Five simple things you can do today to meet and exceed your customers’ expectations:

1. If you offer non-human channels (web self-service), always provide easy access to the human touch. Your phone and chat contact information should be readily available throughout your web site and your IVR should state upfront how to navigate to a human.
2. Route interactions to the right agents. Match customers and agents based on skills, language, customer type, or past service history.
3. Set expectations. If the call wait time is 10 minutes, let the customer know. Even though it may be long, it’s better to know than wait and get aggravated with each passing minute. Give your agents access to the systems they need to resolve issues and set expectations. If it will take one week to process an application or send a replacement part, let the customer know—it will result in a better experience.
4. Ask questions and listen. Have you ever asked your customers, especially your best customers, what they expect from you, what they value most, and how well you are meeting those expectations? Getting this insight can help you design the kind of experiences that will delight customers and build your brand.
5. Equip the agent. Modern unified agent desktops streamline agents’ access to the sea of complicated systems and laborious call processes. If you want to deliver a better customer experience, start by simplifying the agent’s experience.

We’ve all experienced it. Even before you pick up the phone to place a call into a support center, you mentally prepare for the worst. You’ve probably put it off for days because of the negative experience you’re expecting. You’ve perused the web site, but alas, you need to speak to a live human being. So you reluctantly make the call and stumble through an IVR maze of insanity, pressing keys, repeating your customer information and waiting on hold. By the time you actually get connected to a customer service representative, you are so irritated and frustrated that the chance of hanging up ‘giddy’ because of a pleasant, positive interaction is practically non-existent. And worst of all, once you do get connected, the call center agent is ill-prepared to respond to your inquiry, putting you on hold, asking you to again repeat information and reading from a script to up-sell you when clearly now is not the right time. And if you’re really lucky, you’ll get escalated or transferred to another agent so you can start all over again!

Why is this type of experience still so prevalent in customer service? Why, when it’s never been easier for customers to defect to another brand, are so many organizations still focused on cutting costs and over-automating to the detriment of the experience? Why, when research reinforces what our common sense tells us—that a better customer experience improves customer loyalty—do so many organizations ignore what could catapult them ahead of their competitors? Clearly, it’s not that companies set out to deliver a miserable experience. It’s just that the technology, processes and people may not be aligned to deliver great experiences all of the time. Or the customer experience is an afterthought, a feel-good notion that managers may consider after they meet all of their productivity, efficiency and performance objectives.

But by NOT focusing foremost on the customer, organizations are missing out on a tremendous opportunity to differentiate the brand and to build a devoted customer base who will proactively rave to others. In fact, experts agree that customer experience management is the next frontier—the unique differentiator—for contact centers.

Cut costs: Hide the agent
Unfortunately for the customer, for the past 15 or so years, contact centers have been focused primarily on efficiency and cost reduction. Technologies that helped contact centers handle more interactions with fewer people or at lower costs were rapidly adopted. Because people (the agents on the phone) represent the largest operational cost in a contact center, it seemed logical to minimize the time they spent working with customers. This led to all sorts of approaches to cut costs: offshoring, IVRs, voice recognition and self-service. Automated attendants, IVRs and web sites all deliberately buried the option for speaking to a live agent. As a result, customers had to put forth Herculean efforts when they wanted to—needed to—connect with a live person. This trend toward hiding the agents behind layers of technology got so out of hand, that "IVR cheatsheet" and "bypass phone tree hell" web sites such as GetHuman.com emerged that were dedicated to helping frustrated customers sidestep automation at nearly 1,000 major companies.

Help Wanted: Your customers are searching for human assistance in the contact center
Research in customer experience management reveals that there are certain times in a customer journey when customers want or need to communicate with a living, breathing human, while at other times they are perfectly happy—and actually prefer—self-service or an automated IVR. When you understand these hallmark moments—when customers need to talk—you can design your contact center to meet those needs. For example, they may not need or want you for the purchase, but when it’s time to renew or upgrade, they want a live person to review the options. As a result, you may offer a section on the web site that documents the upgrade options, and also invites and encourages customers to contact an upgrade specialist to review the choices. When this contact is made, the agent has a unique opportunity to connect with that customer and deliver an effective and highly productive experience for both the customer and the company.

Equip the Agent to Get the Job Done
So you’ve connected the customer with a qualified agent. But now there is fumbling and stumbling as the agent tries to navigate to the right information. Seven different applications and databases sit open on the desktop. Plus, the agent doesn’t know that you are already a user of another product and that you called into the center five times in the last two weeks. Their lack of visibility into the relevant systems, histories and customer profiles can be devastating to the customer experience. Giving agents the training, the process guidance, the scripting and the 360-degree view of the customer is just as critical to the customer experience as making that connection between customer and agent. In the end, all the customer wants when they pick up the phone is to speak with a human who is well-equipped and prepared to resolve the issue. Is that asking so much?