Contact centers are being tasked to improve customer experience (CX), but sometimes internal factors get in the way of success. This necessitates an honest look at processes, policies, technology, skill gaps, and other variables that may be barriers to providing satisfying CX.
Sometimes we're our own worst enemies. Anyone who has self-sabotaged resolutions to eat healthier, exercise daily, read more books, or learn a new language can verify that sometimes we can only blame ourselves for not being successful.
Contact centers are no different. Sometimes they self-sabotage their own efforts to improve customer experience by clinging to old ways of doing things or resisting the need to take on and invest in challenging initiatives.
Although these are deeply human tendencies, contact centers need to avoid the trap of self-sabotaging their CX improvement efforts by eliminating internal barriers. Nothing should be off limits. The stakes are just too high.
The case for improving customer experience
Although contact centers aren't solely responsible for CX, they play a vital role in the business's CX strategy. When contact centers improve customer experience, the entire enterprise benefits.
The following are some statistics that make the case for CX improvements.
- 80% of consumers believe flawless engagement is as important as product quality[1]
- Most consumers agree they are willing to buy more products (87%) and are willing to recommend a company to others (81%) if they have an exceptional customer service experience[2]
- 80% of consumers are willing to switch companies due to poor customer service[3]
- Globally, 90% of consumers believe customer service is somewhat to very important in the choice of a brand[4]
- 57% of consumers report that customer service is an attribute that influences their loyalty to a brand[5]
To sum it up, customer service is an important component of the overall customer experience and influences customer loyalty, purchase decisions, and brand advocacy. This makes it imperative for contact centers to improve customer experience by removing the following common barriers.
Barrier 1 - Antiquated technology
An article published by CMS Wire reported that 88% of businesses have barriers to improving CX, with technology being the most cited barrier.[6]
Figure 1 Source: CMS Wire: How to Break Through CX Barriers to Deliver Better Experiences
Antiquated technology will handcuff contact centers that want to improve customer experience. Our unpredictable, digital world requires businesses to have a modern, flexible customer service platform that's capable of delivering the types of experiences customers expect.
Contact centers should remove the barrier of old technology so they can:
- Better understand their customers
- Provide digital experiences in customers' preferred channels
- Deliver convenient, 24/7 support through effective self-service solutions
- Fully leverage customer data to provide personalized experiences
- Give agents the tools they need to build strong relationships
Not only will modern technology help improve customer experience - it will also enhance the agent experience, which brings us to our next barrier.
Barrier 2 - High agent attrition
While planning what to write for this section, for some reason a line from a Paul Young song popped into my head - "Every time you go away, you take a piece of me with you."
I think the sentiment is appropriate for contact center agent attrition because every agent that walks out the door takes a little piece of the contact center with them, ultimately weakening the organization and negatively impacting CX. All the time and resources the business invested in those agents is simply gone. And high attrition increases the odds that customers will interact with inexperienced employees.
No wonder Paul Young sounds so sad in that song!
Modern technology can improve the agent experience and reduce attrition by:
- Automating repetitive, mundane tasks
- Enabling agents to conveniently work from anywhere
- Consolidating all the applications agents use into a single interface
- Putting customer and technical information at their fingertips
- Making performance results highly visible
Ultimately, these capabilities empower agents to be more effective at helping customers and improve the nature of their jobs.
Of course, decreasing agent churn isn't just a technology initiative, but check out how implementing the right contact center solutions enabled one of our clients to reduce agent churn by 55%!! - Nine boosts employee engagement and reduces attrition 55% with CXone
Barrier 3 - Training that is only focused on technical skills
According to Salesforce research, 68% of customers expect brands to demonstrate empathy but only 37% of customers say brands are successful at meeting this expectation.[7]
Unless a business has brick and mortar locations, it's mostly up to contact center agents to deliver on this expectation. Unfortunately, contact centers often allocate most of an agent's training time to technical topics, to the detriment of soft skills training.
Being proficient with soft skills enables agents to better connect with customers, show they care, get to the heart of customers' issues, and instill confidence that they will resolve the customer's problem. In other words, soft skills are a critical component of delivering superior customer service experiences.
A study conducted by Leadership IQ revealed that 89% of new hire failures are due to soft skills such as interpersonal skills and attitude.[8] Ideally, contact centers would only hire candidates who already have strong soft skills, but that's not always possible, plus it would significantly limit the applicant pool. Therefore, organizations should allocate a high percentage of onboarding and ongoing training to soft skills.
Additionally, modern contact center software can help agents hone their soft skills. Real-time interaction guidance tools listen to voice interactions while they're happening, determine customer sentiment, and coach agents on soft skills that have been proven to increase customer satisfaction. This consistent feedback and in the moment training, will improve customer experience by helping agents become more proficient in skills that matter.
Related resource: 7 trainable soft skills for outstanding agents (as modeled by cartoon characters)
Barrier 4 - Siloed applications and channels
Contact centers often take a best-of-breed approach to software selection. They may use one vendor's voice solution, another vendor's digital channel solution, a third vendor's workforce management application, etc.
While all these disparate applications may be top-of-the-line, it's impossible to optimize CX if they aren't fully integrated with each other. Siloed applications are a barrier that needs to be removed if businesses want to improve customer experience in meaningful ways.
When support channels are siloed, businesses can't provide seamless, omnichannel experiences. Our research determined that 96% of consumers expect businesses to make it easy for them to switch channels.[9] "Easy" includes not being required to repeat information.
Customers should be able to move across voice, digital, and self-service channels, regardless of what vendor created each application. For seamless experiences out-of-the-box, contact centers should consider using a single vendor to meet all their support channel needs.
In addition to preventing omnichannel experiences, disparate applications also create data silos. In the experience economy, aggregated customer data is key to successfully executing CX strategies. When data is dispersed and difficult to access, it makes it more difficult to improve customer experience.
Barrier 5 - Not collaborating with other business teams
According to one study, more than 70% of customers expect companies to collaborate on their behalf.[10] It makes you wonder what the other 30% were thinking.
Granted, this statistic is related to resolving issues, but the principle also applies to CX. Business teams need to collaborate in order to improve customer experience. Similar to knocking down technical silos, businesses also need to knock down organizational silos.
Some businesses reorganize the entire enterprise around customer experience. Short of that, businesses need to create cross-functional teams to manage CX. This will help ensure experiences are consistent in the many touchpoints across the customer journey.
Collaboration is also necessary because of a common need for holistic customer data. Contact centers capture an abundance of valuable customer information, but a more detailed understanding of a customer comes from combining interaction data with other information such as website analytics, customer reviews, and purchase histories.
The different internal teams need to agree about practical things such as data definitions as well as more strategic topics such as how to best leverage data to improve customer experience. This type of teamwork can give contact centers access to additional customer information they can use to tailor interactions.
Barrier 6 - Not making the most of unstructured customer data
Speaking of customer data... Unstructured data includes information such as customer social media comments, responses to open-ended survey questions, and what customers say during support interactions. As opposed to structured data, such as numerical ratings on surveys, highly valuable unstructured data has been traditionally difficult to analyze.
Think about that for a second - customers tell agents their issues and what they think about products and services all day long and that treasure trove of insights was mostly untouchable. Paul Young should write a sad song about that.
Analytics tools that are powered by artificial intelligence can pry the lid off the treasure chest so everyone can see what's inside. Solutions such as interaction analytics can analyze all interactions from all channels and produce insights such as:
- Customer sentiment - This capability lets contact centers know if customers are feeling positive, negative, or neutral during interactions, and can be used to determine if CX enhancements are working.
- Contact drivers - Knowing why customers need help enables businesses to identify pain points that need to be addressed as well as call types that are good candidates for self-service.
Related resource: Hear how one of our clients used interaction analytics to identify issues that were unnecessarily causing customer frustration and driving up call volume - Transform with CXone Interaction Analytics
- Trending topics - Alerting contact center leaders about trending topics allows them to proactively identify and address emerging problems before they negatively impact too many customers.
- Potential compliance issues - Two important components of CX are ensuring customers have all the information they need and safeguarding their data.
When contact centers don't take full advantage of the unstructured data that's available to them, that's a barrier to optimizing customer experience.
Barrier 7 - Not acting on customer feedback
Customer-centric businesses regularly solicit customer feedback through methods such as focus groups and satisfaction surveys. This enables businesses to identify sources of friction and keep their finger on the pulse of customer opinions.
Naturally, collecting feedback is only one part of the equation. Businesses need to take action on feedback by contacting individual customers and, at a more macro level, by fixing widespread problems.
Unfortunately, according to one study, 53% of consumers think businesses don’t act on customer feedback.[11] This may explain traditionally low survey completion rates. People don't want to spend time providing input that won't be used.
Not acting on feedback is in itself, bad CX. It sends a message to customers that the business doesn't care what they think. If contact centers want to improve customer experience, they need to remove this self-imposed barrier.
Organizations need to first close the loop with individual customers. A formal closed loop process, such as the one below, uses customer experience management (CEM) software to automate the end-to-end process, beginning with alerting organizations that there's new feedback that needs attention, and ending with aggregated management reports.
Figure 2 Source: NICE Satmetrix: Closing the Customer Feedback Loop
Organizations shouldn't just follow up with disgruntled customers. They should also thank customers who provide exceptionally positive feedback to further strengthen those relationships and transform happy customers into brand advocates.
In addition to following up with individual customers, businesses should use feedback to identify and then fix pain points. Visible enhancements to customer-facing solutions such as IVR menus and self-service tools will let customers know the business hears them loud and clear.
We all occasionally get in the way of our individual progress, but in the business world, self-sabotaging CX improvement efforts is bad for business. Removing these seven barriers will enable contact centers to improve customer experience and help the entire enterprise remain competitive.
Improve customer experience with NICE CXone
NICE CXone is the industry-leading cloud-based contact center platform, built to optimize CX. Watch our product demo and imagine how CXone can help you improve customer experience.
[1] Salesforce: 4th Edition State of the Connected Customer (2020)
[2] NICE: 2019 NICE CXone Customer Experience (CX) Transformation Benchmark, Global Consumers (2019)
[3] NICE: NICE CXone CX Transformation Benchmark - Study 2018 (2018)
[4] Microsoft Dynamics 365: Global State of Customer Service (2020)
[5] Zendesk: Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2020 (2020)
[6] CMS Wire: How to Break Through CX Barriers to Deliver Better Experiences (2016)
[7] Salesforce: 4th Edition State of the Connected Customer (2020)
[8] Leadership IQ: Why New Hires Fail (2020)
[9] NICE: 2020 Customer Experience (CX) Benchmark, Consumer Wave (2020)
[10] Zendesk: Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2020 (2020)
[11] Microsoft Dynamics 365: Global State of Customer Service (2020)