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At Aspect, we’ve talked for some time about the potential of the contact center to tap the collective intelligence of the organization to serve the customer. Through this level of engagement, progressive companies have built a competitive advantage by being customer service champions. Others seem to be coming around to that notion as well.
Traditionally, the contact center was seen as the cost of doing business—a compulsory function that sought to resolve issues but wasn’t a source of competitive advantage. The evolution of industry, technology, and consumer behavior is changing how we collectively think about the relationship of business and the customer. The confluence of technologies such as unified communications and the more collaborative nature of today’s consumers are highlighting the contact center’s vital role in strengthening customer relationships.
A recent Forrester blog noted that we have entered the Age of the Customer. As analyst William Band puts it:
“The successful companies will be customer-obsessed, like Best Buy, IBM, and Amazon.com. Executives in customer-obsessed companies must pull budget dollars from areas that traditionally created dominance—brand advertising, distribution lockup, mergers for scale, and supplier relationships—and invest in four priority areas: 1) real-time customer intelligence; 2) customer experience and customer service; 3) sales channels that deliver customer intelligence; and 4) useful content and interactive marketing.”
Fundamentally, Band is saying that if companies don’t have strong customer relationships, efficient operations and savvy marketing won’t matter. That’s a bold statement: in effect, the focus on operational excellence should take a backseat to customer experience. So while I’m happy that executives want to join the customer experience party, I don’t believe companies should view it as an either-or proposition. Let me explain.
Many companies are already reassessing the traditional organizational functions and how they interact. I’ve written previously that the entire organization, led by the contact center, must work together to serve the customer. Greater collaboration and more effective information sharing are critical to support this evolution. Fortunately, unified communications provides the tools and capabilities to enable employees to reach across departments.
The contact center is emerging as the natural hub of interaction between the organization and the consumer. How critical is the contact center in the Age of the Customer? Let’s take a look at the four priority areas noted above:
Real-time customer intelligence. In the course of operations, contact center technologies can extract and analyze data from not just social media but also customer service conversations, providing companies invaluable customer insights
Customer experience and customer service. The next-generation contact center has the ability to engage with consumers on their terms—multiple channels in real time. Traditional metrics such as average call times have given way to a more holistic view of interaction and customer experience.
Sales channels that deliver customer intelligence. By integrating outbound dialing, text messaging, and social media, the contact center has become one of the most valuable sales channels. The contact center has the ability to capture insight from customer conversations and translate it into business intelligence that can then inform future customer encounters.
Useful content and interactive marketing. The contact center now has the ability to tap experts and offer content to enrich the customer interaction. FAQs, online self service, and content such as blogs and white papers are other powerful tools in the contact center arsenal.
Companies can reorient their customer service efforts so that every part of the organization—from executives and experts to frontline personnel—is supporting the same strategy. And by giving the contact center a more prominent role, executives will still be able to devote the necessary resources to operations.
