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By Anna Convery, CMO and EVP, Strategy - OpenSpan

 

As the close of first quarter of 2016 quickly approaches, now is the time for customer experience leaders to take a moment to pause and evaluate where your organization stands in relation to the goals you set for 2016. Are you on track to hit your performance targets? What obstacles are impeding your success?

 

It’s also a time to take a look at the latest industry trends and best practices and explore how these efforts could benefit your contact center operations. What technologies or business practices are other companies adopting that you should consider to help keep your company on track through the end of the year?

 

Here are four critical focus areas for customer service leaders to consider to continue to build exceptional customer journeys and more profitable customer relationships now and in the months to come:  

 

 

The greatest challenge faced by today’s contact center and customer experience leaders is data. Contact centers – especially in the last 20 years – have become some of the most instrumented and benchmarked areas of the enterprise. The challenge is not about getting more data. It’s more about learning how to use data to bring value to the enterprise.

 

This means understanding how to leverage data to better understand the customer, sharing data captured in the contact center and using it to improve other parts of the business. Ultimately, companies must embrace data and use it to effectively impact change – transformations that help organizations become healthier, more competitive enterprises.

 

The most successful companies today are using the big data revolution to their advantage. They are using data from within their contact centers to better understand their customers’ interaction points. These organizations are using data to understand what actions derive the most positive outcomes – in terms of service and profitability – and using that data to scale best practices across the service landscape is invaluable to creating a distinguished brand.  

Omnichannel customer experience is a key focus for contact center leaders as customer behaviors and technology to evolve. Organizations across all industries are evaluating emerging channels such as social media and live web chat as possible interaction points for customer service. Many organizations face the challenge of prioritizing these initiatives as well as maintaining and enhancing their current service channels. As your company explores the possibility of adding new channels into your overall customer strategy, always keep the customer at the center of these decisions.

 

Ask the question, “Will adding social customer service into the mix truly benefit our customer, or does it make more sense to focus on optimizing my existing channels?” In the contact center where there are finite resources when it comes to time, money and people, it’s a matter of striking a balance. Sometimes it’s not about making every channel work, but it’s more about knowing which channel works best for you to service the customer.

 

 

 

Smart enterprises are going the extra mile to understand the drivers of employee engagement because they know that their engaged employees are their company’s brand ambassadors. These companies want to know the drivers for engagement, but also the detractors. Complex processes, fragmented systems and lack of adequate customer data, for example, are all of factors that can lead to lower employee engagement. Forward-thinking organizations are taking steps to minimize these obstacles to make employees more productive and they are empowering them to be the service champions for their companies.

 

Set up your employees for success! Continue to use data to get the insight you need to increase employee engagement and productivity. For example, use technology to gain insight into “a day in the life.” Are they having a difficult time navigating desktop applications and are complex processes preventing them from delivering great customer service? From there, you can adjust those distractions accordingly to simplify processes and transactions, making employees more productive and efficient. You can more proactively identify the factors that lead to employee disengagement such as disruptive company emails, unnecessary team meetings or system maintenance. Having a line of sight into your employee’s work day gives you the ability to apply changes to the business that will create a more engaged workforce.

4.      The Millennials are here – adapt and morph.

One-in-three American workers today are Millennials (adults ages 18-34) according to Pew Research. This generation, known as the “touchscreen generation,” are the ones who grew up with information-on-demand and cell phones in their hands. Their expectation and experience are drastically different from any other, causing a cultural shift within the workplace and one that enterprises must continue to evolve.

 

Traditionally, contact center technologies are more function-driven, lacking sleek user interfaces and flashy features. With Millennials having limited experience with Windows applications, mainframes or dumb terminals, it is essential to explore new ways to access data that resides within these applications and build highly intuitive user interfaces that keep these employees engaged and on a path to success.

 

To drive deeper levels of engagement among these employees, provide real-time insight into performance goals and metrics on their desktop. Providing this visibility to Millennials helps motivate and incent these employees, keeping their focus on driving revenue and achieving their performance targets.

 

 

What’s your plan for the rest of the year? Is it full speed ahead with your current goals and strategic initiatives? Or, do you know there are opportunities to start looking past what you thought would be your priorities and considering some of these trends and best practices? Remember that the key to delivering world-class service is understanding your customer and having visibility into the customer journey.

 

There is still plenty of time left in the year to course correct and change things up for your operations. I encourage you to bring your teams together to discuss goals, brainstorm and level set with everyone in your organization to determine the most successful path related to what you want to accomplish. Keeping these four top trends in mind can certainly help you build a plan to ensure you have the right data needed to implement changes that will improve the lives of your employees and your customers.