Creating a memorable customer experience

The key to a winning brand now relies on creating an exceptional experience for customers as a basis for differentiating from competitors. Actions do indeed speak louder than words.

Customer service and a client's experience is becoming the centre of competition for companies, and as such, the points of contact a firm has with its customers become crucial in creating a memorable customer experience.

Enter the contact centre, which is the customer's main touch point with the organisation, and has become a major vehicle for delivering and completing client contacts. The goal of these modern contact centres needs to be to support the brand and corporate strategy across all customer touch points, as opposed to focusing merely on productivity and efficiency.

It is necessary to leverage technology to produce the results a business demands

Leslie Forsman, business development manager at Avaya Sub-Saharan Africa

The burning question facing organisations that wish to re-engineer contact centres to deliver excellent branded customer experience is: how exactly does a company make this transition? How can a more compelling, more powerful client experience in support of a firm's brand strategy be created?

Firstly, it is necessary to leverage technology to produce the results a business demands, and to keep up to date on developments in technology to ensure the most up-to-date and advanced procedures are used.

Technology can be harnessed to drive business value, and differentiate a company by treating customers as assets instead of annoyances. This technology can also be used to personalise and give a consistent customer experience. This may involve capturing client details, recording customer preference and call history and so on. Having more intelligent customer data means that agents can access this data faster and act on it quicker, leading to higher levels of service.

Implementing speech recognition and interactive voice response technology can also be helpful in improving customer service levels by enabling consumers to deal with simple queries and processes on their own, freeing up operators to handle calls that require assistance.

In order to provide the best customer experience, it is necessary to give clients a choice when deciding how to interact with a business. Contact centres need to have the ability to accept correspondence in a variety of formats, from Internet queries to e-mail, phone and instant messaging, and seamlessly integrate these various channels, to improve the customer's experience and drive productivity gains. It is necessary too, to gain the ability to resolve customer queries as swiftly as possible. Being able to satisfy clients promptly and effectively is a good way of setting a business apart from its competitors.

However, it is important to bear in mind that customer feedback is vitally important with the roll-out of any new contact centre technology. This feedback can then be incorporated into the organisation's business model, ensuring the client experience remains at the highest possible level.

These are five next-generation best practices that can be used to transform the customer experience:

* Virtual infrastructure: The virtual infrastructure is the foundation for advanced practices that impact the customer experience. With a virtual infrastructure, companies are able to distribute customer contact communications while centralising control. Benefits of a virtual infrastructure include cost control, global sourcing and an enhanced client experience.
* Channel integration: Integrated customer interactions and information across multiple communication channels and points of customer contact are being embraced in the quest to provide a holistic client experience. The ultimate goal is to have seamless movement across all channels.
* Enhanced self-service: Natural speech will be a key element of the next-generation customer experience. A major factor in this is the growing use of cellphones and the need for business people to conduct business while commuting.
* Differentiated service: Matching the level of service to the lifetime value of the client is a key practice of the next-generation customer experience.
* Expertise on demand: Using advanced technologies to provide a distributed network of expertise inside the enterprise, accessible to the agent who is working with a customer to resolve an issue. At an advanced level, this will achieve an integration of the contact centre with the rest of the organisation where every employee is a potential resource for impacting the customer experience.

Companies are becoming increasingly reliant on customer care to create an excellent level of branded client experience, delivering on business strategies that give them a competitive-edge. Across industries and the world, technology investments are being made in customer care operations to continuously refine and make the "ideal" client experience a reality.