Customer experience
in the contact centre
| Your brand is on trial in the contact centre In the contact center, revenue is made and lost every day not on price or performance, but by the quality of the customer experience. It may sound like a huge burden to place on the shoulders of an individual contact center agent and that is exactly the point – managing the customer experience is not about abdicating responsibility for customer satisfaction to your front-line people. The organisation and its management are on the line every time the customer joins a call.Experience is every firm’s value proposition because no company can avoid delivering a total experience. The million dollar question is: ‘Was the experience the one you intended?’” Like it or not, consciously or not, customers evaluate their business relationships every time they touch your company. Learning to manage the experience every time the phone rings or the inbox chimes is an essential skill to maintain and build business with customers who are empowered to be brand-agnostic and effortless switchers. There are now thousands of world-class independent customer service organisations. Everybody has access to the same technology, processes and training. So relying on these alone to craft your customer experience is a losing strategy – those tactics are too easily copied. They will not differentiate your brand nor sustain loyalty. There are four criteria that are the base for any solid, sustainable customer experience effort. It must be consistent, ,intentional, differentiated, and valuable. The contact center faces unique challenges in following each of these directives, but meeting them head-on is critical if the customer experience is truly a priority. |