Technology to enhance customer experience

fruit and veg Customers go back to their corner shops over and again. Why? It’s not simply about the qualitry of produce they get there, but also because of the quality of service they receive. It’s a model that call centres could do with replicating, says Neil Titcomb. And they should be doing it by focusing on their technology choices

Until recently, businesses would nod sagely about the need to ‘improve the customer ‘journey’ yet, when it came to taking investment decisions, the reality was that the customer would be all but forgotten in the drive for greater operational efficiencies and a better bottom line.

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Within the call centre itself, this was reflected in a quantitative focus on productivity - how many calls are being made in the shortest answer times - rather than a more qualitative assessment of how many were being dealt with satisfactorily at first pass.
In short, for most it has been a case of lip service rather than customer service.
Today, however, the picture is changing. Markets have become more global and competitive, giving customers greater choice. At the same time, with the advent of tools like the Internet, customers have become more knowledgeable and promiscuous, ever more willing to ‘vote with their feet’ if the product or service fails to meet expectations.
And finally, with products becoming increasingly commoditised, there is a growing need to differentiate the business through the quality of its service and support.
The development of CRM
Over the past half-century, as businesses have expanded, so the essential familiarity and customer understanding typified by the old ‘corner shop’ has been lost. Indeed, it could be said that this has been one of the main drivers behind the emergence of customer relationship management (CRM) technologies, in that true CRM will have been achieved when the enterprise has the equivalent level of knowledge about their customers as the archetypal local shopkeeper.
This kind of familiarity is something to which any consumer can relate and any corporate aspire, yet in some ways the technology has yet to catch up in delivering the experience.
One of the main reasons is the fact that CRM solutions have focused almost exclusively on the acquisition of customer information. Yet the most sophisticated database will be of limited value unless that information can be accessed and used intelligently at the point of customer contact.
Integrated approach
The result is that there has been something of a reality check among end-users. Though still seen as a worthwhile goal, earlier misconceptions that CRM by itself might provide a ‘quick fix’ have now been superseded by a more sanguine recognition that this needs to be part of a broader approach, encompassing infrastructure and process change.
So what steps should a business take if it wishes to derive both the operational and external service benefits from a more intimate understanding of the customer?
If the objective is primarily about improving the customer experience, the business should put itself in the customer’s shoes to determine how easy or difficult it is to communicate and resolve issues with the organisation.
Having identified those parts of each process that hinder rapid and effective problem resolution, the ideal solution should incorporate the following elements:

Interaction management
Every business has the necessary knowledge of each customer; the key is to access and react appropriately to that data at the point of interaction. In a contact centre environment in which the interaction is primarily telephony-based, this relies on identification and qualification of data to initiate that recognition.

In order to be able to make this essential link between the caller and the information held on them within the business therefore, the chosen solution must seamlessly combine the database management capability of a CRM system with some form of customer interaction management (CIM).
This provides two key benefits. By understanding who that customer is and predicting why the customer might be calling, it becomes possible to connect them immediately with an agent with the appropriate skills for dealing with their anticipated enquiry.
Further, it enables the delivery of differentiated services levels. If the caller is identified as a premium customer, for example, they can be answered within an agreed call time, ahead of others.
This directly benefits the customer, as their problems are solved at first pass. And the company becomes operationally more effective as fewer agents are required.
In a commercial environment, where developing the existing client base is much less costly than converting new prospects, the ability to intelligently use trend analysis to predict customer behaviour also provides the basis for a more proactive marketing capability designed both to promote loyalty and to encourage up-selling.
Presence management
One of the key tools in extending contact centre capability across the broader enterprise is presence management. This breaks down the historic barriers between the contact centre and other departments, providing visibility of the status of any employee throughout the business.
If the call centre agent needs to resolve an accounts query, for example, they can see the availability of a suitable member of the finance team, put the call on-hold, briefly explain the nature of the query and then connect the caller, resulting in a ‘warm’ introduction in which the customer does not have to repeat the enquiry.
Equally, if the customer dials that employee directly, presence management enables the call to be forwarded to wherever they are situated, for instance in another company location or home office. Further, if they are not immediately available, a voicemail message can be e-mailed to the recipient as an alert, enabling an early response.
Single comprehensive modular platform
Historically, contact centre operators have acquired point solutions to deal with point problems, building up a complex infrastructure of multiple licensing and maintenance contracts in which the various applications do not talk to each other, resulting in a slow and ‘clunky’ customer response.
In adopting a single unified communications platform based on open systems, the end-user reduces the reliance on multiple third party vendors, significantly reducing cost and management complexity. Importantly, an open systems solution, which can integrate with a CRM package or other third party applications already in place, will also help leverage existing investment.
Few businesses either need, or can afford up-front, the full range of technologies. By adopting a solution based on a modular architecture, the end-user can invest in such differing applications as automatic call distribution (ACD) skills-based routing, interactive voice response (IVR), unified messaging, predictive dialling, multimedia recording and more, so cost-effectively addressing nearly any contact centre or enterprise requirement.
A balanced response
Today, from both a commercial and technology perspective, call centre managers must put in place more qualitative measures which also look at the customer experience and the impact of each call on customer satisfaction. However, the technology is now available to enable them to achieve the tricky balancing act of keeping call centre costs to a minimum, at the same time achieving ‘corner shop’ service quality.
For the corner shopkeeper, customers are real people with real needs that are well-recognised and understood. The enterprise looking to differentiate their offering through superior, individualised service must also now recognise that it is no longer a numbers game.