Don’t close your call center, just part of it
This month’s article is a collaboration with Andy Shockney, Redbank Advisor, and President and Founder of What Box Consulting Group. Andy has over twenty-five years of operational leadership with companies in Central Ohio. He has over ten years of corporate experience, and over ten years in entrepreneurship. He has been a full-time consultant since 2016.
This month we explore the contact centers and its role in helping an organization in facilitating their customer experience strategy. What step do you need to take when you feel like it’s just not worth it to keep your call center open.
Customer experience Strategy
“The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” Peter Drucker
You are too difficult. I wanted to buy, but there were too many steps. I didn’t get what I wanted, so I just gave up. I expected to get it faster. I was hoping for a better solution.
You understand the role of your contact center in your business, but it is frustrating and sometimes feels like a black box that just drains your profitability. Your role as a leader is to set the vision for the customer experience your busines swill create to create and keep the customers. The “source” of your pain can be one of the most potent weapons in your offensive to deliver a world-class service experience. The contact center is no longer just the call center these days, because we should be including omni-channel solutions including email, chat, and social in your solution. Do not get frustrated. Don’t close it, use it.
Redbank recommends that your customer experience can be defined by choosing the right customer experience strategy, choosing your customer experience channels, and raising the bar on your customer experience to achieve your next level of growth. This growth boils down to one very important key driver: Customer experience.
Understanding clearly what promises you make to your customer today and ensuring how you become great at keeping your promises. This experience will set the bar on how much growth you can achieve.
Redbank believes in profitable growth. Bootstrapping growth in your business should not be at the expense of profits, nor should your company achieve growth at the expense of your customer experience.
STEPS TO ACHIEVE GROWTH
1. Set Your Customer Experience Strategy
Why do your customers choose you today and why do they stay? Start with your most loyal, and valuable customers, and find out why they love your company, your product, and your service. You’ll quickly find that each step in the planning, purchasing, delivery, use, and support of your products and services will play a role in your customer experience. This is sometimes called the customer’s journey. Now set the terms for how you intend to win and keep your most valuable customers. This defines your customer experience strategy. Start with your contact center and find out why people contact you today. You will quickly find that although there may be hundreds of reasons for them to reach out, most of the dialogue is around a few KEY aspects of your product or service. These are the non-negotiables. This can provide you with a crystal-clear vision of the expectation your customers set for your company, and how well you are doing with meeting those expectations. Through the lens of your most valuable customers, you can now get a powerful and important perspective about how you will want to set the customer experience strategy to win and keep more customers like them. More like this, less like that.
2. Choose Customer Experience Channels
When a customer hears about your product or service and they consider a purchase, where do they go? Where do you want them to be? What is most important to them in making their final purchasing decision? Understand how your customer engages with your company and what they have come to expect. Ask the question and see the numbers. Redbank believes in data-driven decision making. It is powerful and helps us as leaders to cut through the cloudiness of rhetoric or the way we’ve always done things. The hard part of this exercise is to think about all the places that you may not track easily. Faxes. Trade shows. Social Media Sites. This all begins with listening to the voice of your customer and meeting them where they are at. Talk to your sales, marketing, and support teams immediately to help understand where you can best capture and track the channels you are using to communicate with your customers. Now pull these teams back together and be clear about the journey you want your customer to follow. Where do you want to win? This is your customer journey, and you can choose where to participate. Often, when we assess channels with customers, we make recommendations to remove or reduce channels. Don’t shut down the whole contact center, but we can get by with less faxes, for sure.
3. Raise the Bar on Your Customer Experience
You don’t need to change everything, but you’ve got to improve something. Create loyalty in your most valuable customers over the long-term and be clear how you want your most valuable customers to talk about your product or service. This is the most effective marketing you can buy– word of mouth. Spending on your contact center is buying word of mouth marketing. Create the remarkable experiences, around your customer experience strategy, in the channel you choose. With other processes, ensure you are setting clear and fair expectations with your customers in the delivery of your products and services. Raising the bar on your experience will set a cultural tone for all the people responsible for supporting your company in the delivery of the great customer experience you have come to expect. Picking your channel, will help your team to focus on where to win, and get less distracted by the latest shiny thing where customers may, or may not, be looking for feedback about your company or your product.
THE KEY TO DELIVER PROFITABLE GROWTH
Learning to listen to and understand your most loyal customers and their needs, as well as how to create and add value to their experiences, are essential building blocks upon which your profitable growth can rest. Redbank believes in this investment: become expert at measuring and shaping your customer experience. It is the key to delivering profitable growth. Your great experience will attract more valuable clients. Your profitable growth will attract the capital and talent you need to achieve the next level of growth for your business.
CALL TO ACTION
Here are the steps to take to determine the correct contribution of your call center to your strategy and to move your organization up the Capability Maturity Curve:
1. Establish your customer experience strategy to form a landscape against which to compare;
2. Choose the channels you will use to reach customers and to create that experience (each channel has a different set of criteria and expectations;
3. Assess the organization’s current performance against expectations set above; and
4. Challenge the organization to close the gap between current performance and expectations to raise the bar.