Companies that shirk customer experience during down economies do it at their own peril, providing ample reason for their customers to experiment with other providers and switch allegiances. Instead, this is precisely the right time for companies to reinvest in customer experience, cleansing their system of all "dumb contacts" and their underlying reasons and retraining all of their customer-facing employees to exhibit appropriate empathy, and to look for potential customer defection.

After all, these employees are probably also affected by the downturn, nervous about their futures, so if they feel neglected it will come across to the customers and most likely lead to their turnover once the economy rebounds.

Reduce Customer and Employee Stress

Let's look at two steps that companies can take to reduce customer and employee stress during the down economy.

The first, big step to take is to eliminate "dumb contacts." What are dumb contacts? Put simply, this is when customers contact the company for assistance but there is no value for them or for the company. For example:

Sure it's tough now, and it's liable to get tougher before the world powers and consumers pull out of the recession. But, it's also an exciting—and critically important—time to figure out how to balance customer experience (CE) and costs in your contact center operations.

Frankly, CE and costs need to be in balance no matter what's happening in the economy, good times or bad, structural growth or decline, emerging markets or maturing ones. When times are good, however, we tend to let costs get out of whack, arguing—erroneously, as it turns out—that "we love our customers" and "no expense spared."

Some companies walk down a very different line. At Amazon.com, founder & CEO Jeff Bezos is fond of repeating "It's still day one!" to remind all of the employees that they must remain vigilant to control costs, as if they were spending their own cash, while pursuing the company's lofty goal "to be Earth's most customer-centric company." Most other companies tend to "get soft" and relax their attention to detail when the top line is running away, when customers flock to the malls or their websites, or when they read the glowing headlines.

Contact centers today talk a whole lot about empowering agents, investing in their skill development and reducing escalating attrition. Unfortunately, most companies are unable to track individual customer contacts and attach crisp, actionable performance measurement and management to them. Instead, they still overly rely upon "the old ways" involving hard technical metrics emphasizing speed and quantity to track and manage "average" agent performance.

It has become all too easy to judge those agents who have the highest contacts per hour, the lowest minutes per incident or the highest sales per hour as the "best" performers, just based on the average time they spend on the phone with customers: the average handle time.

The problem is that those metrics can courage your agents to ignore your customers and their valid complaints—and leave your company without an ear to big-ticket issues.

One company transformed from "averages" to actual, individual contact-based measurement and changes. It's a good lesson for others who want to get beyond the old measures and do something to satisfy customers and lower costs.

Because the company considers its technology acquisition and application to be one of its core competitive advantages, I'll call it Ticco, for "tracks individual contacts company."

Here's one of my favorite examples of the customer, technology and contact centers not being in sync. Customers kept calling my client's toll-free number to find the closest store where they could buy the company's hot new products. The voice response system prompted, "Please enter your five-digit ZIP code." But after a pause, the system then said, "I'm sorry, can you please enter your five-digit ZIP code?" and the same thing happened.

It was like the movie, Groundhog Day, only not as funny because customers either hung up and shopped elsewhere (resulting in lost revenue, frustrated customers and probably negative word of mouth for the company) or they returned to the main menu, selected the option to speak to a customer support agent, waited to be connected and then asked the agent for the closest retail location (resulting in additional telecom costs, upset customers and far higher expenses) once the agent asked, "How can I help you?"

We brought this to my client's attention, and there was a lot of head scratching about what was happening—until one of the IT guys piped up. He said, "We took down the store locator database last year because there were so many changes to make to it." After a shocked silence, the marketing and customer service managers firmly told IT to restore the functionality and keep it going because, yes, there were a lot of changes in store, based on the fact that the company was going to double the number of outlets in the next year!

It still amazes me how many customer service operations still do not display complete purchase history and contact history with their customers. Hasn’t this been available for more than 10 years now? What might be new is adding IVR and web hits to classic inbound phone, email, and chat contacts—maybe even more important since a failed IVR or web self-service interaction means that the 1st call or email or chat already represents the 2nd contact—so achieving “first contact resolution” is already impossible.

So if you’re not displaying purchase and contact history for your customer-facing agents, do it! Soon!

But there are fun ways to present these histories, using technology even more to power up customer management. One way is to add how important each customer is to your company (after all, “all customers are not created equal”, as I’ve been preaching more >15 years now). Your CRM system can easily add a field that shows a rosette or star showing that this customer is really important, or a down-arrow to show that this customer is on the “watch list”. Accompanying these simple displays, you can also provide tips and hints for that customer’s next interaction, such as “offer our new fangled widget” or “take extra time to learn how she wants to get alerts from us.”

Almost every company in the last two years has told me “our products [or services] aren’t really very different from our competitors’, so we have to differentiate based on delivering great customer experiences … so how in the heck do we do that?”

Good question, and the reality for too many companies today. Bill Taylor addressed this challenge in his article in The New York Times four years ago (“Companies Find They Can’t Buy Love with Bargains”), lamenting that years of innovative product development hasn’t budged customer satisfaction scores. Why, you ask? Well, I keep running across this situation:

• Marketing and IT create all sorts of new stuff that we might need, asking “the market” to sort the wheat from the chaff, thereby confessing that there will be failures and that’s part of the game.
• Customer Service keeps hearing all sorts of wants and needs from customers who call, email, send chat messages, and otherwise contact them, but Marketing and IT often don’t seek their advice and counsel.
• Customers get some good products/services and features/functions, but not the full plate that they’re seeking.

So how can your company scale the cliffs, and answer the core question? First things first = ask yourself what “customer experiences” are happening today, and what would represent, as specifically as you can manage, “great customer experiences”?

It's not often that I see true ambassadors handling customer issues, despite plaintive cries from customer-facing employees who keep saying, 'just give me the tools to do my job,' and often lament, 'my customers know more about us than I know about them.'

I promise you that if you set up round tables with a handful of your customer-facing employees and ask, 'What do you need to handle your customers completely?' you will be deluged with suggestions. And one clear pattern will emerge: 'Just give me the information that I need, when I need it.'

Consider two different customer interactions, and customer experiences. Which one would you rather have in your company—and as a customer, yourself?

Expedia, Amazon, eBay, Hyatt and many other companies have successfully exploited the online channel for sales, but surprisingly few companies have figured out that connecting online for customer care with their customers can deliver a superior experience for them, and more deeply satisfy their customers.

One of many ways to do that is through dynamic FAQs (frequently asked questions). A composite company I'll call SellMore has an expansive web site with special offers and highly tailored recommendations based on the customers' or prospective customers' answers to a handful of questions posed to them on the site. Sales have been brisk, with generally high marks from users for order accuracy and speed, but the company started experiencing higher return rates and negative postings on blogs about "poor service."

SellMore assigned a team of experienced sales and support reps to walk through the entire customer experience, from the fliers and email campaigns that attracted customers to the site to the web site, itself, and on to post-sales care. Afterward, the team concluded that there were several critical missteps, including "static FAQs" and "isolated FAQs."

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