This article offers three practical suggestions for Contact Center leaders who want to better understand — and master — Customer Experience as a business discipline.
This article is part of our CX–Contact Center Bridge Series — exploring the intersection of CX and Contact Centers, and the knowledge, practices, and lessons that flow both ways.
It is also included in our Contact Center Management Series and our Customer Experience Hub.
Let’s Set the Stage
Contact Center Management and CX Management are different business disciplines, each requiring distinct knowledge and judgment.
First Things First
I sometimes hear Contact Center leaders say that their senior management doesn’t support their Center.
If you work at a CX driven company, like the ones you see in case studies, you’re clearly fortunate. And you’re probably excellent at what you do.
But what if you’re a Center Manager in a company where your function isn’t seen as mission-critical? Or where management doesn’t meaningfully embrace the actions it takes to be Customer-centric?
That’s a different scenario.
You can’t directly control your company’s CX ambition. But you can control your own leadership choices.
Pursue your CX ambitions — even if they exceed the current maturity of your organization.
Leadership Is Influence
You cannot deliver Customer Experience from one department alone. CX spans the organization by definition.
But you can step into Contact Centers where commitment to Customers is palpable — even in organizations where CX is still more slogan than practice.
As John Maxwell famously wrote,
Leadership is influence — nothing more, nothing less.
Don’t settle for becoming the mediocre outcome of your company culture. Especially when that culture isn’t as Customer-centric as it could be.
Hold on to the reminder that whatever made you successful up to this point won’t necessarily make you successful going forward.
Shift your perspective. Consider yourself a driver of your culture.
Culture doesn’t wait to move until everybody embraces it. It begins to move when the influencers in the group begin to move.
That could be you. And here are the three suggestions.
1. Get Involved with the CX Vision
Not every company decides to pursue a formalized CX strategy. At the end of the day it’s a business decision to do so.
And don’t let the incorrect use of lingo in companies fool you. Rebranding everything as ‘Customer Experience’ when it used to be called ‘Customer Service’ doesn’t make it so.
They’re different things. Window dressing doesn’t equate to strategy.
What a CX Strategy Actually Covers
A Customer Experience strategy addresses:
- The kind of experience you intend to deliver
- Who you’re serving and how you plan to serve them
- How you’ll listen to Customers to ensure better outcomes
- The metrics you set to measure success
- How you will prioritize what to work on
- The way you plan to engage everyone within the organization
There’s a lot involved — and for this article I focus on the first point — the kind of experience you intend to deliver to Customers.
The answer to that question is encapsulated in your CX Vision.
Why the CX Vision Matters
Your CX Vision describes the intended Customer experience in vivid and compelling terms. So that everyone knows what that experience should look like and feel like.
In workshops, I often share the example of DBS Bank in Singapore and the work they did to define their CX Vision: RED — Respectful, Easy to deal with, Dependable.
If your company has already defined a robust CX Vision, life is good.
In your Center, that robust CX Vision enables you to align your people management strategy, quality program, metrics, and the way you do things, directly to that vision.
When There Is No CX Vision
If your company doesn’t have a CX strategy in place, then it isn’t likely to have a robust CX Vision in place either.
There’s little point to have a bunch of words on the wall if there isn’t a meaningful plan that’s going to bring those words to life.
Sometimes Contact Center Leaders need to shape their own destiny. In the absence of a CX Vision, you can and should create a robust Service Delivery Vision.
A CX Vision, by definition, applies to the entire organization — including all departments and partners. The entire Customer ecosystem.
But if we’re creating a vision for a function or department like the Contact Centre or Customer Service, it’s better to call it a Service Delivery Vision.
Because now you’re talking about a functional vision. It’s not organizational in scope like the CX Vision.
But over time, I’ve seen cases where a robust Service Delivery Vision shaped the eventual organization-wide CX Vision.
Coming Up with Your Service Delivery Vision
To come up with your Service Delivery Vision it helps to look at what your company says about itself.
We always start here when we design a Mystery Shopper research program or Quality Assurance program for a client.
Read your company website. What company vision, mission and values can often be found there? What’s your purpose? Who are your intended Customers? What role do you play in their lives?
Next, study your company’s brand attributes & values.
What kinds of promises does your company make to current and prospective Customers when they use your products & services? See if you can articulate the brand promises your company makes.
I always think of crafting a Vision like making a smoothie.
Because you put a few key ingredients into a mixer and blend them together to create that delicious and healthy vision.
Now put your findings in front of the people who work in your Centre. What do they think? Does it ring true?
If you’re going to ask your people to live by the new vision, it’s a great idea to include their thoughts while it’s being developed.
What About Voice of Customer?
When crafting a CX Vision, there is another vital ingredient: learning from customer research — often referred to as Voice of the Customer, with particular emphasis on qualitative insight.
For many Contact Center teams, meaningful immersion in the customer’s world is limited to transactional survey results at the touchpoint level. While useful for managing performance, these insights are not — even close — to sufficient to reflect the total customer experience.
As a result, a Service Vision may lack depth in customer understanding. That’s not a flaw — but it is a limitation to be aware of.
What the CX Vision and Service Delivery Vision Give You
When anyone asks your Contact Center Agent what kind of service they deliver around here – they can tell you.
With the same level of specificity they would use to describe a favorite flavor of ice cream.
And they can explain, specifically,
how they apply either the CX Vision or the Service Delivery Vision in daily interactions.
Just imagine how powerful that is.
In closing for this suggestion, the CX Vision, the Service Delivery Vision and CX Strategy are big topics.
They’re worth taking the time and effort to read, study and discuss at a much deeper level than is presented in this article.
But I’ve found over the years, the best CX and Service strategies begin with a solid vision.
2. Don’t Rename Customer Service as Customer Experience
It’s wearying to see how many Contact Centers have rebranded themselves as Customer Experience Centers.
You can point at a horse and call it an apple, but that won’t make it so.
This type of rebranding exercise pollutes everyone’s understanding of what CX really is.
Because CX – by definition & application – addresses the organization as a whole. It covers the entire Customer ecosystem.
Your Contact Center has some impact on the overall Customer Experience for those Customers who choose to use the Contact Center touchpoint to help them achieve their goal.
But a Customer’s perception of your company is shaped by many factors and changes over time — including lifecycle stage and journey context.
Journeys First, Touchpoints Second
McKinsey has long observed that customers think in journeys, not touchpoints.
And that organizations that transition from touchpoint thinking to journey thinking are able to deliver more value to their Customers.
It’s helpful for Contact Center people to understand that they’re a subset of a subset in the world of CX.
First comes CX which covers the entire organizational ecosystem.
Everything is in the CX circle from the website, to the product, the price, the forms you mail out, the advertisements Customers see, the partners they interact with, the cleanliness of your office, the freshness of the flowers on the tables…
Everything.
Within that ecosystem you have the Customer Service function. And within the Customer Service function — which may include branches, retail and service desks — you have the Contact Center.
These days when I train Customer Service Agents, I spend time sharing on Customer journeys. Because the more we think like Customers do — in journeys — the better we can help them.
Why did the Customer contact us? Where did they come from? Where are they likely to go next? What’s our role and opportunity in this part of their journey?
When Contact Center people stick their flagpole into the ground and claim they are Customer Experience, they do a big disservice to every other employee and stakeholder in the organization.
When we all start thinking in terms of Customer journeys, and work together across departments to improve journeys — everyone does better.
3. Develop your Customer Research Know-How
It would be reasonable to expect Contact Center leaders to be deeply involved in customer research.
That expectation often collides with reality.
Contact Center work is a live, beating-heart operation. The work never really stops — and it can be intense. I’ve been there.
As a result, when it comes to Customer research, many Contact Center leaders understandably focus on transactional survey results for their Center.
People do what is measured, incentivized, and celebrated.
But transactional surveys represent only one listening post.
They are useful for managing touchpoint performance, but they are not representative of the total Customer Experience.
That broader understanding comes from multiple listening posts designed by CX teams to capture insight across lifecycles, stages, journeys, micro-journeys, and touchpoints.
Customer research is a fascinating and complex discipline. Some of the essential research capabilities that matter in CX leadership include:
- Qualitative research methods
- Relationship vs. transactional surveys
- Personas and customer journey mapping
- Core research terminology (correlation, causality, regression)
- Combining descriptive, predictive, and outcome metrics
- Applying statistical rigor where appropriate
- Service and Experience Design research
To learn and understand these concepts take time and effort. But the payoff is tremendous.
Get your own Customer Research Know-How up to speed.
Partner closely with the folks that know this stuff. I’m sure they’d be happy to help.
The more you know about Customer research the better. You’ll begin to think about Customers — and make decisions — in new and better ways.
In Closing
Based on what I’ve learned working with participants in workshops, I deliberately chose these three suggestions.
And I hope these suggestions give you clarity and practical direction as you continue to develop your CX capability.
Thank you for Reading
I regularly share stories, strategies, and insights from our work across Contact Centers, Customer Service, and Customer Experience. If this resonates, I’d love to stay connected.
You can drop me a line anytime, or subscribe on our site.
Daniel Ord
[email protected]
www.omnitouchinternational.com
