With changing times, many of the leading experts have agreed that a simple and time-saving customer experience is an absolute must for sustaining organisational success. However, the question arises, how does the reality look like? To put things in perspective, no business entity wants to design and implement confusing or complex processes on purpose. A data released by a leading outbound call centre indicates that huge chunk of customer time is eaten up by the content on websites, email responses, dialogues on an IVR etc. Customers find it hard to process even simple requests and are even left baffled in some cases. It is important to note that customer experiences aren’t as simple as they seem to be.
If we put ourselves into customer’s shoes, we can easily explain some intriguing stories of confusing and time consuming processes that we have experienced. Individuals are pretty much aware of some of the stories because of something similar happening in other workplaces. The list of sub-standard processes where customers face issues at regular time intervals, re-registering their requests, misleading or unclear instruction on getting through the procedures goes on and on.
Now, the question arises: how do business conglomerates achieve to design and implement simplicity in the current processes for the ease of their customers. In order to effectively tackle the complexities, one needs to understand how business units, in most cases design and implement those customer support processes into the system. The primary reason for the same is the rigidity of organisational structure. It is important to understand that all the verticals, be it marketing, HR, finance are all partially responsible for the debacle of the process. Synchronizing an end to end process in a functional organisational setup requires a lot of effort; the implementation of incompetent processes is bound to happen. The next reason is that a vast majority of customer interactions in an reliable outbound call centre setup are scripted with internal efficiency at the back of mind rather than efficiency in processes outside our domain. The objective, however, is to achieve fast and cost-efficient cycle times with a strong intent to cut down on labor costs. It cannot be denied that in most cases, customers prefer to take a different route than the ones designed for them.
As a result, it will lead to a situation where the process will consume more time, since the customer either starts to complain about the effort they have to invest their time in or they do not understand the steps being explained by a call centre executive. Both the situations will lead to different results than what we envisioned. What needs to be understood is that call centre executives need a lot of time to explain complicated and time-consuming processes. Such a thought process usually leads to complex experiences for customers.
It does not come as much of a surprise that business entities that design their processes based on an outside-in thought process, witness significant reduction in average handling times, thereby improving overall customer experience.