Nearly 90% of CEOs cite customer engagement as their primary initiative in the next five years, yet most businesses capture only a fraction of their opportunities for customer engagement. Why are they failing and what can be done better from an operational perspective?
If Corporate Marketing has been responsible for the ‘presented’ brand, Customer Service has owned the ‘experienced’ brand—and often has the bigger impact. Service and support teams must be able to measure and track progress toward the goal of customer engagement.
Service executives already have business objectives tied to the customer experience. Unfortunately, traditional metrics—such as first-time resolutions, average handle time, agent utilization, cost to service the customer—do not capture true customer engagement. These key performance indicators (KPIs) do not show you how much your customers use self-service tools, how customers are speaking about your brand on social networks, or how consistent the customer experience is across channels.
While the entire company must be enabled to deliver on customer engagement, Customer Service and Support is tasked with the all-important front-line customer interaction and problem solving. They are the human face of the company and uniquely positioned to know customers’ personal stories—so they can be understood as people, not transactions.
So what does Customer Service and Support need to get this unique job done?
- Greater collaboration across departments
- Better product or service knowledge accessibility
- New methods for analyzing how customers engage with the company
And how do you accomplish this in your contact center? In our newly released guide “Empower Your Agents to Engage Your Customers,” we offer three ways to deliver customer engagement and, ultimately, growth and profitability.
- Empower your agents with the right technology and processes
- Empower your agents with the right knowledge
- Empower your agents with the right level of motivation
