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We all know what it feels like to contact a company for help when we have a problem and we need it sorting out. Most of us would still rather speak to a human being on those occasions, although an increasing number of us will try to go online first to see if we can sort it out that way – frequently because we’ve found from past experience that trying to speak to someone in a contact centre was too frustrating! All too often you find yourself struggling through a range of options to get to speak to a human being and when you do, they don’t seem to be able to answer your questions, make decisions or at the very least show any sympathy for your situation. It can feel as though we are going around in circles, being passed back and forth between different departments by employees who seem more concerned with blindly following a process than with answering our queries.
- Why do so many companies seem to perpetuate this misery for customers and employees alike?
- Why is it so hard for many to break this cycle and make a positive step change in the experiences we all go through?
- Because many Companies treat the symptoms and not the cause. They put in well intended improvements in different areas of the business, but they don’t join them up and plan systematic transformation of the total experience, or journey, we all go through as customers.
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The answer, many think, is to improve some of the people or technology elements. For example, great skills training may be aimed towards those speaking to us on the phone. Alternatively call routing technology is upgraded. Perhaps voice recognition is introduced. All of these investments are intended to try and get the customer to the right person with the right skills to answer their question. These activities will certainly make incremental improvements, but not significant enough to create a customer experience that differentiates you from your competitors. The problem is that human conversation is infinitely variable. Whilst many organisations can rightly point to reasons for contact generally falling into 8 or so main enquiry types, they can’t legislate for all the potential combinations of enquiries, the variations on a theme that customers will ask or the way in which they will ask the question. This means there is still the need for employees to use their wits to come up with the right answer. The trouble is they are not being supported from top to bottom by the entire organisation to help them provide the right outcome for customers.
As long as Customer Services functions go on trying to create a differentiated customer experience inside the silos of their existing business models, they will always struggle to step off the hamster wheel. The problem is that they are often working within organisations who think of customer service as the unnecessary cost of doing business, rather than a key opportunity to grow the business. Customer Services teams are treated as cost centres and strive to perform in ever-tightening constraints. They continue to practice the principles of mass production and hold on to their part of the production line. They find it difficult to break out and engage the rest of the organisation. They must convince the wider business that all functions must play their part and change the way things are done. Until they do, nothing will fundamentally improve, either in terms of cost or customer loyalty.
Ipsos Mori research in 2009 confirmed that compared to the same survey question 5 years earlier when it scored low, “captains of industry” now recognise that retaining the loyalty of existing customers is critical. Those who are taking the lead in changing the paradigm do so because they recognise that if they fundamentally change the way the whole business delivers the customer experience their business will make a step change in profitability – all things being equal with a compelling product and proposition of course !
The attention of the Board needs to be captured by using demand analytics to demonstrate how much revenue is being lost, and cost incurred, by failing to deliver great customer experiences. Instead they deliver ones which frustrate customers, at the very least preventing them from having the confidence to spend more with that company, and at the worst, actively encouraging them to take their business away altogether. The outcome is not only dissatisfied customers, but disloyal ones which erode profitability.
Hext consulting has recently had direct experience of implementing a voice of the customer blueprint in a FTSE 100 company which led to a step-change in the customer experience. This resulted in higher revenue, a halving of customer complaints and reduced costs through the elimination of failure across the business. The key is to engage both the energy and support of the Board for fundamental change across the whole of the business, and to capture customer facing employees’ hearts and minds; significantly increasing their engagement by harnessing their power to drive positive change. The point being that effective people, technology and processes are vital, but the whole business system must be aligned around addressing customer needs to drive transformational change.
Customer service, delivered so significantly by contact centres, can be a key opportunity to grow revenue and profitability, but it must be realised by implementing a top to bottom, organisation wide, voice of the customer blueprint. To learn more about the key steps of this blueprint, please contact jane.hext@btinternet.com