The Contact Centre ‘To Don’t’ List for 2019

Part two of ‘three little pigs’

How are you doing in the 2019 New Year’s resolution department? A study by Strava, that analysed more than 31.5 million online global activities in January 2018, revealed 12 January to be the date when most of us will have given up on our annual New Year’s resolutions. Although the Chinese zodiac states that people born in ‘The year of the pig’ have great concentration: once they set a goal, they will devote all their energy to achieving it. This sounds a little huff and puff as a mere 8 percent of us achieve our New Year’s goals.

And the same can be said about businesses in the process of planning their customer experience strategy. Excited about the outcome that an enhanced CX will have on their organisation’s bottom line, businesses invest in siloed ‘straw stalks’ of technologies/channels because a house, regardless of its construction material, built quickly and cheaply fulfils the same purpose? Do they know what happened to the first little piggy?

The big bad wolves that devour CX engagement

Often teams within organisations are so busy, that they just want to fill the gaps, convinced that they hear their customers and understand what they need. When businesses invest in new technology or channels without having a clear strategy of what each digital enhancement can or can’t deliver, they have about the same chance of delivering exceptional customer experience as a straw-house against a hurricane.

In 2019, the customer matters more than ever before. The world has changed, and so customers have the power, not the sellers. Customer perception is fragile and able to change with each interaction. Constantly maintaining a strong customer experience in our digitally connected world is a challenge, however this Customer Experience ‘To Don’t’ list aims to reveal a bit more ‘third pig’ CX strategy.

Don’t choose a number:

When choosing a metric to score your customer experience and establish a target for it, the metric must be meaningful to the specific customer touchpoint you’re wanting to analyse. The metric needs to be relevant for your particular industry.

Don’t stop measuring:

Whichever customer metric you choose – the all ubiquitous Net Promoter Score (NPS), the traditional customer satisfaction CSAT, or a more recent invention Customer Effort Score (CES) – it’s worth nothing without analysing the customer feedback you’re collecting. Analysed across multiple touchpoints across the customer journey will show where improvements should be made, which channels perform well and also help identify the rate and reasons for customer churn.

Don’t invest in technology just for the sake of adding another channel:

Many industry buzzwords like AI, bots, physital and omni-channel set to create more headlines in 2019, are causing uncertainty about job losses and the impact it will have on customer experience.

Multiple contact channels that don’t feed into the same knowledge-base can derail CX. Consistency and continuity across engagement channels should support customer service delivery. Having a well implemented customer service strategy with a centralised knowledge-base at its core, is key to meeting the following challenges facing companies wanting to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

When choosing a technology vendor, consider these important questions:
Does the vendor have an integrated platform, or a loose collection of components? Does the vendor own all the products or are they a patchwork of unrelated pieces? Can you choose what you need from the product portfolio? Can you add other components later? How well do they integrate with your CRM and can they scale up? What kind of experience does the vendor have?

Don’t give up:

Just like January 1st is just a day in the calendar, the CX strategy can be reset for a fresh start. Go back to the beginning and revisit the rewards of making changes to it.

Ask questions such as; Why the business needs to make a change? Is the goal concrete and measurable? What is the plan? What support system is in place while working towards a change? How will victories be incentivised?

Bringing home the bacon in 2019

To improve the customer engagement/experience and keep consumers loyal, businesses must place more importance on understanding the relationship between support interactions, channels, and the changing tides of consumer behaviour. This will be key in choosing the right technology to support their strategy.
In the last of our blog series we will disclose specific actions for customer support, as the role of customer service and the contact centre is all too often still largely underestimated in the bottom-line of businesses and the overall customer experience journey.