Our Own Worst Enemies
My wife recently had an interesting customer experience that, although she categorized as positive, I am sure the service provider would categorize as negative. My wife was trying to redeem points from a loyalty program toward an airfare. Her first stop was online where her options would have required eight times the number of points she had anticipated. Dissuaded by what she saw, she called the loyalty contact centre. By talking to an agent she was able to obtain an upgraded ticket at one-fifth the number of points as was required by the sel-serve option presented on the internet.
My wife was delighted with the service and results that she received from the contact centre, but as a contact centre guy myself, I was haunted by the unnecessary call that was driven into the contact centre. At the core of the issue for me was the inability for two customer-touching channels to harmonize their servicing strategy. The internet, a channel used to improve customer experiences and reduce costly calls to the contact centre, had in fact driven an additional call into the contact centre.
This experience is not unique to loyalty programs or an online contact centre strategy. We see this type of unintended end result frequently caused by organizations with multiple customer touch points. When you consider all the potential ways in which you touch a customer (inbound calls, outbound calls, marketing solicitations, statements and invoices, applications, letters and so on), its easy to understand how difficult it becomes to maintain consistency within a customer touch point communication strategy.
I have seen organizations where customers question that company’s price competitiveness not because of the outside competitive market, but rather because different channels are offering different rates for the same product suite. I have seen organizations where statement inserts have not been communicated to the contact centre and thus resulted in frustrating customer experiences and lower than anticipated take-up rates. All of theses types of issues, and many more similar ones, drive both customer dissatisfaction and increased cost.
The overriding issue seems to be that the larger an organization grows, the more touch points and channels it has to communicate with customers. As the number of customer touch points grow, the control over the consistency and sharing of information internally seems to weaken.
What is missing is a customer contact guru: an individual or a team who does not own a specific customer contact channel, but rather is empowered to ensure that all information sent or accessible to a customer is appropriately disseminated within the corporate organization. A group that is tasked for identifying and eliminating conflicting information between channels. Effectively, a group that makes sure that the right hand knows what the left hand is doing. Until such time that we recognize that all of our touch points with our customers need to be zealously guarded, we will continue to be our own worst enemies.
Richard Litvack, Vice President, Operations, Citi Cards Canada Inc.
& member of CMA’s Contact Centre Council
