Driving Toward High Performance through Improved Customer Experiences

2007-11-14 17:23:39 Source: http://www.accenture.com

The Accenture survey of customer service paints an unflattering picture of current customer contact capabilities among communications companies mainly.

Some of the key findings are:

As many as 87 percent of customers say they are bounced from one agent to another during a single interaction. Sixty-nine percent of customers say agents do not have the answers they are looking for and 44 percent say the agents are slow to respond or cause irritation by always turning a question into a sales opportunity (55 percent). Almost half of the respondents said poor service led them to change service providers last year. Sixty-two percent did not think that the increased use of technology has improved overall service quality. Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed were "not at all satisfied" with telephone self-service, also known as integrated voice response (IVR).

Communications companies that are striving to achieve high performance in the long term must now make investments in their customer contact capabilities.

To achieve high performance through optimized customer contact processes and technologies, Accenture recommends that Communications and High Tech companies:

Begin with an overall customer experience blueprint: Design the right customer experience for each customer segment. Reduce unnecessary customer interactions: Successful companies have taken a customer-centric approach and are eliminating interactions caused by poorly designed processes or misleading communications. Make contact center agents more effective: Leading companies are discovering that investments in desktop tools can pay off in increased customer loyalty and lower costs.

Implement metrics that align with customer experience goals: Traditional metrics are unsatisfactory now. A more enlightened approach to customer care measures the "contact rate" (increasing first-call resolution and decreasing the number of contacts per customer).

With an overall customer experience blueprint in place, companies will be poised to achieve high performance and create strong customer loyalty and higher lifetime customer value.