Part II: Business Investments vs. Customer Preferences
The State of
Customer Service
Experience
2 0 2 3
PART TWO OF A TWO-PART SERIES
Providing excellent Customer Experiences is
essential to the survival of all businesses, but it can
be difficult to understand the nuances of how
interactions with a company impact customers both
positively and negatively.
Equally important are the customer service and experience actions and
investments made by a company's leadership, proactively and in response
to consumer sentiment and/or feedback.
Customers look at their experiences with a company as a combination of
all the contacts they make across channels to resolve their issues.
Companies that learn to deliver a seamless, personalized experience
across all channels will have a competitive advantage.
To find out what customers really think about the experiences they have
interacting with companies and to determine whether their impressions
are in sync with what the leaders of those businesses perceive about the
level of service they provide, we conducted parallel surveys with
customers and business leaders.
Executive Summary
Section l: Investments in People and Processes
Does where we work impact how we work?
Contact center associates want to work from home; Customers say ok, but
many business leaders don’t.
The Experience Gap: Businesses score themselves higher than consumers do!
Training is a high priority for business leaders and customers alike.
Part Il: Business Investments vs. Customer Preferences
Section II: Investments in Technology
Smart investments in the right contact center technologies prove critical for
maintaining and improving the Customer Experience.
Live agent chat is making inroads with customers; It should be considered an
investment priority.
IVR & Automatic Callback: Contact center technologies with great potential
when done right.
This is the seventh time The Northridge Group has
conducted a “State of Customer Service Experience”
study and the fourth time we have surveyed business
leaders. Our report provides insights that business
leaders can use to improve the Customer Experience at
their organizations.
Does Where We Work Impact How We Work?
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, almost all contact center associates
worked strictly in contact center offices. When the pandemic hit, most
associates were sent home to work remotely. This arrangement worked
out better than anyone expected.
Today it is exceedingly difficult to get associates to go to a contact
center five days a week because they simply don’t have to anymore.
Companies that required associates to return to the office full-time
have experienced notable attrition.
Workers have had the upper hand in the current job market, so
discontinuing remote work for contact center associates may be a
costly decision for employers. Offering permanent hybrid or remote
positions may be the smart way for employers to attract high-
performing associates and offers the greatest defense against attrition.
The State of Customer Service Experience
Investments in People
and Processes
One of the most important elements to this whole
dynamic is understanding how to measure and
monitor productivity and quality in remote,
hybrid, and on-site environments.
Optimized training, Quality Monitoring, and Workforce
Management (WFM) are all vital to delivering excellent
customer service experiences. A contact center assessment
that focuses on all of these can help improve the live-agent
experience for customers.
We recently helped a leading consumer retailer improve its
contact center performance with an operations redesign.
Our recommendations resulted in a 20%-point improvement
in their Net Promoter Score (NPS), as well as long-term WFM
investment strategies for staffing, training, and metrics.
Contact center associates want to work from
home? Customers say "No problem!“
Now that working remotely has become commonplace, it’s no
surprise that customers don’t object to customer service
associates working from home.
Northridge’s Quality Monitoring specialists have also observed that some customers
respond positively to associates working from home and may even engage in
personal conversation around it. As long as contact center associates are able to
resolve a customer's issue to their satisfaction and do so in a timely manner, the
location seems to be less important in the eyes of the customer.
NORTHRIDGE SUCCESS STORY
47%
of customers knowingly
spoke with a contact
center associate
working from home
72%
said this did not
impact the agent's
ability to resolve
their issue
34%
of businesses
plan to go back
to on-site work
Business leaders not aligned with customers or
their associates when it comes to work from
home policies.
Offering contact center associates the option to work from
home or to work on a hybrid basis increases the chances of
recruiting and retaining top talent, yet many companies are
planning to bring contact center associates back to the office
full-time.
While 37% of businesses offer permanent remote work for contact center
associates, our research indicates that more than one-third of businesses plan to go
back to working full-time on-site.
These employers may have trouble recruiting and retaining good talent. Employee
attrition is costly so companies should carefully evaluate the pros and cons of
mandating full-time onsite work. It may be a mistake in some cases.
Surprisingly, they expressed less concern about recruiting and attrition. Only 29% of
business leaders reported that recruiting was a big concern and only 25% of
business leaders reported that attrition is a big concern. That may change if/when
they return to full-time onsite work models.
37%
of businesses offer
remote work
The Experience Gap: Businesses are not scoring
as well as they think with customers when it
comes to Customer Experience.
93% of business leaders surveyed believe their companies make it easy for customers
to resolve their issues, only 66% of customers felt this way in return.
The response speed associated with live agent chat offers businesses the opportunity
to shift volume to a channel that provides them with higher productivity at a lower
service cost. However, this channel will only be popular with customers if it allows them
to quickly and effectively solve their problems. Many companies aren’t there yet. More
must be done to provide customers with quick and easy paths to issue resolution.
93%
66%
6%
21%
1%
13%
Business
Leaders
Customers
Easy or Very Easy
Neither Easy nor Difficult
Difficult or Very Difficult
How easy is it for customers to get their
customer service inquiries or issues handled efficiently?
A Fortune 25 healthcare insurer partnered with The
Northridge Group to conduct an end-to-end assessment of
their Capacity Planning and Workforce Management (WFM)
processes, with the goals of lowering operating costs, improving
customer service, and enhancing employee satisfaction.
We identified opportunities for increasing visibility to true
staffing requirements, improving accuracy of Full-Time Employee
(FTE) “net lines”, consolidating queues, maximizing resource
utilization effectiveness, and implementing call handling metric
outcomes.
Our recommendations resulted in an estimated 20% reduction
in overtime and 25% reduction in new hires; a 6% increase in
agent utilization for call handling; and the identification of $52M-
to-$74M in cost reduction opportunities.
NORTHRIDGE SUCCESS STORY
Customer service training – a high priority for
customers and business leaders.
Customers and business leaders agree that training for customer
service representatives should be a high priority.
When asked about their customer service investment priorities, more business leaders chose
training than any other customer service investment (except for 24/7 customer service
availability). Interestingly, customers ranked these same two areas--24/7 availability and better
training--as the top investments they believe businesses should make, but in reverse order.
Providing training to supervisors as well as associates can drastically
impact the Customer Experience in situations where a live associate
is interacting with a customer. We partnered with a Fortune 100
telecom company to provide a coaching development program for
contact center supervisors to quickly drive transformational results.
Within six weeks of coaching, Voice of the Customer Representative
Satisfaction improved by more than 4% overall, and by more than
10% for a supervisory team targeted for improvement; the
company's First Contact Resolution (FCR) percentage also increased
by 40 basis points.
NORTHRIDGE SUCCESS STORY
While business leaders believe their company already has appropriate training and
learning management systems in place, 92% of business leaders would like to provide
additional training to their customer service representatives, with soft-skills training
being the top area of investment and/or improvement at 29%.
BUSINESSES
CUSTOMERS
24/7 customer
service availability
Better training for
customer service
representatives
01
02
01
02
24/7 customer
service availability
Better training for
customer service
representatives
Service Availability and Training Rank as the
Top Two Investment Areas for Performance and Experience
There are a myriad of connection points between your
business and the end customer, and while your contact
center associates may not be the first point of contact, there
is no doubt they are the most important.
In my experience working with large contact center
operations, we see that managers often lack the time and
resources needed to properly evaluate associate
performance--it's why they bring in outside Quality
Monitoring experts who can objectively assess the
situation and offer honest, practical insights and
recommendations for improvement.
Lisa Butler
Managing Principal,
Service Delivery
The Quality Monitoring process involves both the collection and mining of data
from a company’s customer calls, emails, chat, and social media – ideally
combining it with other company data to derive insights from deeper in the
organization. While this process varies slightly by industry sector and company
size, I’ve found the most complex and nuanced Quality Monitoring programs are
often tied to the healthcare industry.
Health insurance providers handle calls from both members and providers and
are required to meet specific compliance standards and contend with extensive
regulations to maintain state contracts. Third-party Quality Monitoring teams that
are trained in the complexities of the specific regulations are best suited to help
insurance providers monitor the performance of associates.
It is critical to pinpoint the areas that contact center associates need to improve
on so they can be rectified. When data is collected across multiple channels and
deciphered, the story it tells can be used to improve associate performance and
enhance the Customer Experience.
Smart investments in the right contact center
technologies prove critical for maintaining and
improving the Customer Experience.
Our research indicates that customers are quite willing to embrace contact
center chat technologies as long as the process can quickly, efficiently, and
consistently solve their issues.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology is a solution that presents
infinite possibility for improving the overall Customer Experience, routing
calls efficiently, reducing hold times, and connecting customers to the right
contact center associates the first time around. The key to making this all
work--and where we almost always see it go awry--is in its initial set up and
configuration. Put simply, poor IVR implementation can wreak havoc on the
Customer Experience.
Automatic Callback is another technology that has been highly touted for its
potential to improve contact center wait times and provide a better
Customer Experience. Its success hinges on its reliability and that your
customers trust that it works.
The State of Customer Service Experience
Investments in Technology
These foundational technology systems should be
complimented by a host of new and emerging
contact center technologies, including AI and
machine learning, chatbots, virtual assistants and
voice, among others.