Customer Experience is becoming more of a focus for businesses and we hear all the time that the customer should be at the centre of what we do, but are they?

There are many organisations out there that talk about multi/omni-channel, AI, Chatbots etc. yet they don’t know why their customers contact them, how they would like to contact them and what their customer journey is.

So where is the customer in your strategy?

Let’s start with a few questions:

1.       Do you know who your customers are and what they want?

2.       Do you know why they are contacting you and the journey they have to take?

3.       Do you know how your customers want to interact with you and what their pain points are?

The Customer Journey

Customer contact may be seen as a positive or negative - it can drive frustration for both you and your customers whilst increasing unnecessary costs to your business. It is therefore fundamental to your business to understand your customers existing journey so that you can define your future customer contact strategy.

• Do you know what your customers journey is?

• Do you know what their pain points are?

What do your customers want?

Understanding what your customer needs are is key. If you don’t know what they want, how can you deliver the service they expect?

After listening to customers, here are some examples of what we heard.

What have you heard?

·         Have you spoken to your customers?

·         Do you know what they want?

·         Do you know your customer demographics?

Customer Contact

Once you have captured all your customer’s reasons for contacting you, there is a great tool that can be used to help identify opportunities to reduce workload and improve your customer’s experience; it’s called the Value/Irritant Matrix.

This allows you to categorise each contact and gets you to start thinking about how you can improve customer contact which will benefit both parties.

• Eliminate

• Simplify

• Automate

• Encourage

Customer Interactions

Understanding your customer’s reasons for having to contact you and the associated complexity of that contact is also key. The interaction cube is perfect for this.

The Customer Interaction Cube is a structure developed to categorise the different types of customer interactions that businesses have to handle, considering the urgency, complexity and emotional input of the interaction from the customer’s perspective.

There are eight types of interaction: combinations of either low or high urgency, complexity and emotional input. Each of these eight interaction types are best suited to specific channels that both customers and businesses could benefit from by matching channel with interaction type.

If you would like support with your customer contact strategy, or any other element of your contact centre, we’d love to help. CCS has a team of over 100 experts who are business, people and process orientated, half of whom are technical experts in communications and technology.

“The go-to consultancy for contact centres, supported by specialists, not generalists”