According to Gartner, customer experience is the last source of sustainable differentiation and the new competitive battleground. So says Deon Scheepers, strategic consultant at Genesys.
On this note ITWeb, in partnership with Genesys, conducted an online Contact Centre Survey in December 2016 to gain clarity on how South African organisations are approaching strategies for their contact centres.
It's not surprising the survey revealed that a large number of respondents (87%) said that customer experience is extremely important to their organisation; only 12% rated it as "important".
"Research also shows that companies focused on customer experience outperform companies that have no, or little, focus on customer experience in revenue, growth and shareholder value. Most organisations today do realise the importance of providing 'good' customer experience and this is correctly reflected in the survey," says Scheepers.
The most common problem is, however, in the creation and implementation of the customer experience (CX) strategy, he adds.
"We see many organisations that say CX is important to them, but they don't even have a formulated and communicated customer experience strategy in place."
Scheepers stresses that customer experience is important because it provides higher customer referral rates and customer satisfaction; eases customer acquisition, drives customer loyalty and improves customer retention; reduces customer churn and creates a competitive advantage and differentiation.
Seventy-four percent of respondents indicated that their organisation does indeed have a customer experience strategy in place.
"The customer service centre or contact centre has an important, even critical role in any organisation's customer experience strategy," Scheepers continues. "Organisations must however be aware that a CX strategy should include the entire organisation and not just the customer service centre or contact centre. Customers will be emotionally influenced and form an opinion about your organisation when interacting or experiencing your brand and brand-promise via multiple channels and customer touch-points."
Scheepers also believes organisations must ensure that they understand the impact that their CX strategy will have on their contact centres, including resources.
The survey results kept in line with a customer centric focus as 80% of respondents indicated that they do ask their customers what their service expectations and requirements are. Only 14% said they do not.
"The biggest benefit of this is that you do not have to guess what your customer expectations are, or what they value and view as great customer service and experience. By first asking your customer what their service expectations and requirements are you will know exactly what to include as part of your customer service strategy and invest your resources in the correct places, where they can add most value. This approach will reduce the cost and time required to run various trial-and-error initiatives to identify which are the best and most adopted or accepted by your customers," Scheepers explains.
Just under half of the respondents (46%) indicated that their contact centre currently uses quality assessment and monitoring tools and over half (55%) of these are currently using voice/call recording technologies.
According to Scheepers, the top three most commonly used quality assessment tools are voice/call recording, quality assessment forms/scorecards and customer feedback surveys. Voice/call recording allows the recording of all voice interactions with customers which can then be used by supervisors and/or quality assessors to evaluate the quality of the customer interaction and identify any agent development or training needs, he elaborates.
"Supervisors and/or quality assessors can also listen to live calls and provide agent assistance and coaching while the customer interaction is taking place, in real-time. This can happen without the customer even being aware of the third party involvement," he explains.
Quality assessment forms or scorecards allow supervisors and quality assessors to rate and score each call using a pre-defined and approved set of criteria each with a specific weighting based on its importance to the quality objectives, he adds.
"This also helps to ensure that a fair a consistent standard of evaluation and assessment is used for each workgroup or customer service channel."
Customer feedback is very important in measuring customer satisfaction and to ensure that customer experience is improved at all times, Scheepers emphasises.
"The quicker feedback is collected after the customer interaction, the faster the organisation can respond to bad or negative ratings or comments that could possibly damage the company's reputation and brand. Customer feedback is collected in many ways using multiple media types. Customer satisfaction and experience can be measured directly after each call by, for example, routing the customer to the IVR to respond to a few questions. Customer feedback can also be collected and measured by sending customers e-mail or SMS/USSD surveys," he concludes.
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