Customer Care ROI Still Relevant

It has been some time since I last posted anything to this blog yet the focus on customer care and customer engagement has become even more relevant and important. Every interaction with your customer is an opportunity. It is an opportunity to reinforce your brand, an opportunity to extend their investment into your product or service, it is an opportunity to introduce them to new products and services, it is an oppportunity increase their lifetime value to your company. At the same time it can become a lost opportunity if it is not handled with appropriate care and attention. It still amazes me how many companies out their discount the importance of the contact center interaction with their customer. Instead they spend millions and millions of dollars investing in marketing, advertising, packaging and promotion yet treat the customer experience as a "necessary evil" to conducting business. As a long time contact center professional I have spent countless hours focused on key metrics such as average handle time, agent utilization, operational efficiency etc. All of these metrics are extremely important around managing financials but do little to measure the customer experience. It is exciting to see more companies begin to measure customer satisfaction, first call resolution, agent satisfaction and likelihood of recommending a product or a service. This is a great starting point to increasing customer care ROI. How can companies go further? How much time does your company spend in analyzing why a customer calls? Not just from a cost savings, call reduction standpoint but from a customer experience perspective. How different would their impression be of your brand if you handled the transaction from a customer perspective versus a policy perspective? More to come in my next post. I will attempt (time permitting) to take some of the more common customer interactions and explore how you or your company can increase your customer care ROI through those interactions.