Workforce Management Featured Article
2014 Will Be the Year of Meeting Customer Expectations
2013 ended with a lot of predictions for the contact center industry. Generally, they were similar to the previous few years: more organizations moving more applications and functionality to the cloud, the expended use of social media in customer support and deeper penetration of analytics solutions to cope with “big data” challenges and opportunities.
One overriding theme in all these predictions, however, has been customer expectations, which are on the rise and not likely to level out anytime soon. According to a recent study published by analyst group Forrester (News - Alert), customers who have had a great customer experience with one company have their expectations raised, and expect the same level of service from other companies, even those in different industries. In other words, brands with reputations for top-notch customer service, such as Amazon or L.L. Bean, are raising customer expectations with their high quality of service, and companies that fail to meet those expectations are coming out on the bottom of the pile.
While this may be bad news for companies with marginal customer service, it represents opportunities for more gung-ho companies. Forrester notes that the opportunities are particularly good for companies in industries with no clear customer service leaders.
According to a recent blog post, now is the time to enhance your organization’s customer service value in order to meet rising customer expectations and grab market share from competitors. There are several ways to do this, as follows.
Study 2013 metrics. By analyzing what you did in 2013 in depth, chances are good you can uncover intelligence regarding what worked to boost customer service quality and what didn’t. For the contact center, this includes analyzing call volumes, call types, first-call resolution rates, skills-based routing, service levels, customer feedback and more. In particular, pay attention to the times when the call center was out of adherence to find out precisely what went wrong.
Reallocate the budget. Based on the information uncovered in your analysis of metrics, it may be time to redistribute the budget. If you’re perpetually short-staffed with long call queues, it’s time to hire more agents. If you have enough agents but your customer satisfaction rates are lagging, it’s time for more training, or better skills-based routing. If you are out of adherence too often, it may be time to see if your workforce management is up to the job. If first-call resolution is too low, you may need to ensure that agents have the right knowledge bases available to them.
Add channels, if necessary. While customers may still prefer the telephone to any other channel, there is evidence that customer preference for Web chat is sharply on the rise, particularly with younger customers. Ensure that you have this channel properly integrated with your universal queue. It can be a benefit to the contact center: agents can handle multiple chats at one time, something they can’t do with phone calls.
Improve your self-service. Customers today do try and resolve their own problems before they pick up the phone. If your self-service hasn’t been revisited in several years, it’s time to do that now. An effectively implemented and easy to administer interactive voice response (IVR) solution can go a long way toward taking the pressure off agents.
It’s time to talk social media. If you’re like many contact centers, you’re dreading this conversation. But the statistics are undeniable: more and more customers, many of them from the younger “millennial” generation, are expecting to engage with you via Twitter (News - Alert), Facebook and other social media channels. It’s no longer possible to be passive about this: unaddressed social media complaints can do too much damage to a brand. You need to be monitoring what customers are saying about you, and turning it into a two-way conversation.
While it would be nice if a company could run a contact center to suit its own needs, it’s simply not possible. Contact centers exist to serve customers, and customers are quicker to notice – and drop you for a competitor – than ever before. If there is anything at the top of your to-do list for 2014 other than “improve the customer experience,” it’s time to reevaluate your goals.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi