All customers are increasing spending on customer experience. According to research from Hanover Research from 2023, 99% of business leaders say they plan to spend more on contact centers this year. According to 8×8, the opportunity extends beyond the contact center, making it an ideal time for UC providers to build out their CX practices.
After the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses realized that poor CX costs customers – they will simply leave after one bad experience. According to a Metrigy study, over 40% of customers will tell their friends / family about one bad experience, 26% will leave a bad online review, and 12% will share their views on social media. Companies are spending more on their contact centers as a result.
According to 8×8’s Senior Program Manager Tony Poer, any customer-facing role might benefit from contact center tools. Even an informal contact center environment (e.g. IT department, Credit Control) needs advanced call management techniques. They don’t quite get what they need from a UCaaS platform, but they aren’t ready to upgrade to being a formal, full-blown contact center. Metrigy found that 46% of companies are giving contact center licenses to employees who are not full-time agents (including sales, HR, product development etc.).
“Providing a great customer experience is everyone’s job – not just those frontline agents,” Poer told UC Today.
Defining the Contact Center’s Role in an Organization
Everyone can conceivably interact with a customer – it’s not binary whether you are customer care or not. Roughly 10% of an organization is a more formal contact center type role – people directly working with customers / delivering CX. About 40% have a crossover role – working internally but also with customers. The remaining 40-50% are primarily internal roles (e.g. back office, accounts). A platform that helps all these people must:
- Communicate across the entire organization
- Enable users to move across devices and locations, and toggle between chat and voice easily
- Empower the entire organization to deliver great customer experience – both in tools and mindset
By selling an organization a pure UC solution, you are probably only meeting the needs of half of the employees at your clients’ businesses. The UC space is becoming increasingly competitive in price. If all you’re selling is a UC solution, you will likely be replaced once a client reviews their provider. According to 8×8:
- The average Contact Center (CC) deal is 4x more valuable than a UC deal
- CC licenses are more expensive and typically double the sale amount
- CC customers churn less often – their tenure is typically 2.5 longer than UC because of higher barriers to entry
- UC + CC win rates are 33% higher than just UC (and it’s easier to deliver ROI when helping customers in both ways)
Identifying Value in the Contact Center
Successful partners lead with customer experience, not just focusing on a single-point solution. As a partner, you must consider all deals’ CX implications. With your existing customer base and prospects, you can consider and identify areas where you can add value – to make your service more “sticky.” Your proposition first needs to deliver ROI. Great organizations expect to be praised on social media and receive glowing scores on feedback surveys – which is a more difficult level of service for you to deliver.
Contact Center training and consultancy firm ICMI categorizes value into three escalating categories, and you can use this framework to help identify areas of opportunity within your contact center deals.
Level one is basic efficiency, which requires data and a well-oiled machine to work. A contact center, at its most basic function, must organize people and resources effectively to serve customers. It achieves service levels, keeps abandonment rates down, manages handle times – all with the right number of agents to achieve the cost / efficiency sweet spot. 8×8 suggests partners ask themselves whether they are achieving ‘level one’ value for customers but recommends going a step further to ask themselves – are you helping fulfill the business’s mission most cost-effectively?
Level two is about satisfaction and loyalty and is more difficult to achieve.
As 8×8’s Poer highlights: “If we’re forecasting and staffing successfully, we’re meeting our service levels, we’re adhering to the schedule, we’re managing to our budget, right? What’s the problem with that? Well, nothing, but in today’s contact center, there’s an expectation to deliver more than just a quick answer, more than just meeting service levels.”
To achieve level two, there’s a discovery process to gather information on where you are succeeding and potentially falling short. Ask questions of your clients, for example:
- Are you successful in achieving customer loyalty?
- Do you measure customer loyalty?
- Is there some commensurate measurement in your organization, such as CSAT scores, customer turnover, insurance rates, word of mouth?
- How do you measure customer loyalty? And what do those scores currently look like?
Your customers’ answers will help you identify where you can add value.
And then there’s level three – strategic value. The contact center captures data and intelligence that could inform transformation across an entire business – improving systems, R&D, marketing, and identifying legal situations. We’re talking about providing value across the entire organization, not just in the contact center. Suppose you’re capturing information through call recording in your contact center. In that case, you’ve already planted the seeds for level three value, and this should be the goal: leveraging technology to deliver strategic value for your customers.
8×8’s platforms help you deliver exceptional customer service across organizations and run a webinar series on delivering more value to your customers as a partner.
