Customer Experience Transformation

What is Customer Experience Transformation?

In an age of sky-high customer expectations and fleeting loyalty, contact centers must up their customer experience game. While contact center leaders often cite budget as a roadblock to customer experience transformation, the real question is, can your contact center afford NOT to transform when considering the potential for customer and agent attrition?

The good news is that there are strategies, tactics, and technologies to help with customer experience transformation on a budget. Before we dive in, let’s take a closer look at what is meant by customer experience (CX) transformation, why it matters, and the business benefits.

Definition of Customer Experience Transformation

Customer experience is defined as the experience a customer has with a brand or business, encompassing the quality of customer care, advertising, packaging, product, service, features, pricing, ease of use, ease of doing business, and reliability. 

Customer experience transformation is a comprehensive plan and process that looks at your contact center’s culture, agent talent, and operations to identify ways you can alter your practices, people, and technology to improve customer experience.

Components of Customer Experience Transformation 

While contact centers are on their own journeys to transform customer experience, there are some critical elements of a framework to aid your efforts. 

1. Vision. Your vision needs to be customer centric and communicated broadly, so everyone is “all in” on a CX culture to achieve greater business success.
2. Agent Experience. You can’t provide outstanding CX without providing a great agent experience. Prioritizing resources to transform the agent experience delivers a rapid ROI.
3. Technology. Research and invest in the right technology that provides contact center leaders and agents with flexibility, knowledge, and feedback that sets them up for success in a digital world. 
4. Operations. Take inventory of your current processes and phase in incremental changes that optimize omnichannel support, elevate the customer journey, and promote agent success.

Why Prioritize Customer Experience Transformation

To highlight the importance of customer experience transformation in the contact center, look no further than examples of poor experiences. Maybe your call was dropped after waiting on hold for an hour. Or your time-sensitive order got lost, and the agent on chat can’t locate it. 

Information, tools, and the right technology are key to empowering agents to deliver outstanding CX. Even with limited resources, it’s still possible to leverage digital transformation for change, but it takes effort on everyone’s part to succeed.

As a contact center leader, you play an important role in ensuring that every customer interaction with your agents and company is good. You serve as a role model for embracing digital transformation and ensure that your agents are well supported to maximize their success. 

The Role of Digital Transformation in Customer Experience

Digital transformation plays a pivotal role in upping your customer experience game. It’s defined as the process of integrating technology into your organization to either improve or create new business processes, with the focus on enhancing the overall customer experience. It is not only about purchasing and deploying technology, but about adapting your business processes, and transforming how your business engages with customers.

For many contact centers, it starts with creating an omnichannel experience to meet customer preferences for self service. But it’s both science and art to create a truly seamless journey across all channels. 

Developing a successful omnichannel strategy requires customer-centric design and infrastructure integration for a seamless experience. An additional benefit beyond CX is the opportunity to maximize agent productivity and reduce operating costs. Shifting common inquiries to more automated, less-costly channels also helps enhance customer satisfaction by providing the opportunity for your customers to self-serve. Additionally, when inquiries are complex, your agents can provide more personalized service, further enhancing the customer experience. 

Benefits of Customer Experience Transformation 

Investing in customer experience transformation provides numerous measurable benefits. 

Reduce Churn 

When customers are more satisfied with their experiences and interactions with your brand, products, and company, they are more likely to remain loyal to your business.

Likewise, when agents feel supported, engaged, and empowered, they are more likely to stay and grow with the company. 

Increase Customer Loyalty and Spend

Companies that focus on CX not only enjoy higher customer retention, but customers become repeat purchasers. Satisfied customers also recommend a brand to others, which can result in new business opportunities.

Improve Customer Experience

The payoffs of focusing on improving experiences for customers are tangible. According to a PwC report, customers are willing to pay a 16% price premium on products and services, in addition to increased loyalty. 

That same report goes on to state that nearly 80% of American consumers say that speed, convenience, knowledgeable help and friendly service are the most important elements of exceptional experiences. Prioritize technologies that provide these benefits rather than adopting new technologies for the sake of being cutting edge.

Improve Employee Experience 

When companies invest in elevating the employee experience, superior customer experience follows. Focus on keeping your best agents engaged and happy by:

• Paying competitive wages
• Providing consistent feedback on performance
• Embracing flexible work schedules
• Investing in training and coaching 
• Providing career advancement opportunities

Gain Operational Efficiency

When you leverage digital transformation to deliver better service interactions, gain customer insights, and focus on customer relationships, operational efficiencies come along for the ride. By assessing customer preferences and offering omnichannel support, you eliminate bottlenecks and inefficiencies. From there, you can focus on improving agent effectiveness, knowledge, and best practices for communication.  

How to Achieve Customer Experience Transformation on a Budget 

Digital transformation in the form of artificial intelligence (AI) is making its way into contact center upgrades. GenAI technology allows agents to provide customers with faster, more specialized experiences, and agents save time and effort when providing support. 

Transformation doesn’t have to be a forklift overhaul. Prioritize those areas that fit your budget and business goals.

Offer Omnichannel Support 

An omnichannel contact center connects customers’ interactions no matter where they take place across traditional and digital channels. The key to success is to provide a seamless experience. 

A good place to start is to add the channels your customers want the most, train your agents to handle them correctly, and deliver the specific experience customers expect in those channels. For example, you could add chat to your channel offering and then train your team on the differences in handling chats compared to email and voice. Then set up a way to conduct quality analysis on those interactions to ensure you are delivering on your committed customer expectations.

Improve Every Interaction 

Because every interaction matters, workforce management (WFM) software is one of the most important call center efficiency solutions available to achieve digital transformation. Organizations can reduce staff-related costs by up to 20% with minimal impact on service levels and customer experience. These digital technologies provide real-time visibility into your business, allowing you to create exceptional customer and employee experience. 

For example, AI-infused WFM technology helps contact center leaders balance scheduling against forecasts while offering flexibility and work-life balance to agents — an employee engagement booster while managers ensure they are adequately staffed to deliver outstanding customer interactions.

Make Sure Leaders Are All In

Successful CX transformation needs to start at the top with buy in from leadership and all contact center managers. Customer experience needs to be part of the company’s vision, mission, and goals, but equally important is that leaders lead by example to build a positive service culture.

Examples include listening to your agents and customers and seeking feedback in multiple ways whenever possible. 

When you include experience in the company’s goals and customer-focused strategies, employees are more likely to embrace them, so it becomes part of a CX culture. Agents then feel empowered to share feedback that’s often vital in understanding where to focus CX opportunities. And when they share that feedback, there’s buy-in that’s critical for a company’s CX transformation.

Use AI to Transform Quality Management and Operations

Digital transformation in the form of AI is making its way into contact center upgrades, with the emphasis on customized experiences for agents and customers. 

Generative AI technologies can change how we work and our ability to deliver stellar CX and exceed customer expectations.

Companies benefit from incorporating AI into their customer-centric culture, including:

1. Improving Workforce Management and Employee Engagement
2. Decoding Customer Sentiment
3. Streamlining Quality Management Processes and Coaching

Measure Progress and Refine

To measure customer experience transformation, it’s important to analyze key agent and customer experience metrics against the goals and look for areas of improvement.  For example, contact centers might use qualitative measures, such as net promoter score and other forms of customer feedback, and quantitative measures such as the number of orders placed through a new app versus email.Customer experience transformation is a journey. Plan and prioritize your budget by tackling the most impactful changes first. Celebrate progress and wins with leadership and agents along the way. When you shift your business to a customer-centric mindset and embark on successful digital transformation initiatives, contact centers reap the benefits of happier customers and employees and a healthier bottom line.