Driving a positive customer experience
What drives a positive customer experience through the economic downturn? Dr Roger Newman senior VP of IT outsourcing specialist Mahindra Satyam says outsourcing can play its part.
In a global economic crisis, organisations will be looking to outsource for a variety of reasons, including the need to expand hours, better handle off-peak traffic, improve staffing flexibility, achieve higher work productivity, and most importantly, save on costs.
The fifth annual report from Gartner indicated that despite the global economic situation, outsourcing will be adopted by more organisations to help them work through financial and competitive challenges. However, customer attitudes are changing quickly and, in the face of tough competition and high expectations to justify expenditure, organisations are not just looking to outsource to create a lean enterprise, but also to ensure a positive customer experience that contributes to long term growth.
The report from Gartner also stated that organisations who apply customer-focused outsourcing, are more likely to be successful. Driving this broader vision of outsourcing is the relationship management function within the outsourcing companies. When relationship management is functioning effectively, customers are happier, more loyal and more profitable. Customer relationship management is now more important than ever before.
In theory, relationship management should optimise the value of customers to the outsourcing enterprise by encompassing a strategy that aims to perfect their experience in doing business with the company. This works well in an outsourced environment as relationship management builds on the previous cost saving benefits companies have come to expect ie, often the customer relationship is strong because value has already been delivered, the issue is to take the relationship to the next level of satisfaction. The organisations that have put work with the outsourcing companies welcome this additional value add to further justify their decision to outsource and improve their business case.
Among the most exciting developments available to enhance relationship management are three options that can directly impact a company’s relationships with customers. The developments are called performance-based learning (PBL), automated agent assisted technologies and real-time predictive analytics.
Companies that outsource may not feel it’s their job to worry about their contact centre provider’s training programmes – but they and their customers will certainly feel the impact if an outsource vendor’s agent training is not up to the standard required. Improving the customer experience begins with the agent, whose effectiveness, commitment and longevity directly correlates to training.
One of the best practices in customer-focused outsourcing is PBL which combines instructor-led training, hands-on activities and role plays – transforming learning to make it more useful to agents, thus improving work quality, job satisfaction, staff commitment and productivity. The idea behind PBL is to teach agents specifically what they need to know to serve customers.
The confidence that comes with PBL programmes not only improves morale, but also contributes to ever-improving performance on the job. More importantly from the standpoint of the company that uses an outsourced solution, agents that have experienced PBL hit the ground running, by being able to quickly achieve higher levels of first call resolution and shorter average handling times. It also enhances understanding, communication and collaboration and provides learning opportunity that blends business consulting, organisation development and training to deliver impactful, sustained, timely learning solutions to employees who are servicing their customer’s onsite.
The need for tailored customer training is critical, given the intense competition that has prompted an explosion of new competitor products, services, options and pricing plans for many organisations. Accompanying this boom are huge volumes of information that the agent must access and understand in order to quickly resolve customer issues and concerns. Even if PBL gives the operator the right understanding of the information that can help him to help his customer, we still need to ensure that the information is used effectively in each transaction. This leads me to a second development in customer-focused outsourcing – automated agent assisted technologies.
New ‘agent assist’ technologies use voice recognition to pick up on key points during a customer interaction and instantly retrieve essential data needed to handle an enquiry or problem. Such voice assists automate common repeated activities on the desktop, adding relevant data or jumping to just the right screen, to speed the interaction and ensure an accurate response. For customers, it’s a vast improvement over waiting while an agent scrolls through screen after screen of data looking for the right information.
Automated agent assist is emerging as an important tool for delivering a positive customer experience to today’s Internet-raised generation, for whom real-time is the only time that matters. By reducing manual navigation, page clicks and data entry, automated agent assist shaves vital seconds off average handling times. By harvesting data from existing applications, the technology eliminates the errors that can plague manual re-typing actions. Where in the online world, speed is of the essence, these features significantly enhance customer satisfaction, while at the same time reducing costs to organisations.
Organisations have long recognised that they have massive amounts of customer data. But how can it be used to its full potential? Real-time predictive analytics enables organisations to be proactive rather than reactive and gives the ability to leverage the data to drive maximum value from and to each customer – scalable to millions of customers simultaneously. Used primarily by the troubled financial sectors, it is a process that is rapidly gaining momentum and has the potential to span to multiple industries.
It also continuously polls a company’s diverse databases to create a detailed view of each customer. The ability to pull up real-time profiles of customers is a powerful tool supporting service and marketing objectives. It also enables companies to pre-emptively detect and correct problems before the customer is even aware of them as well as automate tailored offers to customers, based on known preferences or requirements.
In addition, real-time predictive analytics offers another attractive twist: it lets a company tailor the level of service delivered depending on the customer’s current and predicted value. It’s a fact of business life that customers are responsible for the majority percentage of a company’s revenue. Therefore, knowing which customers are most valuable enables a company to provide special offers geared to nurturing and growing these relationships.
Outsourcing has come a long way since the days when budget issues were its primary driver. While the cost-saving advantages of outsourcing will always be important in times of economic struggle, companies are now raising their sights to justify expenditure. They’re starting to view operational efficiency as a key subset of the broader relationship management strategy, as well as understanding that only the customer experience through new developments, not savings alone, will define an organisations long term financial success.
