In the new Forrester Research report, "Customer Service: A Keystone of Your Corporate Revenue Strategy," senior analyst Natalie Petouhoff concludes that customer service, and the contact center in particular, are vital contributors to profit and value.

"Customer service has the stigma that it is a cost of doing business, and not a competitive edge or differentiator," she says. "My number one priority is to make the customer experience relevant to executives."

According to Petouhoff, there is a corporate cultural barrier that keeps top executives from embracing the importance of customer service initiatives. "Solutions that don't directly affect them or appear to fit as part of their strategy are assigned to different silos. From there, the executives think they are being handled, but they never see how to correlate those efforts to the financial success of the company."

She believes the time has come for shareholders to make CEOs directly accountable for customer service. "How is it that we measure the agents who make $14 an hour so excruciatingly, but we don't measure the CEO for financial accountability and results?" she says. "When it comes to CEOs, unless it is a part of their compensation, it is not relevant to them."

To that end, she suggests that the contact center create a customer experience index using already the wealth of information it has on customers. The index can help illuminate such concepts as customer lifetime value and the long-lasting impact of corporate decisions on buying behavior. Over time, such an index can indicate the true health of a company's business, better than any bump in revenues or upsell activity can. "Contact center professionals can use what they know about loyalty and defection to help measure the totality of the customer experience," she says. "If you do that, you can figure out what it takes to get people to buy more, and for a longer period of time, and why your customers switch."

Unfortunately, executives may lack faith in the ability of their customer service staff to execute on value-added strategies. The report cites previous Forrester data, which indicates that business and IT decision makers have more confidence in the capabilities of their contact center's technological infrastructure than they do in the quality of their actual customer service delivery, be it from live agents, or via email, self-service knowledge bases, or collaborative forums.

Petouhoff says some of the blame lies with the historically narrow, operational priorities handed down to the typical contact center. "One of the issues with customer service in the contact center today is that it is such a tactically driven function that [a company] doesn't have the time or money to make it strategic," she says. "Efficiency is what drives average handle time and all of the other metrics that keep agents structured, but there needs to be a balance between efficiency and the effectiveness of being a brand ambassador."

By doing more to express the role of customer service as part of a value-creating business case, service leaders may be able to gain a greater say in setting the ground rules for the company/customer interface. "We know that companies that offer good customer experiences tend to perform better financially, and we know that customers say in many ways that they are willing to pay more to get good service," she says. "Now we need to empower those customer service leaders with the information and tools they need to become leaders of a financial strategy."