Call Center Management Featured Article
In the C-Suite, Who's Looking Out for the Customers?
In most organizations, the main operations are overseen by a chief. The chief financial officer oversees the bottom line. The chief technology officer keeps an eye on the IT assets. The chief marketing officer is looking to control the company’s message to the public. The chief operations officer ensures that the company’s core business is running at maximum efficiency. But this begs the question…
Who is keeping an eye on the customer experience?
Increasingly, some organizations are creating new titles dedicated to customer support, such as chief customer experience officer. It’s this person’s job to ensure that marketing, finance, IT and operations aren’t being crafted without the customer experience in mind.
What Does a Chief Customer Experience Officer Do?
Essentially, a CCEO is appointed to look after customer interests and put them to the forefront. Are decisions being made to save money without weighing how they will impact customers? Are IT systems being implemented that will make it harder for customers to shop and buy? Are operations making it harder for customers to remain faithful?
According to Customer Think’s Jeanne Bliss, one of a CCEO’s core jobs is to understand the customer at a human level and not as a statistic.
“You will need to know who your audience is and what they value beyond surveys and NPS scores,” whe wrote. “Ask yourself, how are you meeting the customers’ goals? Do you spend time listening to your customers and speaking with them? Do you know why they use your service or product and how you could best meet their needs?”
Where Does Call Center Management Fit In?
The answers to the above questions are found in the call center, so the chief customer experience officer will need to oversee the call center. (This makes so much more sense than including the call center in operations anyway.) Through the call center, the CCO can do a much better job of unifying the customer experience. This means understanding where information silos are in the organization – including the contact center -- and breaking them down, integrating the departments or teams into a unified whole. As a CCO, you will have to embed the idea of customer-centricity across the whole organization, not just one department, Yamini Rangan, CCO of Dropbox (News - Alert), told Customer Think.
Ultimately, this elevates the importance of the call center, turning it from a single department into a unifying operations process that encompasses the entire organization.
Edited by Maurice Nagle