When setting their customer service strategy, some organizations focus solely on cost reduction and discover their measures are alienating customers. The balance between efficiency and effectiveness becomes a huge challenge for businesses.
Successful companies still face significant customer service challenges:
- Customer expectations are rising
- Proliferation of products and channels increase service complexity
- Growing complexity of various systems and information sources
- The need to provide differentiated service to customers of different value categories
- Balancing revenue generation goals with customer expectations for great service
Best-run businesses balance the need for efficiency with the need to deliver a great customer experience and create additional revenue streams. Their IT teams partner with software providers to:
- Consolidate platforms and reduce the cost of systems
- Implement front-line decision support systems to improve effectiveness
- Invest in integrating interaction channels and tying front-line interactions to back-office transactions
Utilizing IT to Meet the Customer Needs
While contact center technology is often implemented to improve efficiency, many companies tend to overlook the contact center’s core mission: meeting customer needs.
What are the basic customer needs?
Customers hate to wait. Intelligent routing systems balance the load among agents and locations. Customer service resource management tools help manage workload more easily. While in some cases it’s sufficient to route all calls the same way, some tasks require skills-based routing to specialists.
Agents need to be empowered to resolve issues directly with customers. However, providing agents with access to disparate sources of information can be confusing. Providing a single unified agent desktop enables agents to focus on the interaction with the customer. Agents need to know the company’s historical relationship with customers. An integrated contact management system keeps track of every customer interaction and provides agents with a 360-degree view. This improves customer satisfaction, loyalty and results in savings.
Contact centers aim to resolve customer issues during the initial call. However, some issues cannot be resolved immediately, so transferring calls to a second level becomes a critical process. For a request-handling process to be traced and controlled, it should be automated to an appropriate level. Workflow management and a rules engine support this process.
Any customer service strategy must ensure that it addresses how to optimize the performance of agents. With training and monitoring tools, a customer service system supports agents to improve performance. Workforce optimization tools and performance monitoring are also designed to optimize performance of personnel.
Contact center managers have unique user interface requirements. On one hand, a unified view to monitor operations is required. On the other hand, blended reporting is desirable, combining communications-based KPIs with business system data such as order revenue.
Turning the Contact Center into a Strategic Asset
Successful organizations provide their agents with tools to handle all transactions on a single platform. They ensure that customers have a great experience and give managers access to administration, maintenance and reporting.
For many businesses this means rethinking their contact center strategy while focusing on fundamental values: retaining current customers, maximizing efficiency, and building revenue.
Businesses need to work closely with their solution partners to map business processes and define business needs and strategy. SAP has the technology and processes not only to help you reduce costs, but to also help you focus on your customers needs to drive increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. This in turn turns the contact center into a strategic asset and a competitive advantage.