Our Top-10 to Improve Efficiency and
Elevate the Customer Experience without
Breaking the Bank

By Neil Crane
Director of Product Development
Cicero, Inc.

Elevating the customer experience is about delighting the customer and turning them into ambassadors for your company. As competition grows, especially in this economy, cost reduction is paramount, but you cannot afford to sacrifice customer experience for the sake of cost reduction. Today's service centers need to focus on the customer experience from the moment someone becomes a prospect, to when they buy, through the times when they call for support or even raise a complaint. The challenge is how to understand what happens during these customer interactions - to identify what is working and to change what isn't, using what you have AND without breaking the bank!

In this white-paper we’ll focus on practical steps to streamline processes and optimize the customer experience enabling you to do more with less.

In their book ‘Rules to Break and Laws to Follow’, Don Peppers & Martha Rogers make the assertion that our most scarce resource is not, in fact, money but customers. If we have the right product and the right market we can always get more money but we will eventually run out of customers – even if that is a big number! If we agree with that assertion then the question becomes how we, in the contact center, maximize the value of the relationship with each of our customers, now and in the future.

The core theme behind our Top-10, then, is that we need to focus on the customer interaction to create long term value. By focusing on the interaction from both ends (outside-in and inside-out) we can identify methods to improve operational efficiency and increase customer satisfaction. Now these are lofty goals that could be expensive to implement, but our aim is to get pragmatic and share some ideas that will make a big difference for very little effort or money.

To do this without breaking the bank we need to understand where we’ll get the best return on investment and to do that we need to better understand what the customer wants and expects from us, what we do well and where the customer tells us that we are falling short.

In a survey of what customers say they want from companies conducted by Richard Lee and David Mangen, the top two items on the customer’s mind are better products in the first place and then agents that are empowered to help. Third was that the agent had access to all the information about the customer, even if the relationship spanned multiple departments or different lines of business. Brand strength, self-service and the offer of additional services just weren’t of significant importance to the people surveyed and yet these are areas we frequently see get a great deal of focus from within.

So what does this mean that we should focus on in terms of the experience? Well, it’s all about time – but not in the classic sense of average handling time (AHT). Instead it’s about the time we spend building the relationship with the customer.

I want to use the familiar stopwatch as an illustration of the elements that contribute to the customer experience and then tie that back to what the customer has said is important to them. Using the survey data, the Customer tells us that the #1 contributor to the experience is the Product. #2 is the Person that helps them and #3 is the information that person has available and how they go about using it – I’ll call this Process. These three, Product, People and Process, are the gears in our stopwatch and they have to mesh perfectly if the watch is going to function correctly. Supporting the gears are all the spindles, ratchets and the case itself – these are the Tools that support your call center operation, your IVR, CRM etc – Element #4 in the customer experience. Finally we have the button that makes it all Go – Leadership, element #5. Leadership sets the tone, leadership decides what’s important; and notice that I said ‘Leadership’ and not ‘Management’. It’s not so much Operational as it is Cultural and Visionary.

So with all this in mind, let’s come back to our topic: Our ‘Top-10’ to Improve Efficiency and Elevate the Customer Experience without Breaking the Bank. These ideas have all come from your peers at different ThinkTanks and discussion groups that we have hosted and they are all things your peers said they can do now. They won’t all apply to you but try to keep an open mind and see if there are principles in some of them that do.

Number 10 - Walk the floor – In our straw poll at a recent Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXChange, most of the contact center executives that we talked to said they did this on a regular basis but what wasn’t so common was the idea that senior executives and product managers did it too.

Our first action item, then, is to schedule regular time for senior leaders to walk the floor and listen to calls. Get everyone in the organization focused on the customer experience. Product Managers, for example, will see first-hand the little things they can improve that will make a big difference. One word of caution: this needs to be done within a ‘Culture of Appreciation’ and not one of condemnation. I’ll come back to what I mean by that.

Number 9 - Be The Customer – Have your Agents call into your own center as a mystery shopper, not to check up on anyone, but to experience it from the other side. While you are at it, have them call on the competition to experience what they do differently and perhaps better.

Number 8 - Focus on Behavior rather than Numbers – AHT is a necessary measure for workforce planning, but do your agents need to know the numbers? Several operations managers have shared with us how they turned off the scrolling displays and reported that customer satisfaction and revenue both went up with positive impact on profitability.

Within the context of behavior, create that Culture of Appreciation and not one of Condemnation that I noted above. Several of our Top-10 could be viewed with suspicion if there is no trust between agents and their leaders. Instead, set the focus outside, on the customer, and help everybody see the goal of these items is to create long term value, making everyone more successful.

Number 7 - Engage the Caller, Document Later – almost inevitably, most of your callers have spent time on hold while they wait for an agent. Do you put them on hold again while you make notes during the call? Spend the time with the caller actually with the caller; document the call after you hang up. After call work may increase but those that offered this suggestion found that time on call was reduced and the two balanced out to have no significant impact on AHT while customer satisfaction scores improved.

Number 6 - Listen to Your Agents – establish a forum for communication between agents and to their leaders, including executives. One company shared with us how they held a twice yearly town-hall meeting for a group of agents to meet directly with senior management and bring a collaborated top-few items to address. The group would choose one or two that could be tackled over the following six months. If you do this, be sure to provide feedback on progress so the agents can see that their ideas are valued and acted upon.

Number 5 - Listen to Your Customers – provide agents with access to their call recordings and feedback from customers and schedule peer review meetings (again, within the rules of that Culture of Appreciation). I heard of one company that put old PCs in the break-room and agents were able to login and listen to their calls. Others listen to each other’s calls and the best are rewarded with nominal tokens that cost very little but mean a lot to those receiving them.

Number 4 - Streamline the Execution of the Processes – eliminate redundant steps and stop asking questions you know the answer to because you have them somewhere else, whether it is in the IVR or another application. This doesn’t need to be expensive. Integrating at the desktop uses what you have and can cost as little as $1 per agent, per day. It’s worth noting that there are many approaches to ‘desktop integration’ and the cost varies greatly though the benefits are similar. The Cicero approach may be better described as ‘integration at the desktop’ meaning that we take your existing applications and stitch them together without changing the applications and without writing code. Consequently, it is an order of magnitude cheaper and faster than other approaches. For example, our projects usually last six to eight weeks and show a return on investment in three to four months. Typically our customers save 10-15% per call and we’ve seen that equate to savings that are measured in the millions of dollars in the first year alone.

Number 3 - Provide the agent with instant access to all the information they need – both internal and external sources. I was talking with an office supply company that offers a price guarantee. The way it works today is that the customer has to know there is a better price elsewhere, ask for it, and then the agent has to go and look it up on the competitor’s web-site. How much better would it be if you could take the product code and automatically and in parallel search your principle competitors for their best price, making all that information quickly available to the agent? First, you would save a lot of time per call and second, you could use this information to offer the price match without being asked. It might cost a couple of dollars on that sale, but you create Trust with the customer and with that you create long-term value. Again, there are affordable tools available to make this something you can do today, without breaking the bank. And there again we have the ‘Trust’ word which brings me to Number 2 in our top 10 - Take Ownership and Build Trust – This was originally offered by a senior contact center executive as a means to create greater operational autonomy with senior management but it can be equally well applied to the relationship between the agent and the customer.

In this later case it is a melding of all 5 of the key elements we started with: Product, People, Process, Tools and Leadership.

Leadership creates the environment in which it is OK for agents to take initiative on behalf of the customer. The Agent (our People) decides that they will ‘own’ the customers problem and creates the bond of trust with the caller.

The Process allows the agent to satisfy the need efficiently while protecting the core needs of the business. Finally the Tools provide all the information the agent needs to make an informed decision in a timely manner. Executed correctly, taking ownership and building trust will establish or restore confidence in your Product and Brand and create long-term value for your business.

And that brings us to Number 1 - Never forget it is the Customer that defines SUCCESS.

Short-term goals and challenges will come and go; some will benefit the company now at the expense of the relationship later. True success comes from creating a relationship that is profitable for both parties, today and tomorrow.