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Are You Considering All the Pressures on Your Customer Service Strategy?
While setting their customer service strategy, some organizations have focused solely on cost reduction through outsourcing and basic automation. In the process, though, many have discovered that efforts to unduly curb operational expenses are alienating customers — and eventually eroding profits. When confronting the growing pains of their customer service environment, successful companies have encountered the full scope of challenges (see Figure 1).
ustomer expectations of convenience, reliability, and speedy response times are on the rise — and they require responses across multiple channels. An increasing polarization of customer service requires a differentiated service strategy, including both “low-touch” and “high-touch” services. The proliferation of products, segments, channels, and geographies requires broader and more complex services to address customer needs.
Most companies face complexity in the patchwork of various systems and information sources needed to enable call center staff to address customer needs effectively.
From a business needs perspective, companies must provide differentiated service to high-value customers while delivering efficient service to customers with lower value. In other words, you want to invest in and retain your best customers and minimize your spend on customers who aren’t profitable. Identifying high-value customers — and getting this information to the right support person — becomes key.
And of course, margin pressures are still a key factor — in fact, they’ve escalated to the C-level. Increasingly recognized as a key differentiation lever, customer satisfaction has become a major CEO concern. And while top executives expect continuous productivity gains and demand revenue generation, customers still expect free and highly personalized service.
New Approaches to Call Center Challenges
With all these pressures, the best-run businesses have started to shift their focus to balancing efficiency with customer experience and creating additional revenue streams, as highlighted back in Figure 1. IT teams in these organizations have successfully partnered with their software providers to:
Consolidate service and customer interaction platforms, simplifying management and reducing the cost of these systems.
Implement front-line decision support systems to improve effectiveness, provide differentiated service levels, and better identify sales opportunities.
This ensures that agents have access to all of the information required to resolve the majority of problems with the first call.
Invest in integrating interaction channels, connecting customer service to marketing, sales, and product development, and tying front-line interaction to critical back-office transactions. This means that customers — whether they are buying new products, asking for support on existing ones, or just providing feedback — can get their issues resolved, even if various parts of the company are involved.
Respond to a polarization of service needs by providing differentiated service offerings and channels to high-end and low-end customers. New operational models, such as distributed contact centers, home agents, and self-service options, have proven beneficial here.
Implement the Right Technology to Escape the Efficiency Dilemma
While call center technology is generally implemented to improve service efficiency, many companies tend to overlook the call center’s core mission: meeting customer needs. Cost savings achieved by improving call center efficiency — for instance, by reducing average call handling time — are often overshadowed by the negative business impact of ineffective problem resolution. The result? A measurable decline in customer loyalty and missed revenue opportunities. The right call center technology can help improve efficiency without compromising effectiveness — and can even produce “quick wins” with concrete, measurable customer service improvements — and without an excessive increase in the time agents spend on the phone with customers.
A typical list of key customer requirements (see Figure 2 on page 24) will come as a surprise to no one. But the possibilities available today for responding to these demands might give you pause. How do the top-performing call centers leverage information and communication technology to drive increased customer satisfaction and profitable long-term customer relationships? They provide solutions that focus on the key elements that can undermine overall call center performance, including handling peak loads and random call arrival, providing a shared knowledge repository to enable high rates of first-call resolution, controlling the process with standardized call scripts and workflows, and providing agents with a unified desktop and managers with the tools they need to manage and analyze call center operations.
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