Last week I presented a paper at the AIST Superannuation Symposium in Melbourne. The theme of the presentation was ‘Member Engagement Opportunities through the Call Centre.’

The focus of the presentation was on understanding the fast evolving world of the Multi-Channel contact centre. I won’t go through the details of the paper but want really stood out for me was a question raised by one of the delegates (ironically asked through a live text feed). The question was, “What three tips would you give in order to improve the experience of our Members?”

After thinking about this further, I would stand by the three points I highlighted at the time;

1. Service Strategy needs to be enterprise-wide. In addition, the best Service Strategies are Board-driven and are directly linked to organisational performance goals.

2. Develop a Multi-Channel service strategy. The current convergence and integration of customer service channels and the increasing sophistication and use of multi-media channels and devices by customers means the contact centre landscape is changing rapidly as well as dramatically. Our own research tells us that the customer service experience accounts for at least 30% of total Advocacy and Loyalty ratings by consumers. The availability to customers of channel options, access, speed and convenience are becoming key drivers for these Loyalty metrics.

   Today, organisations which are seeking to gain competitive advantage, create a continually improving customer experience, improve loyalty and potentially reduce operational costs, are investigating Multi-Channel Service Strategy.

3. Any Service Strategy must be customer centric.

Of the three points I would argue that ensuring the Service Strategy is customer centric and grounded in customer insights is the most important. Understanding how customers want to engage with you as an organisation and what their service needs are should sit at the heart of any Service Strategy. If organisations do not understand what the customer wants in terms of being able to engage with organisations, managers will effectively be chasing their tails not knowing where to invest and how much. Do I invest in social media or do I focus on improving my email channel? Do my customers prefer to use email or social media? All of these questions need to be asked from a customer’s perspective. The most successful organisations put the ‘customer’ at the heart of everything. Becoming a truly customer centric organisation can be a very challenging process, but one of the first steps must be to get out there and start asking your customers, ‘what do you want and what can we do to improve our service?’.