Recent research reveals that 81% of businesses strive for the customer experience to be their competitive differentiator, yet only 22% of businesses report that they are exceeding customers’ expectations.
Companies that want to win on the metric of customer experience need to have a strong plan in place yet less than half of the businesses surveyed have created a business case to improve CX in a way that drives business outcomes. While businesses expand efforts to ensure their contact centers cover new and more complex channels like social, the demands and expectations of customers continue to change faster than businesses can respond. How can customer experience-driven businesses ensure their contact centers provide a proactive, personalized and seamless experience?
Companies can start by ensuring that their Quality Monitoring programs are predictors of the business outcomes that they are trying to achieve. Each program should be tightly correlated to key metrics. The first step is to assess the effectiveness of the Quality Monitoring program and design it to fit the needs of the company’s customers and agents. Northridge’s Quality Maturity Model illustrates the common pattern of growth for companies focusing on delivering quality customer experiences.
While personalized and effortless customer experience is always the ultimate goal for businesses, many companies often get stuck operating their customer experience initiatives with inflexible policies and check the box quality programs that drive to a transactional experience. Companies that are stuck at Level 1 often have a high agent turnover rate, inconsistent feedback, and disjointed technology due to a variety of reasons including unclear standards that are applied differently based on the location and the individual doing the monitoring.
In contrast, companies that have met the goal of effortless, personalized customer experience are characterized by having engaged agents who are the client and results-focused feedback that is correlated and predicted by the voice of the customer, and consistent technology that utilizes tools such as automation and speech analytics.
Reaching the highest level of quality maturity is dependent on ensuring your quality management evolves from a performance checklist to an actionable, behavior-based model that inspires representatives to deliver a differentiated Client Experience (CX). Here are three questions to ask when assessing your quality management.
- Does your quality management program measure the data customers care about?
- Does your quality program measure behaviors and actions of the agents that correlate to the voice of the customer metrics? Is your company asking the right questions to provide customers with the experience that they are demanding?
- Does the data derived from your quality management program drive broader business insights and add value?
- Do the insights gathered during quality monitoring help to identify processes that can be improved to enhance the customer experience and increase operating efficiencies? Data from the quality program can be analyzed in an Omni-Data strategy combining other data points like “voice of the customer” surveys, customer complaints, and operational metrics for deeper analysis and comparisons to refine and improve.
- Is the structure of your quality management program consistent, efficient and scalable?
- Your company is using standardized definitions and methodology across all contact centers and organizations. Customization is only applied when a clear business value is outlined, technology and processes such as routine calibrations are leveraged and vendor resources are aligned.
Matching the demands of consumers and providing effortless, personalized and consistent customer experience is no small feat. However, as businesses increasingly compete for less on product and more on service, businesses must have ways of managing quality monitoring programs that identify and react to the needs of today’s consumers.
Learn more about how Northridge can help you assess your existing quality program or contact us.
