2007: The Year Of The Empowered Customer
By Gary Barnett, Aspect Software

Like many consumers today, when I need to purchase an item, sign up for a new service or plan a trip, I do my research. I read online reviews, e-mail friends and family members for recommendations and check out blogs for other customer opinions. Over the past year, the proliferation of instant one-to-one and one-to-many communication, as well as the widespread availability of information about products and services, has empowered the consumer more than ever before. Viewed as a blessing by consumers, this empowerment is seen by some businesses as a curse. They realize that today’s consumers can have an enormous effect on them — positive or negative — and they have to be prepared. The contact center, in its role at the frontline of customer contact, is squarely positioned to make or break what today’s consumers do with their newfound power.

I spent most of 2006 traveling to multiple contact centers and, regardless of their business processes, industries or size, I found that most of these companies face the same challenges: finding the right tools and technology to ensure they deliver a positive customer experience, and finding the delicate balance between meeting consumer demands and the realities of the bottom line.

Challenges To The Customer- Company Experience

There are a couple of major challenges in which companies have significantly invested time and resources to resolve over the past year. Although it is a step in the right direction that businesses are finally recognizing these challenges, there is a lot more that contact centers can do to improve productivity and responsiveness to customer inquiries.

Here are some to consider: Reducing complexity. The growing use of customer communication channels such as Web, e-mail, text and chat has made the integration of contact center products and data more difficult than ever. How can a contact center work efficiently and productively if all its functions — automatic call distribution (ACD), voice self-service, dialer, workforce management, monitoring, recording — are not working together as one cohesive unit? Contact centers are now seeing the value of a unified solution to address the challenge of complexity. By unifying contact center capabilities, businesses have more flexibility, customer inquiries can be resolved more quickly, agents have easy access to customer data and managers can clearly view agent performance. The result is an empowered contact center to respond to the needs of the empowered customer.

Delivering a consistent customer experience. Many consumers complain about radically differing experiences when interacting with a single company. On one call, an agent may have the knowledge and customer information to resolve an issue, yet in a subsequent call or chat interaction, a different agent may not have access to the same information and may not be able to help at all. Most of us, being consumers ourselves, know that inconsistency breeds unhappy customers. Who wants to deal with a company that has different agents giving contradicting answers every time you interact with that company? Since consumers have become more savvy in their research and buying decisions, they are turning to the companies they can rely on to meet their needs on a consistent basis.

While many companies recognize that there will likely always be a human element to making customer-company interactions more consistent, there is a lot that companies can do to ensure they are meeting their customers’ needs and delivering a pleasant, consistent experience across all channels — including those that are automated or via self-service. For example, speech technology is enabling customers to easily speak their account number to retrieve balance information. At the same time, companies can use quality management applications to record calls and review them for consistency and training purposes, and enable agents to learn from both well executed and poorly executed interactions. Companies that implement quality management solutions seem to stand out as having more consistent business processes and customer interactions. Combined with embracing unified solutions, successful companies are properly tracking agent performance and simplifying their customer data and information management to improve the customer experience.

Priorities For The Near Future

In a word...analytics. We are encouraging our customers to focus on analytics in the coming year, with the understanding that analytics can provide a comprehensive view of the entire contact center and, therefore, provide insight into the customer experience. With the contact center increasingly being looked at as a revenue-generating profit center in many companies, analytics can help enhance that view by tracking and analyzing agent performance through key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect best practices and/or are tied to overall strategic business objectives. Some examples of KPIs include measuring calls handled per agent-hour, schedule adherence, agent quality scores, service levels, revenue collected per agent-hour, occupancy rates and shrinkage. The analysis of these metrics can improve contact center service levels, allowing an efficient response to multiple consumer demands.

Analytics solutions that show agent productivity and identify gaps in compliance and consistency issues are essential to optimizing performance and, in turn, maximizing revenue and improving interactions. Quality management analytics applications record calls to pinpoint and evaluate customer interactions. Recording and analytic capabilities help contact centers deliver repeatable and consistent customer interactions. As stated earlier, consistency has been a real challenge for contact centers over the past year, and speech recording and analytics tools can improve overall customer experiences by delivering consistent, best-in-class interactions and empowering agents to become quality advocates.

The Impact On The Consumer Experience

Now that consumers are armed with easy access to information, pricing alternatives and market reviews — and they have the tools to tell vast amounts of people about their experiences — they are more empowered than ever before. Companies that recognize this empowerment and the importance of delivering a positive, consistent customer experience will gain and maintain the competitive advantage. Contact centers that have invested in unified solutions and quality management will continue to stand out from the competition, and consumers will continue to recognize and reward them for the work they’re doing. In the year to come, consumers will have no problem switching services or products if they find the experience that they need, want and deserve somewhere else. Successful companies in 2007 will examine the challenges that have beset the customer- company experience over the past year, take a closer look at how the contact center fits in with their overall customer strategy and set strategic priorities and goals for the months to come.

Gary Barnett is chief technology officer and executive vice president for Aspect Technical Services (news - alert) and Research and Development (http://www.aspect.com).