Three Ways To Deliver High-Impact Customer Experiences
By Alan Vondrell, Austin Logistics

It's no secret that call centers are the bane of consumers' existence. So intense is their disdain that they will put off calling companies regarding business issues until the last minute. And if they receive a call from a company, they'll often answer it with clenched teeth.

Whether calling in or getting a call, today's customers expect the worst. And when they have a bad experience they don't just get mad, they take their business elsewhere at a rate estimated to be between 10 and 60 percent. However, when customers have a great call center experience they are so appreciative that their loyalty for that company soars.

The reasons companies have acquired the bad rap include many years of bad business decisions and a lack of appreciation for their call center operations. But many are now realizing their mistake and are improving their customers' call center experiences. As a result, these "customer experience earlyadopters" are reaping the rewards. A growing number of companies now realize that their call center is a leading source of improving, maintaining, and sustaining optimized customer experience management.

Tried is No Longer True

Great call center experiences from the customers' viewpoint include short waits, no unappreciated upsells, irresistible retention offers, and not being treated like a nuisance — or worse, a deadbeat.

Surely no company wants to deliver poor customer experiences. But without even trying they get trapped in layers of corporate procedures, standards and policies, and inflexible automation. For example, one of the nation's top financial services firms knew these issues all too well, and was suffering with several chronic customer experience problems including:

• Segmenting inbound callers based primarily on risk scores and first-in-first-out strategies.
• Missing the chance to make retention offers before customers could attrite, then playing catch up trying to and win them back.
• Unintentionally treating all customers like criminals in an attempt to reduce growing fraud and bad-debt losses.

This financial services firm had tried all the usual tactics to improve its customers' call center experiences, such as fast-track "gold-card" queues to high-value customers, training agents to be sales pros, and opening more self-service lanes. But these all achieved the usual results — too many resources and too little payback.