Live from Future Call Center Summit: Are Customers to Blame?

Everything is amazing, and nobody is happy.

Citing Louis CK’s rant about how technological wonder has spoiled Americans, Convergys’ Mike Wooden, the opening speaker at Call Center IQ’s Future Call Center Summit, pondered whether a similar phenomenon has occurred within the customer experience space.

Wooden notes that despite all the hype over customer centricity, all the focus on improving the quality of customer engagement and all the investment into related technology, customer satisfaction scores are not making any notable gains.

One, certainly, can make the case that businesses are not doing enough. As Call Center IQ found in its 2014 Executive Priorities Report, only a small percentage of companies expanded their range of communication channels last year despite all the buzz over multi-channel engagement. In its Executive Report on Multi-Channel Customer Management, CCIQ found that only 30% believe they are equipped to serve customers where they want to be served.

That businesses are finally talking about the customer experience from the right mindset is no assurance that they are actually making the needed improvements.

Wooden, however, also attributed some of the stagnation to the escalation of consumer expectations.

Bombarded with rhetoric about customer-centricity, even those customers who have not experienced iconic service from organizations like Zappos and Disney know today’s service is supposed to be magical. They know they are supposed to be treated as royalty; good, solid service is no longer sufficient.

As a result, businesses that improved their poor or mediocre service offerings are not necessarily doing anything to better satisfy customers. If today’s customers want great rather than good, they will not applaud brands for offering good rather than bad.

Another element worth considering is the effect of a transition to "strategic calls." As businesses shift transactional matters to low-touch or self-service platforms, their live agents will spend more time dealing with complex, challenging customer service questions.

In theory, this should produce greater customer satisfaction. Customers will receive more efficient support for their simple issues, while those calling about difficult matters will receive a more personalized experience.

In the short-term, however, this evolving dichotomy could have the opposite effect on customer satisfactions scores. An organization’s self-service and virtual agent technology might not be mature enough to handle transactional matters with optimal efficiency, and an organization’s live agents might not be skilled and versatile enough to handle strategic matters with optimal efficacy.

What is your take? How is it possible that after years atop executive priorities lists, customer experience investment is not producing greater levels of measured customer satisfaction?