Take the 'easy route'

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?