our customers? With corporations investing hundreds of millions each year to improve the customer experience, management seems to have forgotten the main issue: serving the customer! Today’s contact centers crunch numbers and provide management with statistics on how much has happened in a given time period. The focus on crunching numbers has caused today’s contact center to morph into a well-oiled machine — cold and robotic.

 

We have all been taught, “customers are number one,” “the customer is always right” and “a company is its customers.” So why have so many senior executives lost touch with their core values and entrusted their most valued possession, their customers, to people they’ve likely never met and who have very little incentive to care for the customer?

 

Employees show up, handle a few calls, are periodically measured on how they handle an interaction, and then go home. That’s it! The core values upon which a company was founded and how it has become successful have dissolved. Perhaps the passion is gone, or the founding spirit of those who started the company was never passed down. As an idea grows into a company and a company evolves into a world-wide enterprise, the contact center becomes one of the few human to human interactions left. Unfortunately, this interaction is becoming less and less human.

 

Much like a restaurant, it’s the personal experience that matters. My favorite restaurant is the one where the owner knows me by name; he knows where I want to sit, what I like to drink, and what my favorite dishes are. What ultimately keeps me coming back is how I am treated, not the food. Similarly, contact centers need to become the “personal touch” portal for senior managers.

 

So why is it so difficult to maintain a healthy, personal relationship with customers? With so much technology available today, why are contact centers unable to deliver a live customer view to senior management? Does senior management even care? The answer is simple. Until recently, business was good and bottom lines were strong. As such, few customers or managers cared about quality of service, and as the years passed and technology advanced, customers only wanted their requests processed at a faster pace. Companies were only too happy to comply. They filled orders and collected their revenue with rapid speed. With the speed of business accelerating and customers beginning to accept whatever level of customer service was provided. The expectation was to receive the end product faster and cheaper. Customer loyalty had very little to do with the quality of the experience.

 

Recent technology saturation and the sluggish decline of the economy quickly changed consumers’ indifferent attitude toward customer service — they now expect their experience to not only be satisfactory, but perfect. Customers have been inundated with the message that ‘technology makes everything easier and better’ and as such, they demand fast, simple, and successful interactions. Unfortunately, advances in technology can sometimes produce the opposite result. Complex systems are integrated to make the business side’s experience smoother, faster, and simpler. However, that formula does not always extend to the customer’s experience. To ensure protocol, customers are prompted, re-prompted, routed, re-routed, grouped, queued, transferred and re-transferred. Not surprisingly, none of this has had a positive impact on the customer’s experience in a majority of cases.

 

Customer satisfaction in contact centers is at an all-time low. Never before have customers been more frustrated with the service they receive. The game is changing from one of customer acquisition to one of customer retention. With these conditions in place, senior management must take the necessary steps to deliver a personal touch to each and every customer. We have seen company’s ranked number one fall in the rankings while smaller, more intimate companies jump to number one. We can attribute a large portion of these changes to that “personal touch.” It all goes back to the feeling of walking into your favorite restaurant where the owner recognizes you and knows what you want the moment you arrive.

 

How can senior management establish that personal relationship as the central goal of their strategy once they understand that customers need individual attention? The ingredients for success are already in place; it’s simply a matter of getting to know their customer. Contact centers need to deliver a portal, a view of customer behavior and their experiences with the company both past and present.

 

By truly knowing the customer, not just reviewing past actions, senior management can better understand the “why” behind their customer’s actions and choices. Traditional methods for measuring customer behavior do not tell us a lot. Simply reviewing the number of times customers logged on to the Web site or how they interact with a center agent do not give senior managers a holistic view of the customer experience. Customers are more than numbers on a page. Customers are unique, individual and creatures of habit. Every business needs to understand this concept and treat each person as though they were their only customer.

 

The right combination of technologies will give personalized insight into the behavior of every customer as they navigate through their preferred channels. The preferences and nuances of each customer can then be directly delivered to senior management. Customer behavior is a window into customer experience and satisfaction. It is the power to understand what drives the customer. Once senior management understands the experiences and preferences of their customers, they can lay the foundation to strategically position the contact center to improve customer retention.

 

If customer behavior was static this would be an easy fix. However, customers experience numerous interactions with a company over the course of their relationship (i.e., mature customers act differently than “new” customers). Unfortunately, companies tend to force a customer, regardless of their tenure, preferences or status to adopt specific processes, paths and structures without ever knowing if the customer even wants or prefers these methods. If we equate this to our restaurant analogy, it’s like serving a customer a dish they never ordered or even have an appetite for.

 

Everyone has their favorite “dishes” — specific tolerance levels, and habits, which make them an individual. First impressions have a huge impact. The first time a contact center interacts with a customer is where it all begins. From the very outset, the contact center should study, learn and record the customer’s behavior. An organization needs to understand how a customer’s behavior relates to other customers and how these collective behavior patterns affect the business drivers that ultimately determine whether a customer continues to do business or not.

 

Today’s contact centers primarily focus on the reverse approach. Analysis is performed after the fact with the perspective of “How did we treat the customer?” This is a subjective approach. The measurement is more focused on the agent’s behavior than customer behavior. If that behavior is considered appropriate, contact center mangers report a high level of customer service and satisfaction.

 

Is this a true measurement of customer satisfaction? What if you observed a contact center customer the same way you would observe a frequent customer at a restaurant? For example, a customer orders a cheeseburger and fries on their first visit. Over the next three visits your customer tries something new. At first you might determine that there is no discernible pattern; however, if on the fifth visit and each subsequent visit they order a cheeseburger and fries you will discover there is a pattern. Now you begin to appreciate why it is so essential to analyze every user experience, which highlights customer behavior. In this case how a new customer behaves vs. a repeat customer.

 

In the simplest terms, your strategy cannot be limited to how you treat the customer. It is more appropriately described as, “How we can learn from the customer’s behavior?” Contact centers have a unique position to target their efforts toward analyzing customer behavior patterns instead of employee behavior patterns, then directly reporting that strategic information to senior management. Management will either adapt their current practices to make sure agent behavior is driven by customer behavior or quite simply, they will lose their customers.

 

Why does this customer call every week? Where did the customer come from? Why did this customer call three times today? Why is this customer aggravated? Answering these types of questions will put the focus on the correct aspects of behavior, which can really move the needle in terms of customer retention, improved satisfaction, up-sell and cross-sell.

 

The good news is that most contact centers already have this information available. The information should be analyzed from a behavioral standpoint, not a statistical one. The behavior analytics revolution has an immediate and positive impact on various business drivers such as customer satisfaction, first contact resolution, churn, as well as up-sell and cross-sell. When senior management finally grasps this idea, they are able to deliver the invaluable “personal touch”.