If I could provide a collective voice of what customers today think and feel, it would be to say, "Stop playing games. We don't appreciate it!" How do I know? Studies show that customers leave after one bad experience. Never before has the evidence been so clear about what companies must do, and do immediately, quickly, and smartly. They must deliver a stellar customer experience. The advantage for those who act now and do so is that they can blow away their competitors. The best place to start is in the contact center, by repositioning it as a strategic C-level business partner. Here's how:
Step 1: Rethink service
The first step is to reject the old paradigm that the contact center is a cost center. This outdated mentality is destroying the department in a company that has the most direct contact, and thus makes the largest impression, with customers. The contact center is no more a cost center than is advertising or marketing. It should be considered as a source of relationship building, branding, and selling. Executives must immediately stop underfunding contact centers, because doing so is the culprit of the destruction of customer experiences.
Step 2: Define your customer strategy
Many people might think the next step would be to choose technology. But before a company even thinks about a software vendor, it has to create and align its customer strategy and customer experiences. Using voice-of-the-customer studies is one way to unify a company on a common set of goals and criteria for all future
decisions, including those for choosing technology to support the consistent delivery of great customer experiences.
Step 3: Use customer experience metrics
Forrester discovered that organizations that offer better customer experiences have customers who buy more and are more loyal. For this reason it's vital to track metrics that reflect the value of the customer experience. In one study we demonstrated that by improving customer experiences, for example, in financial services, a particular bank could earn an additional $43 million in revenue and avoid losing $51 million (in one year) by retaining customers. This alone shows the potential value of contact centers that offer great experiences.
Step 4: Conduct a customer service gap analysis
When we surveyed enterprise executives about customer service,
91 percent said that customer experience would be important to their 2008 efforts-quite a jump from 38 percent the previous year. Two thirds of the executives want to differentiate their customer experience from competitors', even in a bad economy, and only a handful are willing to lag behind. While this seems to reflect a new strategic awareness about the customer, Forrester also found that 60 percent of executives said implementing technology was the second biggest obstacle to launching customer experience-based initiatives, just behind getting organizational alignment. We suggest conducting a gap analysis between your customer experience goals and the technologies and processes necessary to reach them, pinpointing the best opportunities for quick wins, and building an action plan to close the gaps.
Step 5: Implement customer service best practices
Adoption of such basic best practices as knowledge management, self-service, analytics, and customer strategy is low. When Forrester asked executives if their companies were implementing them, only 30 to 40 percent said yes. This clarifies why customers rate their experience so poorly. Companies aren't doing what they need to do to protect their most valued asset.
Step 6: Define who owns the customer experience
Clearly with the bottom-line value of customer experiences, someone in the organization needs to own the customer experience. Some will argue it should be the marketing department. Others will say the contact center. Regardless, the data is clear: Screw up service and you've driven down your customer lifetime value and reduced your bottom line. And there isn't a company in this economy that can afford to do that.
The CEO must define who in the organization owns the customer experience and make that person the chief customer officer. The CEO needs to give that new CCO positional power to spend, hire, and transform. And the CEO and the CCO must become fiscally responsible for the outcomes, and that includes shareholders holding them accountable for customer-related metrics to earn their bonuses. Without "bonus relevancy" customer experience becomes yet another management initiative du jour.
Current economic conditions and the need to gain and retain customers provide the contact center with an opportunity to become a C-level strategic business partner. If not now, then when?
To read the executive summary of Petouhoff's report, visit: www.forrester.com/1to1cs Contact Natalie Petouhoff, Ph.D at npetouhoff@forrester.com