Self-deception on Contact Centres

The “Effortless Experience” presents some key findings around Customer Experience, and prove that there is a correlation between Customer Loyalty and Customer Effort. One of the interesting findings is that Customer Service interactions tend to drive disloyalty, not loyalty; and another extremely important finding is that the key to mitigating disloyalty is to reduce customer effort.

And in the middle of some great insight, the author puts the finger in the wound: “Most metrics used in contact centres today suffer from a kind of myopia: They take a very narrow view of things that tend to make service organisations look much better than they really are (…) an example: Most companies measure transfer rates by relying on switch data, which is captured when calls are handed from one agent to another. But when you interview customers, it turns out they have a different definition of a “transfer”. What if the customer started on the web – maybe in a chat session – and then had to call the contact centre? In the customer’s mind, that is a transfer. If the customer started on the IVR and then bailed out to speak to a live person? Transfer. Same thing with repeated contacts, repeating information, channel switching, and so on”.

It is true that many contact centres and service organisations are still looking too much at themselves, and (intentionally?!) forgetting the customer. But the truth is that they aren’t doing anyone any favours. Self-deception will only cause customers to leave, the company to lose and thence the self service organisation to suffer.

The author concludes by saying what any good consultant would advise: “we’ll argue for reengineering customer service metrics to better align to the customer view of things. It’s not a beauty contest – these measures will likely make you look much worse than your old ones, at first – but the important thing is that you will have reoriented your dashboard toward capturing what really matters to customers (…) and ultimately that’s where loyalty, and disloyalty, come from“.