Matt Dixon and Lauren Pragoff in their HBR article ‘Call Center Confidential: The
Underbelly of Customer Centricity’ remind us of the following 3 statements you
always hear when you call into a Contact Center
Excerpt
·
"This call is being
recorded for quality and training purposes"
·
"Is there anything
else I can help you with today?"
·
"How satisfied are
you with the service you received today?"
When you hear them, these phrases are good warning signs that
you're dealing with an organization more focused on internal priorities than on
what customers actually care about.
The true problem here is that these questions help in determining
certain metrics which are religiously churned up but never converted into
anything concrete. Companies concentrate
way too much on numbers which are really internal measures and not looking at
specific customer needs which begs the question – ‘Are you reducing effort and
making interactions easy for your customer?’
Companies obsess over metrics such as post call CSATs, quality
assurance ratings and call closure. They have people working on just improving
these stats but rarely is anyone working on making that conversation, which
generates these stats, easier for the customer. Efforts need to start shifting
to reducing customer effort. A customer should admire a company for quick response
and resolution time as it is surely, what they want.
There is an urgent need for
top management to start looking at metrics that indicate ‘ease of use’, ‘lack
of effort’ and the like. They need to realize that customer centricity can be
about metrics such as reducing customer effort and that driving these numbers
up can also considerably improve service delivery.
So can customer service
leaders begin to usher in an era where ‘Ease of Use’ becomes the defining
metric?