A Sponsored Article by OpenText.
I had the opportunity to participate in a team-building exercise known as the escape room. An escape room is a physical adventure game in which players are locked in a room for one hour and have to use elements of the room to solve a series of puzzles. Once solved within the time limit, you are rewarded with the key to unlock the door and get out of the room. Sound easy? To complete your mission you will need your wits, teamwork and a lot of critical thinking.
In late 2016, I facilitated the Atlanta Contact Center Inner Circle event in which 50 contact center leaders from local organizations spent six hours in a room attempting to unlock the secrets of the following puzzles during a one-hour roundtable. Here’s a sample of some puzzles we tried to solve together:
- High-value technology
a. What technologies are you using today that help connect with internal and external customers? Are they meeting your business needs?
b. How does your organization currently use these technologies? What’s next? How can emerging technologies help you glean more insight from customer interactions?
c. What is the most important data for your representatives to have at their fingertips?
- Omnichannel and multichannel strategies
a. How do you measure or inspect for a consistent experience every time the customer reaches out to your company?
b. How do you develop a strategy that will deliver truly seamless and relevant experiences for your customers throughout their journeys?
- Meaningful metrics and accountability
a. What are the top three metrics that you are looking at?
b. What metrics do you share outside of the contact center to help the business understand customer experience?
c. From a leadership perspective, how are you capturing customer preferences, relevant insight and data during customer interactions? How are you making the data useful?
I want to highlight key findings from one of the topics:
- Meaningful metrics and accountability
- Besides measuring standard contact center metrics, a majority of the organizations represented in the roundtable discussions are determining the appropriate customer experience (CX) metrics.
- Most of the organizations are measuring customer satisfaction (CSAT) and NetPromoter® Score (NPS®).
- A few organizations are measuring customer effort.
- One of the organizations modified the standard customer effort metric for their dot-com website experience with their shoppers—did their website provide a “frictionless” experience in which the shoppers did not have to resort to using chat help to solve their issue?
- The remaining organizations use either version of the customer effort metric:
- The organization made it easy for me to handle my issue. Yes or No.
- How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request? 5-point scale, 1 very low effort to 5 very high effort.
Here’s the good news! Even though we did not solve all of the puzzles within the allotted time, we made enough progress to get out of the room. I encourage you to work within your organization and answer the questions that we discussed to get a pulse on where you are on the customer experience continuum and what you need to do to move forward.
I also welcome you to visit the OpenText 2017 Video Series to hear what other WFO leaders and analysts have to say about driving contact center awareness within their own or their clients’ organizations.
Finally, download a complimentary copy of The Forrester Wave™: Workforce Optimization Suites, Q3 2016, which names OpenText a “strong performer.”
I wish you luck in discovering all the clues you need to be successful.