Eliminate the Cost Center Mindset
Mathew Dixon challenges conventional wisdom, believing that an effortless customer experience is the primary driver of high net Promoter scores (a measure of customer loyalty).
Writing in Harvard Business Review, Dixon describes the transformation of T-Mobile’s call center into a model based on Teams-of-Experts. Referred to as the TEX Model.
The success of T-Mobile’s TEX Model is undeniable. Read the HBR article for the stats including a 13% decline in cost to service. Moreover, an increase in first call resolution and the ability to anticipate future issues, has reduce total calls per account by 21%.
However, before a contact center can even think about using a Team of Experts model, they must first eliminate the routine, transactional calls which dominate most call queues.
Of course, this is the basis behind an effortless customer experience. Repeat sales, share of wallet, and positive word of-mouth (net Promoter) is achieved by how well a company solves basic, day-to-day issues.
Ask yourself, how easy (effortless) is it for a customer to register their product? Understand that opening the box and getting started is the first experience your customer has with your product. Why are you asking them to navigate to your website to register – right at the moment they want to begin using their new purchase! Skip the website registration and deploy digital, text-to-register inside your product packaging.
The same question should be asked across every digital customer support initiative. For example, are chatbots deployed only on your website, social media and mobile app channels? What if you deployed text to SMS chat directly in the call queue? What impact would that have on your abandoned call rate? Render it obsolete, I would think
The goal of your digital customer experience should not be to simply automate a routine issue. It must be deployed in ways that reduce friction, save the customer’s time and engage them on the issues which matter most to them.
READ the full Harvard Business Review Article here.