Getting the customer experience right

Every contact centre interaction is a touch point that impacts on the overall customer experience - Adam Faulkner highlights why it’s important to focus on getting the simple things right each and every time

Successful brands need to go beyond basic logos and corporate advertising – what we can see and hear as consumers – to embrace the entirety of an organisation’s interactions with its customers, partners, employees and other stakeholders. The contact centre clearly has an essential role to play across a large proportion of these interactions - whether it’s with customers speaking to agents, through to customers engaging with the latest natural language speech-enabled applications, or interacting with an organisation’s website.

Every single one of these interactions creates a touch point for customers, resulting in an experience – positive, neutral or negative – that impacts how they then feel about the organisation they’re dealing with. Research shows that it’s those organisations that can deliver the most consistently positive experiences that end up creating the most lasting, effective brands and loyal customers.

By thinking about how your customers actually engage with your organisation – and considering the implications of these contacts on your brand image, you can actively ensure that your contact centre operations play a full role in strengthening and extending your brand promise. Get it right, and a successful contact centre operation can add real value. Get it wrong, however, and the negative impact can be huge, with customers quickly sharing their experiences with other customers and prospects.

Avoiding customer frustration

As consumers, we’ve all experienced poorly-designed IVR-based self-service applications that seem to have been developed primarily to make things easier and more cost-effective for the organisation operating them. It’s important to remember that it’s not IVR itself that’s at fault here, rather the way that the systems have been designed. Many systems don’t seem to consider the needs of the customer, often taking them down call paths they don’t want to follow, causing inevitable frustration and leading to customers dropping out of calls.

That’s why it’s essential for organisations to look beyond the technology and address the key people and process issues that are also critical to the creation of successful applications that can deliver a positive customer experience. Contact centres need to take their lead from the growing number of websites that are providing visitors with a personalised service. For example, when you log into your bank account, you immediately gain access to all your account and service details and can carry out the transactions you need to straight away.

There’s no reason why dealing with your contact centre shouldn’t work the same way. This is necessary if we’re to successfully move towards delivering personalised service in the contact centre. All the technology to do this is now in place, for example, quickly recognising who’s calling using a speech-enabled identification solution, call matching a caller’s identity to a customer database using CRM, and then transferring that information to the right agent using skills-based routing and workforce optimisation. It sounds simple, but it’s surprising how many contact centres still put you through to an IVR and place you in a queue without even knowing who they’re talking to.

Getting the basics right

It’s important to keep things simple from the customer’s perspective, and that requires applications to be designed around the needs of callers and to anticipate some of their key requirements such as speed, ease-of-use and ease-of-access. Such a user-centred design approach makes it far more likely that customers will have a positive experience each and every time they call your contact centre. For some organisations, this focus on simplicity and ensuring a consistently positive experience is even more important than making the interaction quicker, with these companies determined to reward returning customers with a sustainable quality experience.

Once organisations have got this basic structure right, they could even extend their contact centre branding by building on some of their investment in other key areas such as advertising. Technically there’s no reason why a supermarket couldn’t use Jamie Oliver’s voice to greet callers, or perhaps Linda Barker greet customers when calling about new furniture.

While initiatives like these can help with personalising a brand, it’s as important to ensure that your agents are fully aligned with your corporate messaging and brand persona. Training is obviously important here, with research clearly showing that those organisations who take time out to keep agents informed and connected to a company’s strategic direction – and even link their rewards to meeting corporate goals – are the businesses that consistently generate the best results.

Living the brand

For some this isn’t enough. There are good examples of organisations of all sizes who encourage and indeed expect their contact centre agents to act as brand evangelists – living the brand and helping customers to optimise their interaction with the business. Virgin, for example, expects its contact centre agents to be ‘young, vibrant, upbeat’ when answering the phone, while all the agents working on one pet insurance company’s equine hotline are experienced riders themselves. These and other organisations have found that it’s a lot easier for a contact centre to deliver a brand-relevant service if they first staff their centres with agents who understand that brand and share in its promise.