Customer Experience: From Cost Centre to Cash Cow

A term often used when talking about the interaction between a consumer and a brand, customer experience (CX) is much more integral to success than some deem it to be. The very concept of it, and its associated departments within organisations, often holds the secrets to short- and long-term success. Even if it is recognised, unlocking them these secrets is often a challenge unto itself.

Visualising CX success

Quantifying the impact of CX isn’t easy but its invisible force can be felt in many areas. With NPS scoring seemingly on the decline, many are looking for more expansive ways of gauging consumer attitudes and behaviours. Forrester believes the following metrics give a clearer indication in understanding how customer perception and impacts business objectives:

1.    Perception Metrics

Data on what your customers expect from their overall experience with your enterprise. This is typically derived from surveys and speech or text analytics.

2.    Interaction Metrics

Touchpoints that give an indication of actually happens during a customer’s path toward achieving their goal e.g., paying a bill or making a return. As well as contact centres, this data derives from websites and physical locations.

3.    Outcome Metrics

Measure customer intentions after an interaction with your organisation. They ultimately assist in helping to predict consumer behaviour.

Excelling in each of these areas is the short answer to transforming your customer success centres from seeming necessities into hubs for driving excellence in customer acquisition & retention and enhancing revenue streams. The long answer, I could talk about for hours. For now, here are some key takeaways.

CX for today and for tomorrow

In retail, CX is just as important if not more so than the product or service it’s associated with. It determines so much of a brands’ reputation and hugely impacts its ability to exceed consumer expectations in today’s world. But, when analysed properly, data collected in customer service centres can assist in the creation of effective product road mapping and identifying improvement areas for continued success in the future.

Unified and quantified insight about what customers need and how they behave, can dramatically improve how every customer-facing function can boost brand equity and positively impact revenue streams.

With the likes of Twitter acting as an open forum for consumers to publicly complain when they’ve received poor service, it’s now more vital than ever to get CX right. And the more they happen, the more costly they become. Last year, complaint handling cost businesses more than £9bn a month in lost time amid supply issues and staffing crisis.

Enter AI

Almost overnight, chatbots such as ChatGPT have normalised the consumer relationship with AI creating an overnight reliance on it to provide useful information and actionable insight millions of times a day. The stage is set for enterprise AI to begin meeting the desires of customers round the clock - which Gartner predicts that it not only should happen but will. The organisations that will succeed long term, however, are the ones that intertwine AI with human understanding, creativity and empathy.

AI implementation shouldn’t be designed to replace workers but allow them to focus their time on tasks that only a person can perform well. AI can handle the admin of daily, routine tasks such as data entry or looking up customer information, empowering employees to handle complex, high-value tasks. This includes the analysis of data that will provide the insight needed to improve not just the function itself but the business as a whole.

New outsourcing models prove that retailers don’t need to sacrifice CX to remove costs – the reverse is in fact true: Effective CX twinned with the right data analytics will highlight where and how costs can be cut.

Continuous evolution

As AI offerings continue to augment and customer demands continue to change, so must our customer success centres. The balance between AI and human agents in contact centre operations should never be ignored once implemented. With each change, opportunities for the likes of self-service operations increase. Constantly monitoring and changing operations as needed is possible using data-driven insights.

Feed in the feedback

Contact centres can be a goldmine for insights into the challenges end users face when using a company’s product or service. It should be implemented in standard process that this feedback is heard and listened to by every relevant team including engineering and design - resolving customer issues as they arise or better still preventing them from arising at all. Looping this information back proactively will prevent future end user challenges and ultimately increase customer retention and satisfaction.

 Want to know more about the new contact centre economics? Read our latest whitepaper here: https://bit.ly/3V2lHRa

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Narasimha Kini Bhavna Newle Chopra Rowan McGrath Ankur Kumar Sriwastava Susan Pollock Nazima Chauhan Abhay Singh Mehta Naveen M. Vikas Kumar Prasad Nair Maya B. Sneha Kulkarni Mishra Nusrat Rahim