The customer experience (CX) challenge
In the current state of double digit inflation and looming tax hikes for companies and their customers, it is even more important that companies retain a competitive edge. Having good products may not be enough when customers are being ever more cautious with their buying decisions. When 70% of consumers say a company is only as good as its service (The Connected Customer Experience by Genesys), it is vital to be attentive and responsive to customer requests. To address this need for excellent service many companies have created customer experience (CX) functions with highly trained customer-facing staff. Sometimes these are a unit in the sales department but often they are an autonomous department.
However, a recent survey of how organisations are perceiving their CX workforces (by MIT Technology Review Insights in collaboration with Genesys), found that there are significant staffing concerns. You can register to download a copy here.
Paradoxically “while 96% of respondents to the survey consider hiring new employees to be challenging, … just one-third identify high staff turnover as a problem”.
The report lists attitudes to flexible working, insufficient learning and development, and lack of career development as areas to improve.
Megan Neale, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, Limitless Technology goes as far as to say “The traditional CX work model is broken…slim margins and low hourly wages have resulted in massive attrition in the contact center landscape.”
With the increase in digitisation, for example AI tools such as bots, the majority view from the survey is that the CX role will become more specialised and higher value:
“For customer-facing agents and supervisors, there will be a significant move away from simply concluding transactions toward deeply engaging with customers through personalized, empathetic, and proactive interactions.”
It is clear from the report that employee experience (EX) of CX staff is a major concern for the survey respondents with 76% identifying low morale and improvement of health and wellness being identified as an important priority. To support CX experts, in their enhanced roles, the report states that:
“Flexibility, learning and development, and accelerated career pathing are at the heart of CX leaders’ plans to focus on employee engagement.”
Organisation experience (OX) data
Change can be unsettling and monitoring the progress towards a new more empathetic CX model is key. CX staff will be at the heart of this change and will have opinions about the front-line challenges; opinions which are not necessarily shared with CX leaders. This is information about the company, not the individual, which we call organisation experience (OX) data. One confidential way of monitoring progress is to use a tool which collects OX data from CX staff digitally, anonymously and in real time, alerting you to any unseen issues which they have identified. Tensense is an early warning system for your business. You can watch a short video here.
The customer experience (CX) challenge
In the current state of double digit inflation and looming tax hikes for companies and their customers, it is even more important that companies retain a competitive edge. Having good products may not be enough when customers are being ever more cautious with their buying decisions. When 70% of consumers say a company is only […]