My Prediction for 2015: All That Matters Is The Experience

My wife's company hosted a white elephant gift exchange during their holiday party and she came home with a portable power stick.  You know the kind that are everywhere. Every news stand in every airport sells them and now you can usually find them in the checkout aisle of your grocery store.  What product could be more commoditized than this little battery?  Can you name a single brand?  I love all gadgets so I took the trouble to unbox and charge it.  Inside I found a curious little piece of paper. 
I have been reading everyone's predictions for the Contact Center in 2015 full of the latest buzzwords and trendy tech.  I also went back and reviewed some of those same predictions for 2014.  Precious few became widespread trends.  In 2014 pundits were predicting the omnipresence of Customer Journey Mapping, Multi-Channel becoming seamless Cross-Channel, and every kind of analytics you can imagine; customer experience analytics, social analytics, speech analytics, etc.  Were these technologies adopted in 2014?  Certainly.  Were they widespread?  Not at all.

The economic downturn that began in 2008 made it feasible to throw bodies at call volume and do it with onshore representatives.  At the same time companies caught on to the fact that customer experience is a differentiator - and in an age when information is ubiquitous and scarcely do companies have a captive customer base, customer loyalty is golden!  This little piece of paper says it all.  Anker figured out that the easiest way to stand out gain loyalty was to focus on the customer and care about their experience. 

With customer experience being a major contributor to customer loyalty, even well established technologies like chat and virtual

assistants have lost their luster.  Why?  Both technologies (chat and virtual assistants) leverage an extensive knowledge base for scale and efficiency.  The reason an agent can handle multiple chat sessions while also taking voice calls is because they can fill the gaps with canned responses (that is ALL that virtual assistants do...with a patina of pleasantries overlaid to patronize and waste your time).  Savvy customers get this and are tired of canned answers - whether they be automated or read to them from a script.  We want HUMAN interactions.  Couple that with the fact that Cloud Contact Center technology makes it easy to stand up a sophisticated contact center (or a home-based virtual one) in weeks and the allure of great human-to-human interactions is hard to resist.

Human interactions also make upselling/cross-selling a reality.  My wireless provider peppered me with emails (that I deleted without reading) about changing my plan and saving money.  Later when I called in with a service issue, the representative took advantage of a good experience (they solved my issue quickly) and sold me on the new rate plan.  Even with the most advanced (and expensive) speech and/or sentiment analytics, this is tough for automation to do and most companies would only try it with relatively low-value calls. 

I am no Luddite.  I think all of these technologies have a role to play in a modern customer experience strategy.  What I found in 2014 was that many of the features that make their way into a requirements matrix are driven by industry analysts and consultants and not by the company.  In every opportunity I have pursued where the requirements looked like a list of the breakout sessions at Frost or IQPC, the solution that was ultimately implemented was somewhat vanilla and more dependent upon human representatives; cutting edge tech being pushed-off to some nebulous future "phase". 

Large contact centers are using analytics and smart automation but they are hiding it from the customer.  Silent IVR, WFM/WFO, and Performance Management products that aide in coaching and developing great representatives will be the big winners in 2015 because they drive performance improvements without burdening or annoying the customer leaving us humans to do what we do best: interact.