Employee experience is more important than customer experience. The employee spends as much time communicating internally as externally so their experience with software (tools for their job) is paramount. Clunky UX (user experience) for customer facing situations means unhappy customers (who call in and get frustrated by how long it takes to talk to a human that might not be able to help either!) This all costs you money.
Customer Experience is what companies try to achieve through Digital Transformation – or as I like to call it the Amazonization of the business. Every business wishes it had the ability to interact with customers in the frictionless and repeated manner of Amazon.
If the EX is great, the CX can be also. Ever on a call when the agent can’t get your records or some other piece of technology prevents a positive outcome (first call resolution)? That is why EX is more important than CX.
Unfortunately most software is built for F(x) – functionality. Broadsoft’s portal is a perfect example. Clunky, lacking in a user interface — might as well be a MS-DOS app.
Most cloud contact center software is built for the call centers. Reporting and analytics are designed for managers. What about the agent experience (EX)? The better that is the more efficient the center becomes.
I don’t know if it is a function of the product/tech or not, but most of UCaaS sells their offerings the same way. (Not much discovery; not much understanding of how the offering can accelerate digital transformation goals and get businesses to where they need to go.) Chatbot sales is the same way – like a guy selling pretzels on a NYC corner. “We got pretzels here! Get your pretzels here!” Contact Center is the same way – and directed at mostly one buyer: the call center manager. Without discovery, research and understanding, sales will be stymied and price pressured.
Functionality and features are great but that’s the engineering. Buyers don’t care if it is CPaaS, UCaaS, CCaaS, WebRTC or what-have-you. They care about what it can do for them. Are you making it easier for employees to help customers? Are you making it easier for customers to self-serve? What does the offering provide for? What is the outcome? Not the price. The value.
NOTE: With WFH EX is the key. This pandemic isn’t over. We will likely see another one. WFH and EX are tied together. That’s the lesson from COVID. Digital Transformation (DT) was just getting started before COVID (as a marketing buzz word), but no one articulated what DT was. Now we know it is about customer self-serve and EX. Don’t miss that lesson!
