Self Service - Of Cents and Sensibility Part 2

Self Service of Cents and Sensibility Part 2

By: Colin Taylor

In part 1 of this three part series we looked at the history of service service, the challenges organizations and customer face when trying to interact via self service, the most popular and preferred self service channels, costs and effectiveness and declining success rates. In this part we examine Customer perceptions regarding self service, best practices for ebilling and IVR and Self Service and the Call Center.

Customer Perceptions
What if we could peek inside the head of our customers and see what they really think about self service, what would we discover? Research completed by Paul Hudson found that customer perception is that self-service is associated with speed, convenience, simplicity……and technology – but not associated with offering support, being caring, or personalized. However, the words ‘customer service’ is associated with care, support, personalized, but less associated with being fast and convenient.

Two out of three U.S. consumers surveyed want self-service options when shopping. Nearly half of U.S. shoppers surveyed under the age of 45 want stores to offer self-checkout. Almost 46 percent of U.S. consumers surveyed want stores to offer more self-service options, like self-checkout or kiosks, to improve their shopping experience.

In looking at customer perceptions we have to realize that – 1-perceptions are not static, they can change over time –People who refused to pump their own gas or use an ATM when these SS technologies were introduced happily do so today. And 2-That perceptions are shaped by the customers environment and by their self interest and specifically is something is: A) Easier, B) Faster, C) Less Expensive

Self Service and the Call Center
According to ICMI, 79.5 of centres offer Self Service. Reasons for Implementation where headed up by : operating cost reductions (83.4%) and meeting customer demand for service options (74.3%). Over half (64%) of respondents don’t know if or when a customer has tried to self-serve but then opted for a live representative.

Among the tools contact centers use to support Web self-service channels, in particular, leaders emerged: issue tracking (53%), knowledge management (44.6%) and service management tools (42.3%).
A troubling 43.6%, almost half of respondents, don’t measure customer feedback on their centers’ self-service channels.

Regardless of the self service channels employed in the call center, each center still has to determine what to do with:
 The 13% that opt out of the IVR?
 The 40% who are still on your website?
 The 2/3 that have already tried to find the answer?
 Silo distance between call centre and ‘owners’ of the web?

Frequently Asked Questions or FAQ’s are often one of the first self service tools adopted. If questions can be self contained and completely answer the question they are well suited for web service. 80% of questions can generally be answered by FAQ’s . Yet FAQ’s are near the bottom of the self service tools employed by customers
1. Shopping carts (for products/services)
2. Order confirmation
3. Order tracking
4. Appointment setting/rescheduling
5. Bill pay and funds transfer
6. Personal account access, set up and management
7. Site search
8. FAQ’s
9. Opening and checking tickets

So how do we implement and drive self service adoption? The graphic below illustrates the considerations that need to be addressed and aligned.


Consumer must be ready, they must understand their role (89% of employees are confused by new products or services) and what is expected of them, they must be motivated; either by themselves or someone else and they must have the Ability- skills, competency, knowledge or pre-requisite technology (i.e. internet).

The product must have appeal, be compatible with the target audience, provide a tangible advantage over previous methods etc. In addition the product must overcome inertia, technology anxiety etc.

Drilling down to look at eBilling this chart illustrates a logical process to implement eBilling.






The following best practice tips can significantly improve the speed of implementation as well as the success achieved;

1. Sign up all new customers for your ebill program. Do it automatically and with no action required from the customer.
2. Use an e-mail matching service append up to 20 percent of your customer database with customer’s email addresses at very low cost.
3. Initiate an automated welcome e-mail telling the customer what to expect.
4. Then just begin delivering the bill electronically. A small percentage will opt-out, but the vast majority will accept it. Adoption therefore becomes equal to the number of email addresses you have available.
5. Offer simple bill presentment via secure email as the first step. It’s not necessary to try and ‘pull’ the customer to your website to achieve successful ebill presentment.
6. Take it one step at a time. Achieve bill presentment and paper truncation first. Then drive payment as the next step.
7. Replicate your paper bill truly in a digital format – familiarity drives acceptance. You can add additional functionality later.
8. Use opt-out rather than opt-in strategies. Customers expect you to bill them.
9. Automatic paper truncation with the ability to revert to the paper option. When your customers are familiar with the ebill, turn off the paper automatically – you will be surprised how few requests you will get to re-institute their paper bill (on average, less than three percent).

On the topic of best practices lets look at some related to the use of IVR’s
1. Menu options no more than 4
2. No more than 4 layers
3. Zero Out option at any time
4. Allow corrections at each menu level (consider routing to live agent after 1)
5. Allow to back up or re start at each menu level (consider routing to live agent after 1)
6. No Jargon
7. Make sure the customer can actually do things they want to do:
1. Account balance
2. Report a payment
3. Open a Ticket
4. Track a shipment
8. Test Speech Recognition and Virtual agents before you deploy.
9. Use IVR for outbound calls -
1. Outage notifications,
2. Pre-collection,
3. Planned Maintenance/Outages

Share knowledge across multiple channels to make it available when and where needed:
Knowledge base for web, can be employed by live agents for calls, chats, email
FAQ’s- make sure they are the same ones regardless of the channel they are viewed
Blog- If you have one promote it and link it to your website and help pages if it offers service and self service tips.
Video/YouTube channel- This can be a great resource for showing ‘How to’ and,’ where to find’ information.
You must measure all users who employ self service…those that enter and those who leave early. Only by understanding what calls, contacts you are actually deflecting successfully can you determine the ROI. And only by knowing where customers are ‘jumping out’ of self service can you identify where you need to improve.


A Caveat to the trend to self-service has been raised by William J. McEwen, Ph.D., the author of Married to the Brand. Bill cited industries that have trended towards commodity status have of often been strong proponents of Self Service…such as the gasoline retail business. 40 years ago when each retailer tried to show the superiority of their product, but by 2007 only 9% of consumers surveyed by Gallup believed there was any difference between brands.

McEwen feels that a key to maintaining a strong brand is maintaining contact and interaction with customers. Organizations like the JetBlue, Southwest and Ritz Carleton have long since identified that their staff are the key to a success and positive guest experience. Similarly we can all think of positive service experiences where it was the individual that we interacted with that made the experience so great.

So from McEwens’ perspective if we eliminate personal service interactions we are driving our organization towards commoditization. If we take McEwen at face value a move toward cost reduction through self service is less personal, less connected and less likely to create raving fans or similarly happy customers.

But more personal service costs more. Is their no way of improving service quality without increasing the costs?

Building a Strategic Plan for your Contact Center

Building a Strategic Plan for your Contact Center


Colin Taylor

In our call center consulting engagements one recommendation comes up time and again and it is often the first one we tackle when working with our call center clients; the Strategic Call Center Plan. In a previous post we examined if a call center, contact center or customer service operation required a Strategic Plan and concluded that it is one of the most powerful tools to ensure alignment between what a company or organization is working to achieve and the support provided by the call center to realize these goals and objectives.



Of course if the company has defined their strategy then the exercise can be straightforward and can be completed as set out in our earlier post Is A Strategy For The Contact Center Necessary?



But what if no corporate strategy exists? Can we develop a call center strategic plan? The answer is that in some organizations you can and in others you likely cannot. In order to define the existing strategy you will access and active participation from the senior management and the company leadership team. Depending upon the size, industry and structure of the organization this may or may not be achievable. If the company however is of a size, structure, culture that could allow for the required participation and there is a willingness upon the senior management group to engage in this exercise then it is in fact possible to construct a call center strategic plan in the absence of a corporate strategic plan.



Of course, each organization is different as are the members of the leadership teams at any organization. Their individual experience with developing strategic plans will also vary, so our approach has been to employ pre-work for all of the participants and to set up facilitated meeting to work through the biggest strategic questions upon which the corporate and call center strategies depend. In these meetings we establish and gain agreement on a strategic framework upon which the call center strategic plan can be built.



So what are these questions? In our experience the answers to the following questions have been critical to establish that strategic framework:

1. Who is the Primary Customer? This question focuses the attention and efforts of the center against the customers deem most important to the business.

2. Who Comes First? The answer to this question establishes the hierarchy or priorities between Customers, Employees and Shareholders.

3. What are our Core Competencies? This question eliminates ambiguity surrounding what we are good at which provides and competitive advantage and what we may or may not be good at, without a competitive advantage.

4. What are our Core Values? Defining what we value and prize as an organization can help to prioritize call center and customer service decisions within the call center.

5. What will we not do? Establishing what we will not do as an organization is as important as what we will do. Strategic limits ensure that cycles and efforts are not wasted in areas that the organization has no interest in pursuing.

These five questions when combined with knowledgeable a facilitator with deep understanding of both strategic planning and call center operations can deliver a highly focused, and aligned call center strategic plan which better enables the call center operation to support the company and the brand.



For more information regarding Call Center Strategic Planning or The Taylor Reach Group call center consulting services, please contact the Colin Taylor.

Talking Call Center Videos

Call Center experts from New York City 311, Philly311, Unity Health, Scotiabank, Preferred Health Partners, speak on industry trends, how the trends are impacting their contact centers, the role and impact of social media on their centres and customers.
These videos are available on the Taylor Reach Group YouTube video channel and is available via this link

Is A Strategy For The Contact Center Necessary?

By Colin Taylor
In our call center and contact center consulting practice, we are often asked this question.

Johnson and Scholes (Exploring Corporate Strategy) define strategy as follows:

"Strategy is the direction and scope of an organization over the long-term: which achieves advantage for the organization through its configuration of resources within a challenging environment, to meet the needs of markets and to fulfill stakeholder expectations".

All businesses have a strategy, many by definition and constructed to reflect their own business realities, customers and markets. Some strategies are undocumented and driven by entrepreneurial zeal, but every bit as much of a strategy as those defined. In short a strategy provides the organization with a goal and direction towards that goal that it aspires to realize through the conscious and determined efforts of its staff and stakeholders.

So is a strategy required for elements within the organization such as customer service or contact centers? I would suggest that yes. A strategy or strategic plan is essential for the contact center to support the organization as it works to realize the corporate goal.

Companies in developing their strategic plans define who their customers are; and their primary audience focus on how to create value that underpins the strategy: The Customers come first or the Employees come first or their shareholders come first. If the focus is on the customer then the contact center will be critical to interacting and serving customers needs and requirements. If the focus is on employees, it is often extrapolated to explain that happy employees will work harder and deliver superior service to customers. Even in the cost conscious shareholder value creation model customers must be serviced. The reality is the contact centers are the most common communications channel between customers/consumers and the organization. The contact center plays a critical role in supporting the corporate strategy and influencing customer satisfaction.

So how to develop a strategy or strategic plan for the contact center? First acknowledge that as contact center leaders we do not have a ‘blank canvas’ to work with. The corporate strategy has already been defined and is evident in the Mission Statement, Vision and Values documents. In reviewing these documents we can gain an insight into the strategy, the customers served, the manner in which value is created, the goal and objectives of the strategy and the values which are the touchstone for making difficult decisions. So the development of contact center strategy is completed in the context of the corporate direction.

Second we know that our role is to interact with the customers in a manner that supports the corporate strategy. Lastly we know what the Vision for the future is. We know where the company is going. Our challenge as contact center operators is develop a roadmap and plan to support the evolution of the contact center in lock-step with the evolution of the company towards its Vision.

The key of an effective call or contact center strategic plan is to support and align with the overall strategy for the business. Implementing this sounds fairly straightforward but can be fraught with challenges and problems. For example what is the appropriate service level target for the defined primary customer group versus a secondary customer group, who, while not primary is still a significant source of revenue? How can you reduce the costs to serve one customer segment while increasing resource allocation and delivering superior value to another? How does your agent or representative model map to these distinct groups? Can everyone serve both customer segments? Can they do it well? How do you embrace new Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) goals to support the strategy? Are you even sure that your current metrics, such as internal quality are providing accurate customer satisfaction data?

The first undertaking that the center operator must complete is to ensure that they understand fully and in detail the corporate strategy. Too often contact centers launch initiatives to improve customer satisfaction, or reduce costs only to discover later that the corporate goal wasn’t an across the board CSAT improvement; or that the cost reduction initiatives undermine revenues and repurchase from the primary customer segment. Sit down with the management and review the mission, vision, values statements and any additional detail and specifics that the manager can provide.

In the context of the two examples cited above what is meant by customer satisfaction? In which segments of the customer base should satisfaction be improved, why and how? What is the intention for the remaining customer segments? How will the segmentation of customers to allow a focus on the primary customer group? What is the impact for example on the queuing structure and methodology? Is the CSAT of the remaining segments to remain unchanged, decline or increase? What is the budgetary impact anticipated with these changes?

Regarding cost reduction what are the boundaries associated with this change? Is this change really desired to improve the profitability of customer transaction? If profitability is the real goal then the actions taken to reduce costs cannot at the same time reduce sales conversion (the percentage of the customers who buy), nor reduce average order size or frequency. The establishment of boundaries limits the range of options open to the operator and also supports alignment between the two strategic plans.

Alignment is critical. Without both strategic plans being in synch, they can be working in opposite directions, and the attainment of both of the plans objectives and goals can be compromised. As the primary communication channel between customers and the organization the call or contact center can have a disproportional impact on the overall performance of the company in attaining its stated goals and objectives.

Alignment goes beyond the Vision statement and the future state end goals of the organization. The center must be aligned with the core Values established as well. If the company has determined that its value creation model focuses on an Employee First strategy then the contact center must ‘walk the talk’. In an Employee First strategy, the premise is that happy employees will create happy customers who will continue to patronize the company and buy its products and services.

How can an operator embrace an Employee First strategy in an ‘always on’, high change and structured contact center environment? What do we do with our existing metrics? Is Average Handle Time (AHT) an effective or even an appropriate metric in this environment; or does it simply encourage representatives to feel conflicted. For example “Does the company want me to satisfy the customer or get off the phone quickly?” Such conflicts are not aligned to employee satisfaction (ESAT). Where there is conflict there will also be confusion and frustration. This hardly sounds like a successful Employee First strategy. So examine the metrics and KPI’s to ensure that what is measured is what you want to attain.

The steps outlined so far focus on immediate operations in the center: how the center has to change on a call by call basis. But what about a long range view. How do these changes impact on the incoming demand in terms of volumes of calls, emails, chats and self service? The operator needs to make and challenge assumptions regarding how these changes affect and impact demand. This is important. It is the forecasted demand, along with service level and AHT that determine the labor costs and budgets.

In concert with reviewing the demand the operator also needs to revisit other key aspects of the center operational model: people, process, technology and methodology. Aligning to the corporate strategy impact requires changes in how the center operates. The wise operator looks at how the operations of the center can be changed to improve overall alignment. How can we change the processes to align better with the strategic goals? Is there a technology available that better manages demand or facilitates better segmentation and cost management? These could be structural changes in terms of how the contact center operates today, who it serves and how it serves those customers.

Structural change is almost certainly required to align and support the attainment of the results set out in the corporate strategic plan. Albert Einstein said that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” If what the contact center was doing today delivered the results sought by the strategic plan then the strategic plan would not have been created.

To review, there are 7 steps that must be completed before a contact center strategic plan can be developed. Complete each step fully before articulating the contact center strategic plan
7 Steps to a Contact Center Strategic Plan
1- Understand fully the corporate Strategy,
2- Understand customer segmentation and priorities,
3- Identify the impact of customer segments and priorities on queuing management,
4- Understand applicable boundaries,
5- Examine your metrics and KPI’s
6- Review and revise your demand forecast
7- Examine you operational methodology for structural changes
With the 7 steps created you can articulate a contact center strategy with the knowledge that it will support the business goals; and move the organization one step closer to the realization of the corporate strategic plan.
For more information on developing a contact center strategic plan visit our website at http://www.thetaylorreachgroup.com or contact the author.

Report- The Customer Experience & The Call Center

Like culture, all companies deliver a Customer Experience. Also like culture, it isn’t always what the company intended. It is often a poor customer experience.

Does your company deliver the promised customer experience? Do you have a document outlining what the Customer Experience is supposed to be?, No, Thats not surprising, few companies do. And all of us who don’t have a Customer Experience model in place are in good company. According to a recent Forresters’ report while 90% of executives said that the customer experience was very important or critical, only 11% consider themselves to be very disciplined in their approach to customer experience.
Let’s look at an interaction with a call center from the customers’ perspective



As you can see from the above illustration the customer expectations and emotions rise and fall as the call progresses. All of us who have listened, monitored or taken live calls know this to be true. What are the ‘pain points’ on the call we looked at earlier?
• Service Level – waiting too long to get the call answered,
• “Unexpectedly high call volume” – unexpected volume or poor forecasting/scheduling,
• Policies etc.

At all of the key points during the call the agent has an opportunity to support the brand messages and to meet the customer expectations or not. Of course it is far simple to suggest that the agent could have done x or y. The truth of the matter is that it is the company that makes the decisions that impact the service delivery.

The agent can really only work within the parameters the company sets out. It is the company that determines the grade of service that they want the call center to meet. It is the company through the center management that forecasts the calls and contact volumes and sets the schedules for the number of agents on shift. It is the company that establishes policies and procedures that the agents must adhere too.

Now let’s not place on the blame on the call center and its management solely. It is the marketing group that creates and sends the messages that create the customer expectations which leads the customer to place calls into the call center with these expectations.

So how can we ensure that your customers receive the experience we would like them to have? An experience that builds loyalty; An experience that supports repurchase; An experience that reduces customer churn and attrition.
Before starting to architect the Customer Experience, let’s start by defining it
The key elements of any Customer Experience related to the contact center has to include:

1. The ease of access – to information, to purchase, to inquire, to complain or to fix a problem,
2. The speed of access – Service level, hoops customers have to jump through – how many times do they have to enter their account number etc. time to return an email or resolve a trouble ticket?
3. The quality of interaction- Where they able to get done what they wanted too? Was it easy, was it efficient, logical?
Customer Experience is the experience that a customer has when interacting with a company. This includes how they chose to interact with us and how easy it is for them to complete the interaction.

IBM defines Customer Experience as “The designed interaction between a customer and your organization”. The key element of this definition is the design element. The message here is regardless what your customer experience is and regardless whether it is good or bad, it is what you have designed through your actions, processes and procedures.

Before starting to architect the Customer Experience, let’s start by defining it
The key elements of any Customer Experience related to the contact center has to include:

1. The ease of access – to information, to purchase, to inquire, to complain or to fix a problem,
2. The speed of access – Service level, hoops customers have to jump through – how many times do they have to enter their account number etc. time to return an email or resolve a trouble ticket?
3. The quality of interaction- Where they able to get done what they wanted too? Was it easy, was it efficient, logical?
Customer Experience is the experience that a customer has when interacting with a company. This includes how they chose to interact with us and how easy it is for them to complete the interaction.

IBM defines Customer Experience as “The designed interaction between a customer and your organization”. The key element of this definition is the design element. The message here is regardless what your customer experience is and regardless whether it is good or bad, it is what you have designed through your actions, processes and procedures.
With this definition in hand can now look at how we can design our desired customer experience.

To do this we need to start at the beginning. Few companies today are looking at the customer experience holistically. For those that do consider the question of Customer Experience, it is often only a marketing concept…how should our stores, marketing and advertising look and feel to support the brand.
The call centre is generally not connected organizationally to Marketing and most often resides under Operations or Sales. This distance between silos can mean that the Marketing group has little understanding of what takes place in the call center. This despite the fact that centers are the single most common communications channel an organization can have with its customers. Purdue University found that 92% of customers judge an organization based upon the interactions they have with a company’s call center.

So how can we as call center executives join the dots between the desired customer experience and customer satisfaction to deliver the result through our call centers? Like with any travel, once you have a destination in mind you can then develop a roadmap to get you to where you are going.
But we have a few challenges in developing a roadmap…For one thing we do not know where we are starting from.
We know that most companies have not defined and documented their customer experience. So how can we expect to know where we are at now and how we are doing?

The first step in our process is to assess and determine where we are now; we need to understand what the customer experience is today.

First, we need an inventory of the channels, methods and touch-points through which our customers interact with us: phone, email, chat, mail, in-store etc. Do all of the touch-points end in a common single CRM that tracks each ’touch’ the company has with their customers? What about marketing initiatives: email blasts, SMS, print media, daily specials, white mail, etc.
Second, we need to analyze the customer satisfaction metrics (CSAT) and reports we have in place for each of these channels. You are not alone if you don’t have metrics to report on all of these channels; – this is the first step you will need to complete! On what channels do you measure CSAT, and where is it not measured?

Let’s examine the channels where no CSAT measurement is taking place. Is this because a conscious decision has been made not to measure it? Have we determined that we can’t measure it? Has it been determined to be unimportant or has the idea of measuring CSAT on this channel not been considered? Remember that old management tenet, “you can manage what you can’t measure’.
With your CSAT data in-hand, ask yourself is the data comparable? Are you asking the same question for each channel or do you ask different or somewhat different questions? If you are asking about satisfaction with the company or brand on one survey and asking if they were satisfied with their last call center interaction or agent, you are asking two separate and distinct questions. Unless the questions are the same you can’t aggregate the results. So if you are not asking the same questions then you have your second take away.

With comparable data you can chart the CSAT across all communication channels. Look at the results and what do you see…If you are like the majority of organizations you see a much lower level of satisfaction than we would like to see… almost two thirds of 15 verticals surveyed had a customer experience average scores of 70% or less.

The CSAT score is the customers’ opinion of the service interaction quality for the interaction they have just completed. In the same way our internal quality assessment scores are our satisfaction with our agents being able to address all of the elements that we think should be important to both the customer and the company. In the vast majority of organizations these two assessments measure two distinct elements. They are not the same.

Sad or not the scores that our customers have given us are their opinions of the service we provide. This is the customer experience we have now. This is the result of the service model we have designed and put into place.

The last step in defining the current customer experience is to look at what messages we are providing to our customers and prospects. To gain an understanding of what these messages are look at the company Mission Statement and Company Values…are you speaking of ‘World Class Customer Service’ or ‘Committed to quality’ or satisfaction or customers are a priority etc.
Keep in mind that it has been said that the accuracy of a Mission Statement is inversely proportional to its length. That is to say that the longer the mission statement the less likely it is to be true, or realised to be true. It has also been said that “If the mission statement doesn’t fit on a T shirt, it’s too long.”

Next meet with the Marketing people and review their current marketing campaigns and messages…do the company mission/value/vision statement and the marketing messages match the customer experience we are delivering?

It is important that when examining the marketing and brand messages that we see the emotional aspect to most messages. People make decisions on emotion – then rationalize with intellect. What this means is how the messages make them feel has a great deal to do with how a customer will feel about a brand, a product or a service interaction. In call and contact centers we often focus narrowly on what can and can’t be said. Maya Angelou said “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”

This can be a two edged sword. If our advertising and marketing make them feel warm and fuzzy about our brand and products. This is good and will be remembered. Many centers employ scripts or provide little latitude to empower the agents to make decisions to satisfy customers. Customers are also likely to remember how angry, frustrated, stressed and unhappy interacting with the call center made them feel. In too many organizations the Marketing department and the call center are working in opposite directions even though the success of the company is their shared objective.



In the diagram above we can see the shift from the promise that Marketing makes to product delivery and the service supported by the call center. When considered in terms of how a customer perception is shaped the excitement or anticipation starts high and often degrades with the reality of delivery and after sales service.

Let’s look at a hypothetical organization with the following Mission Statement;
“To deliver World Class Customer Service to our Customers, by providing access to our products and services the way our customers want them, when they want them, while providing a positive, enjoyable and productive environment to our employees and delivering superior returns to our Shareholders”

From this Mission Statement we can see what the company values:
• World Class Customer Service,
• Unfettered access to products/services- based on time and based on channel,
• A productive, enjoyable and positive environment for staff,
• Superior returns for Shareholders

As we continue down the process we have set out a few minutes ago we would then meet with Marketing to discover the attributes of the Brand. The following is a reasonable set of attributes associated with our hypothetical brand;
Accessible,
Cares about Customers,
Daring,
Different,
Energy,
Fun,
Glamorous,
Stylish,
Trendy,
Youthful,

By looking again at the original emotional call flow we reviewed earlier we can now match the experience to the desired Brand attributes



With the ‘current state’ of our Customer Experience picture in hand, we can next look to the experience we wish to create.
Do the Mission/Vision/Value and Marketing messages support the Customer Experience we want to create?

What descriptions and phases would we use to define this experience?

What descriptions would our customers use to define this experience?

Now describe how we want a customer to feel following an interaction?

The answers to these questions become the starting point of aligning the contact center with the brand message.
We are now equipped with a number of building blocks that we will need to develop our customer experience roadmap.
Look at complaints. Map the processes required to support delivery of desire customer experiences. Identify policies and procedures that are in opposition to the identified customer experience descriptors? Identify all processes, policies and procedures that are not aligned with the desired Customer Experience and raise these with management for discussion, review and revision.

To summarize the steps in designing a Customer Experience Roadmap are as follows;
1. Know what the current experience is,
2. Know how you are measuring the experience,
3. Understand your policies, processes and any negative customer impacts,
4. Plan changes and tests,
5. Measure improvements/reductions as a result of tests,
6. Roll out positive changes and continue other tests,
Or displayed graphically



About The Taylor Reach Group, Inc.
The Taylor Reach Group, Inc. takes a ‘hands-on’ holistic approach to improving customer interaction, customer experience and call/contact center strategies. Our consulting services examine every aspect of the call/contact center interaction process. 150+ years of award winning contact center industry experience. Proven results, guaranteed ROI. 14,000+ agent positions globally employ TRG designed operational models.

For more information on our Customer Experience and Call Center consulting services pleaqse email info@thetaylorreachgroup.com