Over the years, the contact centre has often been seen as a necessary but costly function of the business, generating multiple expenses: from agent salaries to maintenance fees and offering limited financial value in return.
This perception is changing as new capabilities come into play through which organisations can more easily measure the value of the contact centre. The issue historically has been that there was little to no ability to associate new revenue with what the customer service team was doing.
Most customer-facing operations were split into sales and support teams with the former seen as generating the revenue, and the latter providing necessary help to customers. The support team was not perceived to be offering any additional value to the organisation, mainly because there was no real way to link it with a specific sales number.
More recently, the importance of good customer service has become more widely recognised as study after study demonstrates the value it can bring. Bain and Company, for example, found that companies that excel at customer experience grow revenues 4-8% above their market. Other studies have shown how retaining customers helps to drive profits.
Traditionally, the benefit of better customer engagement was seen to be around the way it helped organisations to drive down cost. Studies indicate that retaining existing customers is far less expensive than acquiring new ones. We have seen research that shows the cost of retaining an existing customer may be up to 25 times less expensive than gaining a new one. So businesses can benefit hugely from focusing on customer retention and driving up customer lifetime value.
Tools Available
But what kind of tools are available to them? Structured data and its analysis is often the starting point. Over the past five years, it has become easier to extract data from the contact centre showing in the case of net promoter scores (NPS), what the customer thinks of the business.
The problem is, and where next-generation voice of the customer tools can help, is people are about more than just their historical numbers. Organisations also need intelligence about how their customers are thinking and feeling. Rather than just collecting the traditional NPS score, they need to find out why customers gave that score. Being able to identify that enables them to create an action plan to improve customer service still further. Customers that simply give a score of six out of ten for delivery, for example, could suggest a negative opinion but that alone does not give the business tangible information about the reasons behind the result.
That’s where the next generation of voice of the customer tools can help by providing an extra level of precision that tells them why the customer was negative about delivery. It could be that items always turned up late or the delivery was missing an element. Getting access to that level of precision enables the business to address the problem.