Why brands need to rethink their approach to customer care

At CXN Live: Contact Centers 2020, Luke Williams, senior vice-president and distinguished principal analyst at Qualtrics, offered an alternative viewpoint on some of the leading-edge topics in the area of customer care. Williams began by detailing the critical importance of customer care, noting that 78 per cent of consumers would permanently change the way they feel about a brand based on a single interaction with a contact center.

Williams explained that most brands have struggled to deliver experiences that delight their customers due to a myriad of challenges that customer care teams face. These challenges  include:

• The inability to deliver tailored support experiences.
• Costly and disruptive frontline attrition.
• Operational metrics that fail to report on ‘why’ and ‘what’s next’.
• Experience gaps that go undetected because of siloed data.
• Traditional voice of customer channels that rely on solicited feedback and lack a system of action.
• The inability to deliver the digital service experience that customer expect.

Williams discussed each of these challenges in detail, offering explanations on their nature and impact on the organization as a whole, providing insights into how these challenges arise and what they mean for the contact center of today.

Delivering customer care experiences that drive business impact

During his session, Williams remarked that even achieving good customer care, let alone excellent customer care, is very difficult to do. However, when we can accomplish this, it not only solves customer issues and builds long-term loyalty, but it can also be a strategic function.

“Most customer care agents do something no CEO ever does,” Williams noted. “Which is talking to customers every single day.”

Customer care is not just a cost of doing business, remarked Williams. Customer care teams should be as or more important than any other team in the organization. A focus on customer care can help to drive key business outcomes such as reduced acquisition and support costs, increased brand perception and loyalty and faster, more profitable revenue growth.

Williams went on to discuss other key issues in customer care detailing how brands can benefit from rethinking their approach to these issues.

Rethinking customer care

• Rethinking agents: Even high-quality agents, if poorly engaged, cannot maximize customer happiness, Williams explained. Brands need to maintain open channels of communication with agents and identify which interactions create the most value for the firm and the customer.
• Rethinking metrics: Williams explained that customer care can be populated with so many metrics it becomes difficult to understand all of them. He noted that it was wise to prune vanity metrics and occasionally plant new metrics. A focus on forensic metrics, such as customer lifetime value which has the clarity on value of work being performed,  as opposed to vanity metrics such as NPS, can give brands a real ‘dollars and cents’ valuation of actions taken.
• Rethinking technology: Williams detailed the traditional arguments made for on premise vs. cloud-based technologies, noting that it was now widely understood that cloud-based technologies offer significantly more flexibility. He explained that traditionally, technology was a constraining resource. We are now, however, seeing a shift toward the adoption of technology that allows organizations to reduce operational expenses and replace agents for low-touch, easy interactions through the application of artificial intelligence.

In his session, Williams explored each of these topics in detail and offered advice and further explanations for customer experience professionals. Watch the session on-demand above to access the full range of Williams’ insights.