While technology has come a long way in improving contact center operations – from better self-service options to workflow management and more accurate forecasting – contact center managers are still struggling to overcome some traditional realities. These challenges include high staff turnover and employee burnout, time-consuming training methods, and struggling to keep costs under control while customer expectations soar.
In a recent blog post, Forrester Research’s Riccardo Pasto, Principal Analyst, along with Katy Cobian, VP and Executive Partner, and Chiara Bragato, Research Associate, laid out a case for contact centers to overhaul their core customer experience (CX) competencies. These competencies include determining what customers need, designing and testing solutions and potential experiences, and delivering these improved experiences while enabling frontline employees.
The blog recommends three critical steps for contact centers:
Invest in cross-functional alignment to deliver connected experiences. Organizations whose marketing, digital and CX teams are highly aligned "report 1.6 times faster revenue growth than their peers and 1.4 times better customer engagement." To help ensure functional alignment around customer journeys, companies should invest in a shared journey atlas and prioritize key journeys, perhaps by hiring an outside partner to assist and train customer support teams. This will allow companies to pinpoint how functional teams and business units intersect to support prioritized journeys by connecting and aligning roadmaps.
Engage in journey mapping. The Forrester blog noted that leaders often struggle to build momentum and drive action from their mapping efforts, in part because they don’t think ahead about purpose, goals and potential broader impact. Companies should cut funding to journey-mapping initiatives that lack a clear objective, executive champion, customer insights and the participation of key stakeholders. The blog recommends that contact centers use Forrester’s Customer Journey Mapping Canvas to consider the factors that shape the effort before, during and after mapping is complete.
Experiment with customer journey orchestration technology. Customer journey orchestration involves using tools to improve journey discovery and accelerate journey improvements. While this is a critical process, only 19% of CX leaders say their teams use CJO tools. Contact centers should focus a pilot project on one of the core use cases of CJO: discovering journeys across steps, channels and silos; analyzing past, present, and future behavior; predicting journey outcomes and measuring results; or adjusting interactions across channels in key moments.
Read Forrester Research’s full blog post here.
Edited by
Alex Passett
