Can customer service benefit from a laboratory approach?

 

Brands and their senior level executives understand that the customer experience they provide is one of the key differentiating aspects of their business. As such they are under enormous pressure to use this experience to increase acquisition rates, enhance service provision and maximise cross and up-sales opportunities. Additionally, not only must they engage and attract new customers, but also deliver improvements on existing customer satisfaction and retention levels.

 

At the front line of most brand’s customer service experience is the call centre. This plays a critical role in improving customer satisfaction and identifying sales opportunities. Within a call centre, no matter the level, staff will always have ideas as to how a proposition or approach can be enhanced to improve customer satisfaction; from the executives right through to the agents that deal with customers head on.

 

The main problem they face is how they effectively estimate what it takes and what risk is involved to put the wheels in motion for these new ideas. The usual barriers will always get in the way; doing their day job, gaining the necessary internal support and permission to trial new ideas, freeing up enough resources to actually develop the concept into a practical solution. Even if these steps can be overcome and a test campaign gets underway, the entire endeavour can often fail because of external pressures, not least the need to meet the next quarter’s targets.

 

However, outsourcing the testing of new concepts and enhancements to a dedicated ‘laboratory’ environment can give them the capability to use a robust approach that looks at the idea impartially and independently. It can present and capture data that while not scalable it does provide sufficient information to assess whether it’s a worthwhile idea.