As customer experience and customer service increasingly become a strategic priority for companies looking to differentiate themselves, call center leaders are under more pressure than ever to ramp up their call center performance.

Recap: In Part I of this blog post, I covered the following three areas to focus on in order to advance your call center performance:

1.     Create the Right Perception

Lead and manage with the mindset that your call center is a customer loyalty and revenue-generating center.  Perception matters.

2.     Use Outcome-Based Measurements

Some aspects of customer service are never going to change – anyone asking for assistance expects to be helped by someone who is knowledgeable, pleasant, presents the answer from the caller’s perspective, and is professional. There are other characteristics that callers prefer in their service provider, but they are not a core requirement. Most of us want to be helped by someone who seems interested and cares, as well as someone who “really gets it.” It’s not easy to do a good job of delivering customer service, and it’s only going to become more challenging as customer expectations become more demanding.

There are some interesting attitudes among callers today, including the fact that many would prefer not to have to call and speak to a customer service person. Calling and asking for help is the last resort for a surprising number of millennials. For many, “talking” means SMS or texting, and it’s taken as a personal affront if data is not available in their preferred channel.

In this environment, mobile applications (apps) are emerging at a rapid clip. Consumers cannot get enough of them, even if all they do is acquire them (mostly for free), use them once or twice, and move on to the next potentially more exciting application. While it may seem frivolous to purchase an app to point out the exact location of different stars in the night sky (actually, I think it’s rather cool), it’s not inane to want an app for banking, insurance, shopping, traffic, travel reservations, or to make medical appointments.

In customer service organizations, collaboration should take place around cases and content, and should involve not only customer-customer service agent collaboration, but internal collaboration within the enterprise. Internal collaboration has quantifiable benefits as measured by increased organizational productivity and efficiency. For cases, collaboration helps increase first contact resolution, decrease handle times and increase customer satisfaction. For content, collaboration helps evolve content to be more relevant, accurate, complete, and in-line with customer demand.

Some of the technologies that help foster collaboration around cases and content include:

For cases:

• Presence indicators, instant messaging and video chat – to allow customer service agents to connect in real-time with subject matter experts, supervisors, managers or other agents having the necessary skills to help resolve a question.
• Collaborative workspaces – to allow agents and subject matter experts to share documents and logs about the customer issue,  the troubleshooting process and results in real time.
• Activity streams – To allow agents and subject matter experts to subscribe to a case and receive notifications of all changes and additions to a case.
•  Remote support – To allow customer service agents to invite subject matter experts and specialty agents to troubleshoot software or hardware with a customer.

For content:

I think it started happening about seven years ago.  Web 2.0 and social media kicked in gear an evolving platform and ecosystem of friends and business sharing that continues to open up new and exciting connection and convergence opportunities for marketing, support and services.   I check in like the other 40+% of the social web to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and multiple other blogs.  And, I think, "we the people" connect, consumer and communicate like never before.  Companies with contact centers are constantly looking to evolve, expand and harness the enormous potential for social platforms, to create extraordinary customer experiences.  Across multiple channels of operation, boardroom walls and organizational silos are coming down, and thinking is changing.

Mobile tools facilitate this “people convergence” and the transparency, human connection and sharing via blogs, vlogs, forums, social networking platforms and community portals grows in scale and scope every day.  These are all varied forms of the Web 2.0 technology that evolved in the early part of the century. Yet, the use of these platforms, users, ideas and connection points have made them increasingly invaluable as tools for businesses, community and connection.