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Customer Experience: Shrinkage
Today’s consumer is sophisticated, vocal and not as loyal as many believe. Consumers are apt to evaluate their suppliers and providers first and foremost on the experience that company provides, on a loyalty programme or its products, but more importantly on the service they receive. Customer service departments need to understand that they need to delight or surprise their customers on an ongoing basis. Every experience matters which when delivered over time in a positive way, is they way to build a longterm relationship and drive profitable growth. Engaged agents delivering quality customer interactions are therefore pivotal, and if you cannot provide them, consumers will grow frustrated and simply move on to another provider.
Assumptions We all need to extract more from what we have available, particularly at the present time, when driving operational efficiencies is of utmost importance. But the challenge is to recognise – and plan for – the potential knock-on effect with the consumer. Optimising people and processes, whether inside or outside of the contact centre, is one area where organisations can secure a meaningful and ongoing return on their investment. The ability to ensure that your contact centre is using the optimal number of staff – with the right skills, and all working at the right time – will not only ensure that costs are kept to a minimum, but also deliver service level improvements as customers appreciate greater access to the contact centre. For instance, cutting down the amount of time that agents spend on training might be an easy option to save on hours spent away from the phones, but there are knock-on effects to taking such actions. Having more staff available to deal with customer complaints can be positive if there is capacity to be met, however if agents have no idea how to handle the customer’s query, then that time is wasted. There is a danger of creating a false economy within the contact centre, and making sure that shrinkage is as accurate as possible will prevent this and guarantee every agent’s time is being spent making sure customers are receiving the best experience possible, with the appropriate tools and skill sets.
Customer experience: Shrinkage
The Voice of the Customer For decades, customer-facing staff were taught that the first rule of customer service is that the customer is always right – that still remains true today. It is also true that with the emergence of tools such as social media, the customer’s voice is increasingly more powerful. This increased power that the customer has, means that it has become even more important that a business is offering its customers a positive experience. For example, if a customer has a bad experience dealing with the contact centre, they now have the capability to simply go on to social media and make their complaint public.
Customer Satisfaction Running a successful contact centre operation means managing by the numbers, and the most important number of all is the number of bodies in seats each hour to respond to customer contacts. Since over two-thirds of contact centre operating costs are related to personnel, getting the ‘just right’ number of staff in place is critical in terms of both service and cost. But this is the service provider’s problem – the consumer simply does not care. All they want is their personal problem dealt with quickly and efficiently by agents that understand the issue.
Conclusion Loyalty is not a given. It is neither permanent, nor under the control of a service provider. They simply have it on loan for short periods of time - from one interaction to another and from one call to another. So the customer experience is something that should never be underestimated; it needs to be an easy, flowing, straightforward and satisfying process. Service providers who ignore this simple maxim, do so at their peril.
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About Aspect Aspect’s fully-integrated solution unifies the three most important facets of modern contact centre management: customer interaction management, workforce optimisation, and back-office. Through a full suite of cloud, hosted and hybrid deployment options, we help the world’s most demanding contact centres seamlessly align their people, processes and touch points to deliver remarkable customer experiences. For more information, visit www.aspect.com/uk
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