What’s Getting in the Way Of Your Customer Experience?

This article, exclusive to Call Center IQ, draws on research highlighted in the whitepaper "How to Achieve a Great—and Profitable—Customer Experience." You can download the free whitepaper, courtesy Call Center IQ and SAP, here.

Here’s a reality that speaks volumes about the success of customer-centric initiatives: though 80 percent of executives identify customer experience as a top priority, many believe their actual experience is somewhat mediocre.

Indeed, on a five-point scale, executives, on average, rated their experience at just a 3.62 in a study with Bloomberg Businessweek. Though not terrible, that kind of scoring is hardly befitting an aspect of the corporate value proposition deemed a paramount strategy—especially one that directly speaks to how the company interacts with the people who purchase its products.

When discussing underwhelming customer satisfaction and internal customer experience efforts, many customer management professionals have it on reflex to blame the C-level—‘executives, after all, think only about money, and since customer service seems like a cost, at least upfront, it is hard to get everything we want approved.’

Certainly, there are members of corporate C-levels who do not want to invest millions or billions into customer experience, and there are others who measure success in a manner vastly counter to the notion of customer-centricity. But if 80% of executives are actively calling customer experience a top organizational priority, it is simply not feasible to blame the entirety—or even the lion’s share—of customer experience shortcomings on executive support.

So what are these other, more significant causes of the gap between how organizations value customer experience and how well organizations deliver a customer experience?

The "How to Achieve" whitepaper identifies four obstacles identified as "major" customer experience inhibitors by executives and all, interestingly, are "gaps" in their own right.

Simply, these various points of organizational disconnect can combine to create a disconnect between the customer experience companies want to have and the customer experience its customers actually endure:

Organizational and process silos – The "buy-in" argument might be losing luster, but that does not mean organizations are structurally-conditioned to make every customer experience wish come true. Organizations still have divisional, process and political barriers to progress, and when focused on a concept like customer experience that can be murky and debatable in its own right, it is no wonder that progress can slow.

Lack of coordination across channels to ensure consistency – More and more companies are coming to grips with the notion that customers want a consistent experience across channels, but actually delivering that consistency is trickier. Beyond the fact that some organizations remain company-centric on emerging channels (ie, how can we benefit from interacting with customers on social media), many simply are still fleshing out best practices for the various channels and have not developed that seamless, consistent experience.

Large number of disconnected tools, technologies and applications – Even though the essence of customer experience has actually been fairly-consistent, the hype behind certain metrics and tools is ever-evolving. Consequently, this creates market opportunity for a variety of solutions for better understanding and managing customers—these solutions, often, are geared to specific customer objectives rather than to providing an ability to capture and act on customer insight across the entire life cycle.

Lack of a complete view of the customer – "Customer Experience Edge" provides the perfect example—banking customer service representatives who can’t even access the information a customer just put into the IVR, let alone their history of business and interactions with the company. If a proper customer experience comes from building meaningful relationships at all turns, every associated interaction needs to be in plain view of the customer service function and ripe for influence over the service that is provided. Too often, customer issues are approached as disjointed and one-off, creating inefficiencies that burden the customer service workforce and result in unsatisfactory outcomes for customers.