One Goal to Rule Them All: Why Customer Experience Matters Most

How to cut through confusing and competing contact centre goals and put the focus on the single most important mission: improving customer experience.

Contact centre managers have a number of competing priorities, but there’s simply no question that customer experience is what matters most. Research from Harris Interactive states that a full 86 percent of customers claim they will shell out up to 25 percent more to get a better customer experience. If you’re not putting your operational focus squarely on improving the start-to-finish relationship your customers have with your company, you’re likely missing the mark.

Customer Experience is First – It’s Not Up for Debate

It’s no longer reasonable to question whether or not investing in improving the customer experience is worthwhile. New research shows it’s downright vital. A Harvard Business Review study found that after controlling for other factors driving repeat purchases, customers who reported having the best past experiences with a brand spent 140 percent more over time when compared with those reporting the poorest past customer experiences. Furthermore, the same research determined that customers giving brands the lowest customer experience ratings will likely only remain customers for a little more than a year, while those reporting the highest customer experience scores stay loyal to the brand for at least another six years!

It’s understandable that your contact centre must focus on a number of factors – improving your scores on key performance indicators and rising to the challenge of increasing call volumes are just a couple – but these points are small potatoes compared to the greater guiding mission you must work toward: improving the overall customer experience.

Customer Experience and the Multichannel Mindset 

In the multichannel world, you can’t afford to let customers’ unsatisfactory encounters with your client service centre go viral; new social media channels empower your clients to lambast your brand to their friends, fans, and followers. Be careful not to let the divide between the service levels your company promises and those that you deliver grow too wide. Bain, a management consulting company, has termed the gulf between a brand’s promise and its’ customers’ experiences the “delivery gap,” and it’s important to pay close attention to the implications of not delivering on your promises.

In an interesting study, Bain determined that while 80 percent of brands touted their products and services as “superior” (a pretty lofty brand promise), a measly eight percent of their customers mirrored the companies’ assessments of their offerings. That’s quite the gulf between promise and customer experience – a shockingly wide delivery gap you’d be wise to consider with reference to your own company.

If you’re talking a big game about customer service but not making good on your promises, the delivery gap may create some serious consequences in terms of consumer loyalty. In the contact centre, refocusing on customer experience may require some retraining and upgrades in the technology department. Let’s look a few key starting points.

Improving Customer Experience in the Contact Centre

To get the ball rolling on upgrading the experience your loyal consumers have when interacting with your brand, consider:

1. Offering multichannel customer service options.
2. Upgrading contact centre software to provide fuller information for both agents and customers.
3. Taking a proactive approach to customer service rather than putting out fires – pay attention to key insights cleaned from smart contact centre software systems.
4. Accessing the full customer history rather than focusing solely on the present interaction. A good CRM platform will give agents the ability to get a full customer profile.

Customer Experience KPIs

To get started evaluating your contact centre’s performance with reference to customer experience, you need to know which metrics are most useful for evaluating your performance. What KPIs are most informative for evaluating customer experience?

• Word of Mouth Index (WoMI) – Measures both likelihood to detract from a specific brand in addition to consumers’ likelihood to recommend it.
• Net Promoter Score – Divides customers into three categories – promoters, passive customers, and detractors – by asking how likely they are to recommend a brand to their friends and colleagues.
• Customer Effort Score – Measures how much effort the consumer reports was required to resolve her issue and compares it to her expectations of what would be required.

Be sure to measure yourself against other companies in your industry rather than working toward some arbitrarily determined number that may not be relevant for your market.

The Takeaway

It’s easy to get carried away by the many competing priorities you must manage when running a contact centre. But even when you feel overwhelmed, never lose sight of the main goal: delivering an excellent customer experience. For more on how to deliver the customer experience “goods,” check out our free white paper.