Customer experience, and by extension the ongoing business relationship with any customer, lives and dies at the point of contact. All the glossy advertising in the world cannot compensate for a consistently weak experience. “Surveys find that only 26 percent of a purchase decision is influenced by advertising. By far the factors more frequently cited are personal experience and referrals,” says customer experience expert Shaun Smith of Shaun Smith + co, former Head of Customer Service, Sales, and Marketing Training for British Airways and more recently, VP of Customer Experience for the Forum Corporation.
Ideally, advertising serves to establish a promise and an expectation for a unique and appealing customer experience, which is then confirmed and reinforced every single time the customer touches the organization. That puts the contact center on the hook, yet uniquely placed, to sustain the customer experience regardless of changes elsewhere in the organization.
The best customer experiences are delivered by companies that have so deeply embedded their brand message and customer priorities in their DNA that each and every agent can present the best the company has to offer. They create self-sustaining customer communities that are so focused on their interaction with each other that they m
ay even forgive the occasional mishap, and see it as an opportunity to actively engage with the company and make improvements because they believe their patronage is truly valued.
No Barriers – Customer Experience Permeates
Achieving that goal requires a customer-service commitment that completely denies the existence of barriers. The customer experience will surely break down if the different communities that make up an organization do not understand the role they must play to build and maintain it. This means paying more than lip service to the concept of customer centricity – it requires aligning the internal organizations that provide the “care and feeding” of customers to achieve the same goal – building and maintaining the environment that provides the right service to the right customers and creates value for those customers they cannot get anywhere else. “Really strong brands have marketing, customer service, and human resources all working as one around a common agenda, which is the customer experience,” Smith says.
Marketing’s contribution is the articulation and refinement of the brand promise, using advertising and outreach to communicate the virtues of doing business with your company and setting it apart from competitors and pretenders. The customer service organization must be prepared, on a monthly, daily, weekly, and hourly basis, to deliver on that promise to customers, with the right training, systems, and most importantly, management support to make the right decisions by each and every caller.
Human Resource’s role in this process cannot be overlooked. Look at the global market for customer-service personnel as an opportunity, rather than a negative. HR should focus on bringing people into the organization that will be a natural fit for the customer experience, who can believe in the company’s brand mission, and who will use every tool and opportunity at their disposal to preserve that experience whenever possible.
Technology can help. A unified desktop that provides a 360-degree of the customer enables every person with the entire organization to share the same common view of all customer experiences. Marketing, Human Resources, Finance, the Executive Suite, and so on, can all share a common view and extract exactly the insight to help the organization support and deliver the promises made or requests extended.
Summary
The contact center’s role in a customer experience management strategy cannot be underestimated. Consumers perceive that a company’s ability to respond to a problem or request has a higher influence on an excellent experience than any other attribute, as shown in Figure 1. That puts the contact center ever-more front and center in creating that experience – consistently, intentionally, but in a manner that is differentiated and adds value.
Your customer experience can never be better than the people you place on the end of every telephone call, e-mail, or web chat, and the quality of the technology they rely on. Only they have the unique opportunity to strengthen your relationships every time a customer reaches out, and that can only happen if they are given the tools and trust to make every contact the right contact. “It is about having people who like people, who have personalities, and are willing to engage with customers and get beyond the form-filling,” Smith says. “You need a working environment where people are naturally curious and interested in doing business with your customers – not where they are driven by management to pick up the phone within three rings every time.”
This article is an excerpt from the white paper “Customer Experience Happens in the Contact Center, With Insights From Shaun Smith." Go to www.cincom.com/shaunsmith to download the complete white paper or to view a webcast titled "See, Feel, Think, Do - Creating Breakthrough Ideas to Deliver the Perfect Customer Experience," in which Shaun Smith presents a lively discussion on how to build great customer experiences.
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