Achieving Differentiation Through Customer Centricity

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, May 2007 by Christensen, Vance

Today's customer service network and value chain are widespread, not to mention often siloed and complex. While most customers still opt to do business by phone with a live agent, others prefer the flexibility of e-mail and the always-accessible Web. That said, organizations cannot underestimate the value of the customer impact from their in-person sales and service opportunities. Competition is fierce and customer demands are high. Now, more than ever, optimizing workforce performance through the selection of the workforce model that best suits your customers - is critical. Increasingly, these dynamics are causing organizations across vertical markets to not only reevaluate their approaches to quality and service levels, but also workforce productivity - leading the most forward-thinking down the path of "customer centricity."

According to the Harvard Business Review, a "customer centric" company is not about "organizing your company to serve customers. It's letting customers determine how you organize."

In one sense, dûs is an obvious observation. The very phrase "customer centricity" implies that die customer resides at die center of your organization, theoretically acting as die touchstone around which all decisions revolve and from which all initiatives emanate. In anodier very real sense, however, customer centricity is quite difficult to achieve. True customer centricity requires die flexibility to adapt to changing customer needs and dynamics. It requires companies to objectivity listen to customer concerns. It requires die commitment to invest in how best to truly capture the "voice of die customer" and convert it into actionable intelligence that can be used not only in brick-and-mortar settings and contact center environments, but throughout the enterprise.

The value of achieving true customer centricity is expressed in a number of ways, die key benefit being to act as a differentiator between you and the competition in a marketplace of increasing product parity and growing customer demands. Today, organizations have the opportunity to increase their customer loyalty, thereby improving the all-important bottom line, simply by evaluating workforce models and determining how to best capture and put the voice of the customer into action.

Let's start by examining how evaluating workforce models with the customer in mind can positively impact customer service levels.

Workforce Models - Changing With The Times

Many organizations are using or considering a hybrid workforce model, one in which they employ both brick-and-mortar and virtual employees to meet the needs of customers. IP telephony has helped pave the way for this transition by allowing the infrastructure flexibility to route calls seamlessly from centralized to remote agents - all of which remains completely transparent to the consumer. With this infrastructure, supporting processes and the right technologies along with an enterprise mindset blended workforce models can be extremely cost-efficient, enabling companies to better meet customer needs.

This approach, which allows companies to broaden their employee base and manage staff more efficiently and effectively, is being leveraged in both back-office and branch locations around the world. For example, a contact center in a financial institution can easily identify resources/personnel in other areas of the organization with forecasted "down time" during expected spikes in call volume such as those in the branch office. This can help fill gaps and align die right staff, including highly specialized personnel, to meet specific customer requirements.

The virtual contact center presents another opportunity. With a remote workforce, organizations have die opportunity to attract workers diat previously might not have considered diem as a potential employer. Examples include stay-at-home mothers and die disabled: groups that may be educated, skilled workers, but require a level of flexibility diat many jobs simply cannot accommodate. Such a model can open new doors, making you an attractive employer for a category of previously untapped, skilled workers with specialized scheduling needs. You can fulfill your full-time staffing requirements and strategically augment part-time schedules to meet specific objectives and periods of heavier customer traffic.

We've focused on how organizations can meet the expectations of their customers by adopting full- and flex-time models diat are centralized and distributed. But how can these companies extrapolate their customers' preferences in the first place? How can they capture customer feedback? How can that information be put into action in support of a customer-centric strategy?

Customer Feedback Reinforces Reality

Organizations have long paid lip service to the importance of the voice of the customer. Although many have recorded customer interactions for the past 30 years, they have focused primarily on the actions and enablement of their staff, rather than on those of their customers.