Contact Centers Face Barriers to Customer Experience Excellence

Contact centers today are seeking ways to delight customers and push the boundaries of the customer experience. But research shows that many organizations are still struggling to deliver basic customer expectations and attempting to build advanced customer capabilities on shaky ground is a losing prospect. Instead, companies should be looking for easier and faster ways for agents to help customers, such as better training for the agents or improved self-service options for customers.

New research conducted by Contact Centre Management Association (CCMA) uncovered ways contact centers can accelerate innovation and operational effectiveness. The goal of the research was to serve as a playbook for contact center organizations looking to better equip and inspire agents to offer better customer experiences.

The research found that the most common barriers to customer experience innovation stem from a fundamental failure to recruit the right people, establish appropriate metrics, and design effective systems and processes. Before a business can ever pursue transformation, they must first ensure that they can clearly, quickly, and effectively deliver on basic customer expectations. It’s only then that they’ll successfully expand to provide the personalized, successful experiences that truly differentiate a brand from its competition.

Another noteworthy finding from the report is that the best way to cut down on customer service inquiries is to take action to prevent the reasons customers reach out in the first place. Successful companies surveyed for the report seek to hone their core products and processes to reduce the need for customers to make contact in the first place.

The report noted that the top five barriers to innovation include:

• Reverting to previous ways of running the contact center,
• Cynicism due to previous failed initiatives,
• Focusing on wrong KPIs,
• Reliance on third parties, and
• System fragmentation.

“Innovating the customer experience requires forward-thinking leadership that is open to exploring new experiences, technology and approaches rather than simply updating and changing existing processes,” said Vasili Triant, COO of UJET. “We believe the insights and best practices identified in this research will show a clear roadmap for transforming contact centers into operational and customer experience game changers for organizations.”

Edited by Erik Linask