Sam Salerno: If you’re looking for a surefire way to tank your customer experience, look no further than operating from a bunch of data silos.

Today’s customers are quick. They’ll jump from website to chatbot to messaging to phone call all in about .72 seconds. And if your brand isn’t ready to meet them on those channels—meaning they have to hit the restart button every time they switch from one to the next—you’ll quickly see your CSAT and NPS scores plummet while customer frustration goes through the roof. Worse yet, you’ll lose revenue and your contact center will start costing you more money to operate.

And that’s a recipe we all want to avoid.

Fortunately, today’s Snack comes loaded with an action-packed framework you can use to break down pesky data silos and turn your customer experience into a well-oiled machine.

Intro

Welcome to Snackable CX, where we break down our best resources into bite-sized guidance on how to stand out and be known for your customer experience. I’m Sam Salerno, here from Mindful, the best-in-class, total experience solution that aims to add kindness to your tech stack.

Serving up today’s snack is Victoria Harrell, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Medallia. So over to you, Victoria!

Victoria Harrell: Hi everyone! I’m super excited to be here to talk some quick strategy with you.

First, let’s level set. We all know how big of a role contact centers play in a customer’s overall experience. For tons of customers, interacting with your rep is either the surprise and delight moment you hoped for, or the straw that broke the camel’s back.

And I know you’re aware of all the other touchpoints, too. Your customers are on your website…in fact, they’re ALL OVER your website, probably a bunch of times before ever contacting you. They receive your emails, your postcards, and see your presence on social media.

This world outside the contact center presents an opportunity. An opportunity for your organization to deliver a more connected experience for your customers, and, hopefully, to meet those very high expectations that today’s customers have.

And when it comes to beating the competition, this connection opportunity allows the face of your business—the contact center—to differentiate your brand by providing customers with an unparalleled level of customer service.

But before I jump into the practical steps to take toward connecting experiences, we need to address the silos you’re facing. All of these other customer touchpoints are driven by teams in other departments. And as businesses grow, staff changes, and business processes get more complex, these departments can easily become siloed and actually stand in the way of delivering a delightful experience.

CX leaders, I’m calling you out: it’s time to drive transformational change by breaking silos and connecting experiences across the enterprise.

So now, the million dollar question, baby…how can you start breaking these silos and delivering connected experiences?

Cue the music, ‘cause I have four steps to get you started.

Step 1:

Gather information about the state of CX WITHIN your organization and identify what silos exist.

You gotta start by assessing whatcha got before pointing fingers. Here are some questions to get you started on your sleuthing:

Where is internal knowledge share being stalled? Try to look at it from multiple angles—is it getting stalled by process, people, or technology?

What signals are being captured from the customer and are you capturing 100% of these insights? This includes signals like emails, calls, chats, social data and more. Getting an idea of what you’re collecting — and how successful that collection is — will let you know how fully you can understand your CX program.

Another question: are agents enabled with the tools they need to provide great service in the contact center? Pro tip here: ask your agents! Simply asking them “was there anything you needed to help this customer better?” will give you lots of info.

Final question: are key leaders getting actionable insights from their data and are they able to share that data across the organization? This should be easily identifiable in a CX leadership meeting.

Onto step 2:

Gain buy-in from key stakeholders, like your organization’s contact center or operations leaders.

Show these leaders the impact of disjointed experiences and what’s at stake if they don’t work on changing things for the better.

For example, you could look at connecting the dots between lost revenue and poor NPS and CSAT scores. Plenty of businesses have made this case, so lean on your analysts to correlate this causation and point to hard facts about the revenue impacts a customer experience can have.

And look, if you’re one of these leaders, you have a great leg to stand on and can reach across teams to loop in another leader. But if you’re not a leader, use a snowball approach to gaining buy-in from leadership stakeholders. Start with ones closest to your purview, and gain their trust so you have more backing when you do branch out.

Step 3 to connected experiences:

It’s time to pitch to your c-suite.

Now before you book that meeting with your C-Suite, you need to have a plan in place for what you’re going to say—you can’t go in there all willy-nilly. You need to make your point FAST, so make sure to speak their language because their time is expensive.

Focus on what creating omnichannel experiences means for customers, employees, and especially for the business.

Most importantly: show them the money! Execs want to see the ROI they can expect from an investment in a more robust contact center strategy that ultimately breaks down organizational silos.

Here are two stats to help you get that conversation started:

• You can let them know that in the contact center alone poor customer experiences cost businesses an average of $75 billion annually in just the United States.
• And, when it comes to agent attrition, businesses could be saving up to $600,000 annually just by investing in their frontline teams and reducing agent turnover.

Customize these numbers for your business! Don’t forget to keep in mind that the contact center is the central hub where customers leave feedback and ask for help, so why not have it be the channel that starts the conversation around driving revolutionary change in how your customers experience your brand?

And the final step:

Create a cross-functional group to deliver results.

Make sure you’re getting input from team members so they can participate in the creation of more connected customer experiences. Pulling in diverse positions will not only ensure a holistic approach, but you’ll guarantee that teams feel like they have a seat at the table.

An example of this could look like bringing your digital operations leader into the contact center strategy conversation. Why? Because they have valuable insights into digital experiences that are driving up contact center volumes. With them at the table, you can hone in on what needs fixing across the entire experience, with consideration for each side.

Now, a lot of times differing teams’ goals come at odds with each other. Contact centers, for example, are typically tasked with keeping call volume down…while experience designers aim to offer the next best step—which might end up being a call! With multiple perspectives collaborating together, now you can develop solutions that are best for all parties: the customer, the contact center, and the business.

This step is all about working better together, breaking down information barriers and putting the customer first.

Next steps

Alright ya’ll, I hope you found these tips helpful and that you’re able to pull a few of them out and start having these conversations today! Sam, thanks for having me on, and until next time, bye!

Nutritional Facts

This episode has been adapted from the guide, “The Executive’s Guide to Breaking Silos and Delivering Business Results,” which you can find in Medallia’s Resources at medallia.com.

We publish new Snackable CX episodes just about every week, so be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. See you next time.

Hosted by Sam Salerno.

Written and performed by Victoria Harrell.

Produced and engineered by Jared Evers.

Edited, mixed, and mastered by Adam Griffith.

Artwork designed by Rob Beckham.