A few weeks ago we sent out our annual agenda poll for 2012 – and over 900 of you answered the call to help direct next year’s CCC research agenda (thank you!). As we start to parse through all the data, a few interesting things struck me that I wanted to share with you.
One: Despite a current environment of economic uncertainty and continued financial austerity, customer service’s organizational focus has not swung to cost containment at the expense of the customer experience.
And, two: In 2008/9, many of your peers looked at ways to reduce cost per contact as their key driver of cost reduction. In 2012, more service organizations will find ways to reduce contact volume altogether – mainly through expanding self-service channels.
Let’s expand on both of these findings a bit.
Organizational Focus
Every year we ask you and your peers to tell us how focused you are on a host of different priorities, including talent development, technology investments, and process (re)definition. But, the two leaders every year are the classic trade-off between the customer experience and cost management/containment.
Customer experience always leads, but at times it can drop in favor of a rise in cost management.
But, over the past few years – the customer experience has grown while cost containment has dropped:
- In 2010, 65.8% of service organizations said the customer experience was a critical focus area for them. That number jumped to 68.2% for 2012.
- And in 2010, 46.9% of service organizations said that cost containment was a critical focus area (the highest we had seen in quite some time). That number dropped drastically to 32.1% for 2012.
Whether the murmurings we have heard that customer service is now considered one of, if not the most crucial customer touch point now means that the customer experience will be the leading focus from now on – or if the membership feels that the customer experience is simply their job – it’s rewarding to see that cost pressures aren’t crowding out the customer experience.
While 67% of the membership reports that they are being tasked with actively reducing costs – either to cut budgets or reinvest in activities that support top-line growth – the focus on the customer experience would indicate that they won’t be cutting costs at expense of the customer. (BTW, you can access our Cost, Quality, and Productivity Benchmarking tool if you want to see how you stack up to your peers as you look over your budget for the next fiscal year).
Cost-Cutting Measures
And when you are in cost-reduction mode, your initiatives are of a wholly different flavor than back in 2009. Back in 2009 during the recession, many of you counted cost per contact reduction projects on your ‘to do’ list: including adjusting service levels, consolidating operations, and reducing your workforce (all of which ranked in the top 5 of member cost-savings programs). And while cost per contact reduction is often fast to implement, it is limited in its cost-savings. We can only adjust service levels so much until the customer experience is negatively impacted.
In 2011/2012, the membership has changed focused. The second ranked cost-reduction method is improving self-service capabilities (which was actually ranked the second-to-last method in 2009). (BTW, the first ranked method this year is the ever popular improving productivity). The third ranked initiative is improving processes, which often reduce callbacks and even initial calls (which was ranked 7th of 11 back in ’09). These longer-range programs have large potential benefits, and often help improve the customer experience as customers would increasingly prefer to self-serve or not even contact us at all.
It’s clear that there are new initiatives on the horizon to continue to stay cost effective in 2012.
In 2012…
So, what will 2012 hold for you? Leave us your thoughts – are you doing anything different from past years?
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Related posts:
on October 6, 2011
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Lara, not surprised that self-service ranked so high on your survey. Many of our clients are looking for ways to personalize self-service interactions to create more personalized experiences (even online!). Intelligent e-billing is one area where a lot of organizations are making great strides. If interested, here’s a white paper link you may find interesting called “The 4th Generation of Online Billing” which you can find at pb.com/ccmsoftware/Resources.shtml
on October 6, 2011
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Kit – thanks so much for the white paper link. I’ll be sure to check it out as we start shaping up our research agenda for the coming year. A heads up that we are planning on focusing our major research initiative on managing the multi-channel customer experience. I’ve heard very similar things across the membership about more personalized experiences so we want to dig into customer expectations today and how we should be designing our self-service channels.
on December 6, 2011
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