With products and services losing their power to decide brand longevity, customer experience has emerged the new zone of focus to establish differentiation. The role of contact centers has become pivotal than ever before.
They are now faced with the challenge to transform rapidly in response to the rapid change, to ensure customer happiness. So, what are the megatrends facing businesses today and how can companies empower themselves to ride through the change?
Customer Holds the Reins – Thanks to Internet’s information explosion, today customers are more informed and more aware of the choices they have. As such, their expectations are high. They want superior products, 24x7 customer service, multiple service channels(mobile/chat/email/call), and a customer support that responds quickly to their every problem and solves issues effectively. Such high expectations require huge budgets that companies cannot afford. This usually leads to over-working of existing contact center employees, which results in unhappy employees creating poor customer experiences.
The solution to this is to create a fully customer-centric organization that is aware of its customers’ expectations and implements them at every level of process/product design. Create a strategy of multiple customer interaction channels and organization-wide knowledge sharing to ensure customer-centricity.
Product Proliferation – With constant innovation and company mergers and acquisitions, there has been an exponential increase in products. Contact centers are overburdened with the challenge to sell and support huge number of products. The consequence - poor agent performance and poorer customer service.
Overcome this challenge by creating an effective centralized knowledge base on the basis of inputs from internal product/service experts and the expertise of the top customer service agents. This knowledge base should be amenable to digitization and continual enhancement to ensure transfer of actionable information. An ideal knowledge base includes in majority expertise on the most common customer issues and focuses the rest on issues that consume substantial time of agents.
The Social Media Revolution – Your customers are discussing your brand with the world on social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Any positive or negative feedback has a massive and rapid reach here and creates a like effect on your brand.
Be there where your customers are and get their true voice from there. Empower your contact center with a social media strategy that involves agents as well as other department employees. Leverage on the powerful reach of social media to create brand awareness and brand loyalty through transparency and responsiveness.
Organizational Change – Outsourcing, offshoring, mergers, and acquisition implemented for efficiency enhancement or cost reduction, create the challenge of infusing customer objectives into the extended environment. A lack of proper understanding creates poor customer service.
Empower your agents with a centralized and accessible knowledge base. Leverage on powerful cost-effective technologies such as SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), which enables multi-modal communications (video, voice, instant messaging, application sharing, etc.,) between you and your customer (one or more participants actually) simultaneously. Using such methods you don’t overburden your employees or disappoint your customers.
Rising Contact Center Costs with no Substantial Outcome - You are getting no tangible evidence of the success of your contact centers despite increasing investments on their capability enhancement. As a result, though a vital component of the organization, your contact center never gets recognized. This leads to low agent morale and poor customer service.
Customer experience is not the responsibility of contact center alone but of the whole organization. Create multiple touch points and integrate systems to share customer insights across divisions. Such sharing imparts complete information of every customer. Better solutions and sales service are provided by a very ‘customer-aware’ agent.
Every change presents you with an opportunity. So do megatrends. You can discover new opportunities to reorient your employees across divisions and identify best practices to increase brand exposure. Megatrends empower you to invent powerful strategies to achieve the bottom line – keeping your customers happy.
