The contact center is often overlooked, yet it is a critical component of any organisation's service and experience architecture. It's within the walls of this hive of activity that people, processes and technology come together to connect with customers one-on-one. Organisations spend millions for the same privilege during the marketing journey.
Traditionally, businesses have viewed the contact center through a short-term, cost-focused and technology-first lens. However, this approach falls short in driving long-term results. Rather, it is crucial to prioritise the service interaction moment when striving to achieve sustainable value. Organisations should aim to craft customer experiences that ultimately benefit both their top and bottom lines.
Rather than thinking with a transactional, cost-focused mindset, it's time to develop a relationship-first mindset. It's not enough to offer a decent customer interaction. Organisations must deliver a customer experience that maximizes collective value. The goal should be to balance an optimal customer experience with optimal cost.
Organizations can achieve this by earning customers' trust and making it easy to interact with them. In many industries, customer experience is the last point of differentiation businesses can offer to customers in an increasingly crowded world clamouring for people's attention. It's prudent for businesses to transform the contact center encounter and elevate it to its rightful place: the heart of exceptional experience.
Throughout the journey, keep the customer at the forefront by offering seamless services that bring together people, process and technology to maximize collective value.
Many customers dread the need to contact an organisation. Once they navigate the maze of phone menus, they face a level of redundancy, such as typing in their date of birth, ZIP code and other details, only to have to repeat the same information to a human seconds later. Perhaps a "slow system" forces continual, contrived apologies from the other side of the line. Or, maybe the customer went the chat route, only to have the conversation dropped midway or finding out that they have to call anyway. It's exhausting and does no one any favours.
Ironically, in the pursuit of pure short-term 'bottom dollar' cost optimisation, the long-term costs are high. Driven to despair, the even-tempered customer turns into the petulant, long-suffering customer (for whom seconds feel like hours). Ditching any modicum of sophistication, the crabby customer storms onto social media, transforming a conversation between two into a public situation for millions to opine on. Or, they simply leave for greener pastures, telling their friends to avoid doing business with you at any cost.
Not surprisingly, this interaction makes a mockery of what an exceptional experience should be. It becomes an absurd reminder of the madness that stalks the customer at every turn of their contact journey, threatening to diminish their experience from the first moment of their interaction until the last.
frog's service design expertise, together with our intimate knowledge of customer experience design enables us to partner with you to provide first-class contact center transformation solutions by providing you the confidence that you’re building the right service architecture, with the right capabilities, to support your vision and ambition.
The gap between the average customer interaction and executive decision-making is significant. Jeff Bezos famously called the Amazon Contact Center during a meeting of thirty Amazon executives to test one leader’s assertion that Amazon could answer each call in less than a minute. When four-and-a-half minutes ticked by, Bezos was furious.
While a boardroom intervention can be a powerful case for change, most executives would prefer to be ahead of any corporate escalation. A central purpose of the contact center is to create a series of intimate moments where you have an opportunity to build trust, develop a relationship and impress and delight a customer. But the daily grind of needing to maintain what lies "behind the curtain," such as process decisions, employee attrition and vendor conversations, all vie for executives' attention. It's easy to forget what it's all about.
These interactions cannot be an afterthought. They must be intelligently designed and informed and enabled by data. Each decision you make affects that moment. Each moment to interact with a customer is a critical touchpoint for the overall brand in its quest to retain the customer and optimize their experience A few bad moments - even just one - and you might see revenue walk away.
We consider contact center interactions as conversational moments. Yet, the reality is that each service moment is typically fraught with inefficiency. So, what can you do?
If solving customers' problems and enhancing their experience is top of mind, businesses should make the contact center the customer's playground by rethinking their spending priorities and growth strategies. The contact center experience is one that needs to be curated and cherished. Businesses must understand what supports those moments that oppose the customer, derailing their experience. As you embark on your organisation's contact center transformation, we offer three steps to craft a spot-on contact center transformation. In the past, cost considerations won, and customer concerns lost. For the future, collective value maximisation will win.
1. Dissect the anatomy of each service moment
Start with the end in mind. Build an anatomy of each moment so that you understand what a typical interaction looks like. Examine the anatomy and identify the optimal way to handle a contact to maximise the efficiency and value of the experience. Use that as your guidebook to inform your people, processes, and technology. Look for opportunities to create moments that truly matter.
2. Build collective value
Collective value refers to a service that maximises your investment in the contact center, while also enhancing both the customer and employee experience. Every customer is valuable, but expectations may vary by segment. Employees must feel valued and empowered to serve customers in the right way. Their experience is closely linked to customer satisfaction.
Deploy your limited resources in a manner that maximises your customer service by examining the balance between upfront investments, cost per service and employee and customer satisfaction.
3. Create an experience hub
We're redefining contact centers as experience hubs. An experience hub is an enterprise core that manages all service interactions and customer contacts across multiple channels. The experience hub bends the typical oscillating contact center ROI curve upward by enabling sustainable change at scale. This involves examining each service interaction to curate moments that are technology-enabled and operationally aligned, which prioritise customer and employee experiences.
… like transforming your contact center into an experience hub, creating sustainable value across the enterprise and procuring exceptional experiences for everyone? We help clients get this done.
Discerning customers have high service expectations and demand superior CX experiences, bringing contact centers to the forefront of transformation strategies. In today’s business climate, lasting ROI is achieved by transforming into an experience-focused, technology-augmented function.
We can service clients with a combination of engineering, technology and world-class design thinking that's just unmatched in the market.
As you seek to achieve service innovation, cost savings and revenue growth as part of your contact center transformation strategy, look to frog. We've done it. We're your business technology and transformation partner, here to bring full-spectrum value from beginning to end. To learn more about our customer experience design offerings, please download the report.
At frog, we get that a lot can happen in six minutes. You could even get in touch with us in six minutes. We hope you do. We're here to help.
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