By
Sayo Afolayan
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Date Published: June 21, 2021 - Last Updated June 17, 2021
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Comments
Customer success is simply helping your customer achieve his/her definition of success through the use of your product or service. A customer’s definition of success can be the experience through the journey, and/or the final product/service. Many organizations now have separate, dedicated customer success teams.
I’m proud to say that the contact center has been helping customers achieve success since inception. It’s what we do. Contact centers are a pivotal part of the customer journey and in providing the final product/service.
The role of the contact center likely will continue to evolve, increasing in significance and responsibilities. According to Forbes, “we'll increasingly see the contact center have full and official ownership of all inbound customer interactions, encompassing both operations and marketing, revenue generation and customer service.” Because of this expanded mission, customer success has now become a dominant responsibility of the contact center.
The idea of having a dedicated customer success team is still gaining traction in Africa. Maybe you’re in a similar place at your contact center, or perhaps your company is still evaluating that approach.
Here are a few suggestions of how can you leverage your contact center to drive customer success:
Make Sharing Feedback Paramount
According to Microsoft’s 2017 customer service report, 52 percent of people around the globe believe companies need to take action on feedback provided by their customers.2 The contact center is a depository of customer opinions. When customers call, chat, and email, they provide comments on your products and services. To drive customer success, we must channel that feedback into the organization by regularly providing information to marketing, sales, operations, and any other internal team that makes decisions that impact the customer. Couple this feedback with suggestions on areas of improvement to deliver improved customer success.
Make your feedback interactive and engaging. The goal is to provide feedback that becomes vitally useful to the organization on all levels - feedback that enables outside-in thinking, empowers the organization to take action and build a better future.
Probe to Understand and Aim to Overperform
Get an in-depth understanding of your team’s role in the customer journey. Then ensure your team does their job extraordinarily well. Customer service is a significant driver of brand loyalty, referrals, and sales.
Lastly, always look for ways to improve your service delivery. 55 percent of customers expect better customer service year over year. This is especially true amongst those age 18-34, with 70% indicating rising expectations looking forward.
Empower Your Team
Here are some steps to take toward this goal:
- Reiterate the value of driving successful customer outcomes and the team's role in the journey. Clearly outline and highlight what the team is responsible for in delivering successful outcomes.
- Create rewards, recognitions, gamification, etc. around the key activities needed to deliver successful customer outcomes.
- Include successful outcomes in your performance management tool. This goes hand-in-hand with having an in-depth understanding of your role in delivering successful outcomes. Once you have that understanding, develop KPIs around the critical factors that drive success for your team.
Our contact centers are inherently customer success teams. We’ve been proudly helping our customers achieve success since our inception. With these little tweaks, we can further help our organizations achieve customer success with our customers.