From the CCIQ Community: Key Call Center Questions for 2014

Sixty eight percent of businesses will increase their customer experience spend in 2014.

If your reaction to that statistic is to celebrate on behalf of the customer management community, hold your applause. Given how fundamental customer service is to the success of a business, the fact that the figure is not 100% is appalling. Businesses thrive when they satisfy customers; if the 68% figure is accurate, it means 32% of businesses are not interested in thriving this year.

Caring enough about the customer experience to make it an executive priority is a product of market-driven reality; it is not a sign of customer-centricity. It is not a sign that the business knows what it has to do—or is interested in doing what it has to do—to actually improve customer satisfaction.

Action is the name of the game in 2014. Customers, empowered by the growing ubiquity of social media and increasing accessibility to alternative providers, no longer have to reward businesses for a rhetorical commitment to the customer experience. They get to demand improvement in practice.

Businesses, therefore, can no longer think of the customer experience as a broad, binary commitment. They must recognize the specific strengths and weaknesses of their service experience and use new investments to optimize that scale. They must act in the best interest of customers.

Governed by the laws of practicality, no business is going to solve every customer management problem in 2014. Focused businesses will, however, make notable improvements in the areas most important to their customers.

These need for a customized customer experience strategy fueled the final question of Call Center IQ’s 2014 Call Center Executive Priorities Report survey. Respondents were asked to identify the question they most need answered for success in 2014.

Some of those questions, which reveal how businesses are planning to specifically actualize their customer service investments, follow:

Given low budget availability, what are the main steps a business should take for prioritizing its investments and achieving an optimal ROI?

Can self-service replace high-touch?

To what extent do you allow first line managers to influence, own and report on the customer management function?

I sense a large move towards hosted/cloud contact centers with mixed media/queues. This could potentially flatten out the technology as outsource vendors consolidate to similar features and technology. What will the new area of differentiation as technology and features become more common?

Onshore versus Offshore - Does American onshore really provide greater value in terms of customer engagement?

How do you increase satisfaction while transitioning to lower cost service channels?

What are the emerging trends in big data?

What is holding organizations back from getting true customer effort measures in place vs inferred effort from looking at sample transactions, surveys or interactions?

Who drives the Customer Management Priorities for your business and what are those priorities based on? (i.e. Executive Team, Customer Service Leadership, Marketing, Sales)?

Can NPS be directly influenced? If so, how? How long does it take to see changes in the score?

What technologies are call centers using to successfully authenticate caller identity and mitigate fraud?