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Colliding Priorities: Balancing Customer Demands with Operational Realities

by Mariann McDonagh, CMO, inContact - August 31, 2015

 Colliding priorities: Balancing Customer Demands with Operational Realities 
By Mariann McDonagh, CMO, inContact


Just when you thought the 21st century customer had everything he could possibly ask for, new demand will arise. We’ve reached an age of utmost customer empowerment, where customers are looking to feel privileged, in control and as though their experience was tailored specifically for them. As exceedingly high expectations become increasingly unmanageable, customer service centers have hit a road block – and legacy customer service systems are having a hard time staying on top of it all.

In a 2013 survey of customer experience executives, Aberdeen found that more than half of all organizations are pressured by the impact of empowered customers. While companies may be ready to step up to new demands and opportunities, expectations from prospects and customers quickly turn businesses face to face with management realities, forcing them to deal with both external and internal challenges to meet customer needs.

The prevailing problem here is aging infrastructure as most customer service organizations are still employing rigid systems that are not fit for today’s multichannel service expectations. Agents suffer while manually switching between phone, email, chat, social, CRM, billing or shipping systems – the list goes on. Couple this with transfers between different service departments and agents are bound to find themselves frustrated by a bit of a chaotic work experience. Knowing these challenges, it comes as no surprise that service quality and workforce effectiveness decline as agents manually switch between this tremendous number of silo systems, all while trying to provide a high level of service to the customer.

Operational Challenges: The Agent Experience
Setting customer experience aside, what of the agent experience? (They’re people too!) As service quality suffers, so too does the agent’s productivity and morale. Limited by these rigid systems, the internal staff is faced with time consuming interruptions and unmanageable multitasking. Frustrated by the inability to get information or switch between communication channels, agents struggle to deliver the services their customers now expect and desire of them. Leaving customers unsatisfied and agents discouraged.

Managerial Challenges
Beyond the agent experience, so, too, are management and executive teams struggling as they work to gain centralized visibility into the complete customer care workload. Assessing where, when and how improvements can be made in the end-to-end service experience requires better understanding of individual agent challenges and identified technological areas to be corrected. More problematic still is the fact that customer experience executives lack visibility across the entire customer journey altogether. In service organizations with outdated infrastructure, interactions through every stage of the relationship aren’t tracked or connected in a meaningful way for management to analyze. Consequently, organizations fall short of providing a consistent experience in the current environment, and much less a personalized response, which is becoming crucial in today’s service realm.

Updating Systems
There comes a point where the cost and time required to update, integrate or modify older systems stands in the way of any attempts to innovate or change the service experience. Like many other areas of the business, it becomes a matter of balance. As empowered customers take control of their relationships, organizations must become more adept at understanding customer service needs and responding with innovative service offerings that put the customer in control, without breaking the bank. Investing in analytics and research will help organizations identify which areas should be considered the highest priority, and inform decision makers on how to tackle the overhaul either from an incremental or soup-to-nuts approach. The empowered customer will continue to demand a high level of service, and business wanting to maintain their customer base will look seriously at how they can provide that high level of satisfaction through agent performance, operational efficiencies and technological improvements.

 
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