Don't Get Caught on the Tail End of Service
Most contact center professionals know and understand that customer satisfaction and customer engagement are critical components of effective customer service. And the way to improve upon them is to continuously anticipate and accommodate customers’ needs.
But if a company’s communications channel is not integrated with the rest of the organization, then customer loyalty is at risk. Without integration, companies cannot deliver an experience to the customer that is tailored and one that they’ve come to expect.
I’m currently attending Frost & Sullivan’s Customer Contact West in Huntington Beach, CA, and have realized, after speaking to a number of contact center executives, that cross-channel integration is a common challenge among many companies across a variety of industries. Challenges are ubiquitous: from unsuccessfully disseminating information and not achieving a holistic view of the customer, to not obtaining cooperation in the culture and having the inability to optimize customer information from outside the organization.
Some executives (from well-known corporations) told me that their enterprises still operated in silos; others said that executives didn’t want to make the investment to integrate the technologies and process; and others added that their organizations were in dire need of someone in a position to champion and own the customer strategy, such as a chief customer officer.
Despite all our progress in delivering effective customer care, we’re still in the initial stages of the customer service evolution. Customer engagement is more rapidly becoming the key differentiator in today’s fast-paced business climate. If your communications channels aren’t integrated, than you aren’t providing the level of service to your customers that they deserve and anticipate. If you don’t pick up the pace, eventually your competition will.
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