Customer Centricity
Companies are making a huge effort to change their ways and focus on customer centricity. For good reasons though, as companies that are more customer-centric and prioritize their customers have better business results, get more positive word-of- mouth, and bring more innovations to market.
But while many companies claim to be customer-centric, the real number is actually much lower. How do you know if your company is achieving the highly sought level of customer centricity and is providing a gratifying experience to your customers?
From a general perspective, customer centricity stands on five pillars: Accessibility, Responsiveness, Empathy, Consistency, and Agility.
This new paradigm of customer centricity made companies realize the importance of customer experience and identify it as a key business differentiator. For example, customers dialing into a contact center embark on a journey that in most cases ends with a solution to their query. However, they feel more valued if this customer journey is as easy and smooth as possible.
The shift from a multichannel strategy (offering different channels to customers) to an omnichannel strategy (eliminating the siloes for providing a single-view of the customer journey) led the way to this evolution to customer centricity.
Understanding the importance of the contact center experience as a strategic part of the overall customer journey, allowed us to redefine the five pillars of customer centricity (general perspective) into four main ideas focused on the contact center environment: designing the experience, empowering agents, getting the metrics that matter, and understanding customers.
Design the experience
Customer experience design is about focusing on the quality of the customer experience and the ideas, emotions, and memories that these moments generate. In the contact center context, customer experience design is first of all driven by accessibility, namely the consideration of the different channels (touchpoints) which people and organizations can use to interact with each other.
Integrate the contact center in the whole customer experience
Each and every step of the customer journey has to be thought of as a part of the customer experience. This makes customer experience design a top-down process. It starts from a global perspective and goes down to the analysis of each specific features, resulting in a holistic approach:
- Implement IVRs, voice or visual, to improve self-service capabilities as an optional, yet useful path for the customer journey.
- Use intelligent and proactive routing based on full customer data to target the right agent with the right answer for the customer, regardless or the channel.
- Optimize your workforce and provide your agents with full customer knowledge, from all departments, eliminating data siloes.
Imagine the customer journey, step by step, feature per feature
Each and every step of the customer journey has to be thought of as a part of the customer experience. This makes customer experience design a top-down process. It starts from a global perspective and goes down to the analysis of each specific features, resulting in a holistic approach:
- Implement IVRs, voice or visual, to improve self-service capabilities as an optional, yet useful path for the customer journey.
- Use intelligent and proactive routing based on full customer data to target the right agent with the right answer for the customer, regardless or the channel.
- Optimize your workforce and provide your agents with full customer knowledge, from all departments, eliminating data siloes.
Eliminate department siloes
Customer experience design is all about eliminating department siloes and a unified, global approach will help avoid most problems that make customers unsatisfied. So for example, it will prevent inconsistencies in customer experience across the whole journey which are caused by underused organization resources or unsynchronized processes.