Almost three-fourths of organizations have (32.3%), or are planning to hire this year (41.5%), a Chief Customer Officer (CCO) or an executive-level role in charge of the customer experience (CX), according to Metrigy research. With customer engagement channels increasing and changing, and response time expectations growing, one of the key duties of most CCOs is to create a “customer first” mentality across the organization — where every employee is in tune with the customers’ wants and needs and can help respond to them if needed.
In many cases though, there is still a physical and digital divide between the individuals who hear from and speak to customers every day (contact center agents) and the rest of the organization’s employees. And this is having a negative effect on key customer satisfaction ratings and KPIs including:
– Response time
– Average handling time
– Average speed of answer
– First call resolution (FCR)
– Customer effort score
– Abandonment rate
– Net promoter score (NPS)
– And more
In a recent 2021 State of the Contact Center survey of 400 contact center and CX leaders, communication silos were identified as one of the top challenges to CX, with 58% saying that multiple systems and the inability of agents to communicate and collaborate with organizational SMEs was having a negative impact on customer satisfaction. Fifty-five percent of this segment (55%) reported this negative CSAT impact was moderate to extreme.
Bridging the Digital Divide
This is leading to more and more organizations integrating their unified communications (employee communications including voice, video and chat) and contact center (CC) technologies. Metrigy research shows that organizations that integrate UC and CC with a single vendor, enabling the contact center and its agents to communicate and collaborate with the rest of the business, are achieving significant results:
– a 37% improvement in agent efficiency
– a 14% cost decrease
– a 57% customer rating improvement
– and a nearly 100% revenue improvement for the areas affected by the integration
Some examples of the this last statistic could include a contact center that handles a particular product and now taps into non-agent experts to not just help close cases, but to help encourage cross-sell or upsell sales.
Think too about product development where the product team, easily able to tap into contact center speech analytics, can see and hear what customers are most passionate or upset about, and either improve upon the product or create a new product line.
The same notion applies to the sales team. If they’re calling on existing customers for renewal or to improve the health of the relationship, they can tap into the contact center’s insights to know what current customers inquire most about or what they like to hear. Same goes for prospects.
Now think about IT. Able to easily see and hear where customers get hung up in the customer journey, self-service or IVRs, they can make a change that increases the sales flow, sales completions or just noticeably improves CX. They can also react in real-time or be proactive when it comes to an issue that’s beginning to trend or a reported outage.
These are just some ways in which a major increase in both customer satisfaction – and revenue – can be achieved.
To read more about the rise of the Chief Customer Officer, the increasing focus on integrating UC + CC technologies, and the statistics referenced above, you can access a complimentary copy of Metrigy’s research here.
