Contact Centers: A Wake-up Call For the Executive

Contact center agents and managers will agree that it’s hard to grasp their challenges if you haven’t worked in a contact center. They’ll probably also agree that they sit in the center of where the customer action and huge value creation opportunities happen.

In the beginning of my career I managed an internal sales and customer service team for a few years, after having been part of it. Selling, handling complaints, letting dissatisfied customers have their say, making sure they didn’t need to repeat themselves when passing calls on to someone else, it wasn’t easy. Especially with the pressure to handle calls fast Yet, at the same time, we knew that we were at the heart of the business and went the extra mile. Customer first, always.

Towards the omnichannel challenge

If the business lost a customer that wasn’t helped properly, it was our fault. If we didn’t keep our cool and understand that the emotional dimension of these customer interactions was our best opportunity to make all the difference, we missed the point of our job: creating value where the so-called moments of truth were omnipresent. So, it became a sport to jump on every occasion to turn an unhappy customer into a loyal one. Recognize that kick?

Finding the right information fast – a challenge for knowledge workers and contact center agents

With the advent of new channels, it all became even harder as we moved from multi-channel and cross-channel to omnichannel. In 2004, research from BT found that 95% of large companies across six European countries were not able to see if a customer asked the exact same question via phone and via email. Worse: in 85% of the cases where a customer used both email and phone to ask that exact same question, agents gave different answers. Finding the right information fast became – and still is – a challenge for all knowledge workers and certainly also for contact center agents.

A year earlier, in 2003, the sixth edition of the annual “Merchants Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report” found that over 75% of contact centers weren’t able to get a single customer interaction view and contact centers failed to move from being (perceived as) a cost center to a profit center.

Why this little trip down memory lane? Because the mentioned reports – and other similar ones – always mentioned the lack of management support. Many CRM installations failed because of it as well. Corporate culture proved hard to change and the crucial role of the contact center was underestimated in the eyes of many executives.

What happened in the last decade?

The customer experience delivery gap Bain and Company published in 2005 (PDF)

After having analyzed some recent evolutions in the contact center space, to my surprise the same challenges still exists. Contact centers continue to be seen as cost centers in all too many cases and their crucial role remains undervalued.

This is all the more surprising if we realize that in the decade between then and now:

1. customer expectations have continued to grow faster than many organizations could deliver on them and the customer experience is key in the contact center challenges,


2. the number of channels customers use to seek service has exploded and grown far beyond the phone and email


3. the customer experience is known to be the key driver of business success, as Peppers and Rogers wrote in 2005 in their book Return on Customer,


4. we have more data than we ever had before and are just at the beginning of the real data explosion, enabling us to have actionable data that serve the whole business and customer.


5. the role of the contact center and contact center agent is dramatically changing as this interview with customer experience futurologist Nicola Millard explains very well.

In that same year (2005), Bain & Company found the famous customer experience delivery gap (80% of companies that believe they provide superior experiences versus 8% of their customers who agree). It’s a number we still use, even if it has only continued to grow in reality. The growing gap between customer service expectations and delivery was again emphasized in Accenture’s 2008 Global Customer Satisfaction Survey, in which the company also found that customer service had become the de facto leading consideration when customers pick a new provider.

Time to go the extra mile: connecting the dots

To cut a long story short: knowing that 1) the customer experience is the driver of business growth and is an end-to-end journey, 2) knowing that customers will not likely decrease expectations nor the number of channels they use and, 3) finally, knowing that offering the right information at the right time, regardless of channels and taking into account prior interactions is essential, executives need to look at the contact center and customer experience and service from a holistic perspective. Really putting the customer first in a context of digital transformation and change, oriented around processes and people.

The technologies to automate several processes and optimize customer service processes and information flows, using artificial intelligence and information management, exist, as the infographic by Kodak Alaris Document Imaging clearly indicates (disclaimer: Kodak Alaris is a partner).

The challenges are crystal clear. The cost of not providing great customer service and experiences is huge. And, as Petra Beck wrote, it’s not about optimizing processes OR the customer experience.

Still, 74% of C-level executives and boards continue to see contact centers as cost centers instead of profit centers, according to research from the Customer Contact Association.

Changing this situation can only happen if we realize that delivering on the customer experience promise (and need) is not the same as paying lip service to it and if contact centers can make a clear case in collaboration with all stakeholders in the broader customer experience optimization reality. And, today, more than ever, that is everyone.

Just like in that internal sales and customer service team I mentioned in the beginning: we all have to go the extra mile to catch up with the digital and increasingly real-time customer to begin with and differentiate ourselves by being true customer champions.

Customer first, always.

Outperforming companies prioritize the customer experience and engage in two-way communication – source infographic by VisionCritical

This article originally appeared on InformationDynamix and has been republished (and slightly adapted) with permission.



Contact Centers: A Wake-up Call For the Executive