Delivering on CX - The Informal Contact Centre

Your business has a contact centre requirement, even if you don’t realise it yet. Let me elaborate…

I would imagine that the phrase “contact centre” makes you think of a room filled with tens or even hundreds of desks, with agents taking thousands of calls around the clock. And for some very large businesses this is very much still a reality.  But these days contact centres have evolved from their rigid, phone-based origins. Let’s start off by thinking about why contact centres exist...

Contact centres are typically used where businesses have large numbers of customers.  These customers are usually consumers (B2C) who tend to generate lots of inbound enquires, such as technical support requests or billing and contract queries.

Servicing a high volume of customer enquiries is expensive. The flip side is that by doing the same thing (answering customer queries) thousands of times, you can get it down to a fine art. A modern contact centre (done well) is the culmination of lots of understanding, designing, implementation and constant monitoring.

All of this is designed to point to one thing -> Customer Experience (CX)

So now, imagine you’re the customer wanting to contact a business, what does good, modern CX look like?  The things that put a tick in the box for me are:

• Answer my question – give me a clear and concise answer (preferably the right one!) so that I don’t need to get in touch about the same thing again and again
• When I need to speak to someone else, connect me to the right person as quickly as possible
• Know me as customer and summarise what I need for the next person so I don’t have to explain every time
• Come to me... allow me to interact the way I want, by voice, email, chat, SMS, WhatsApp or whichever medium is best for me at the time!

While we’re here, we could also pose the question, why do we care about CX anyway? It’s not a particularly difficult question to answer, but over the last 5-10 years a couple of things have made this more important than ever.

• It’s harder to win customers, so customer churn is costly and potentially terrible for your business's reputation
• Customers have a lot of choice, differentiating is key and polls show that CX plays a big part in where people choose to spend their money
• Customers are busier than ever and are used to communicating virtually any time of the day across multiple platforms – restrictive contact options are a turn off for many

A poor experience will lose you business, so it makes sense to provide a consistent (good) CX whenever customers are interacting with anyone in your team. This leads us to the Informal Contact Centre, the idea that anyone in your organisation in any location could be an “agent”, so by applying the latest contact centre concepts and technology, you’re able to deliver a seamless, very positive, customer experience.

Vendors recognise the challenges faced by modern business and are developing their products to bring advanced CX functionality to a broader user base, benefiting customers outside of the traditional contact centre. Somewhat predictably, AI features heavily in the CX enhancement roadmap as it’s notoriously very good at looking at large volumes of data in real time and learning behaviour over time.  It’s also good (and getting better) at interpreting what humans are doing and saying. This is the worst AI is ever going to be and it’s astonishing already – harnessing its power to improve your customers’ experience (and make your employees’ lives easier!) is going to set you a step ahead.

So, what’s my point?

Refining the art of customer experience has been around for a while and there are many lessons that can be and have been learned from dealing with challenges at scale. As-a-service solutions significantly reduce cost of entry to “enterprise” functionality that was once only available to businesses with deep pockets, which now means, regardless of the size of your business, you can benefit from these features.

Customers are demanding more and are quicker to move when they don’t receive the experience they expect. CX has never been more important, so levelling up the experience across all customer touchpoints is essential. The Informal Contact Centre should be considered an integral part of your customer experience strategy.