If you’ve attended Enterprise Connect in recent years, you know the contact center space is a hotbed of activity, with conversations shifting away from general feature sets to topics of greater depth around how to keep customers engaged with the business and deliver experiences that delight and differentiate. In fact, at EC19 this past March, we brought the customer engagement conversation to the mainstage for the first time in our show’s history, with contact center guru and track chair Sheila McGee-Smith running a panel discussion on how customer engagement is leading the larger conversations around enterprise communications.
As my colleague Eric Krapf, Enterprise Connect GM and program co-chair, wrote in a
blog this week, “the demands for ever-improving customer service won’t let up any time soon.” Another recent
No Jitter blog from Ovum analyst Jeremy Cox presented the reality that despite enterprises’ efforts around digital transformation and omnichannel customer engagement, the chasm between what customers expect and what most businesses currently deliver is growing.
“These barriers to a frictionless and positive customer experience aren’t intentional,” Cox wrote. “For the most part, they’re the consequences of organizational structures, departmental processes, and a tangled bird’s nest of legacy technology that evolved based on the needs of the enterprise, not the customer. … For digital transformation to have any value and meaning, it must create an environment that is fit for customers, to meet their ever-rising and rapidly evolving expectations. It’s that obvious. So why is it so hard to do?”
Cox adds that old, outdated mindsets are getting in the way of 21st century progress on this matter of customer engagement. While I believe that Cox is correct with this assertion, I have to think there’s more to this story…
Contact centers, customer engagement, customer experience -- these are all areas that are not cut and dry. They’re complex. Modern businesses need a strategy for everything -- for how to differentiate the customer experience, how to retain customers, how to gain new customers, and how to leverage new and evolving technologies to accomplish these goals. They need to be thinking about and evaluating whether they have the right things in place today and how they can improve things for tomorrow.
With all the factors involved in operating a contact center that keeps customers engaged and satisfied, many paths may lead you to success. Which is your contact center on? Are you satisfied with the customer experience you are providing? If not, what approaches are you looking at to get to the level of customer service you desire?
These are all questions we’re aiming at with our first-annual
Enterprise Contact Center & Customer Experience survey. Won’t you help us out as we look to take the pulse of our audience and learn how you are approaching your CX efforts? For your feedback, we’ll even sweeten the deal: As a survey respondent, you’ll be able to enter for a chance to win one of three $100 Visa gift cards!
Take our survey now before it closes on Friday, June 28. And come on back to No Jitter in the coming weeks, as we’ll be publishing the results so you can see how your organization’s approach and perspectives stack up against others.
