Connecting Customer Service (CS) and Customer Experience (CX): Insights from AT&T and Verizon

What is the connection between customer service and customer experience? Who owns customer experienceOpens a new window and how can organizations do more to strategically leverage the wealth of customer insights that customer service collects over the course of their customer interactions?  Find out with a plethora of experts at the Customer Contact Week in Vegas this June!

What is the connection between customer serviceOpens a new window and customer experienceOpens a new window ? Who owns customer experience and how can organizations do more to strategically leverage the wealth of customer insights that customer service collects over the course of their customer interactions?  

Celebrating 20 years, CCW or The Customer Contact WeekOpens a new window , which takes place from June 24 – 28, 2019 in Las Vegas, takes us on a journey where the best and brightest in the business share their stories, experiences and insights about customer service and its strategic role in delivering world-class customer experiences.

To give you a teaser of what you can expect, MarTech Advisor caught up with 2 of the headlining speakers at the event to get their quick take on what CX means and the role that Customer Service leaders, technology and data can play in helping deliver unbeatable customer experiences.

We spoke to Patrick Troy, National Practice Lead, CX AT&TOpens a new window and Kelley Kurtzman, Vice President – Global Consumer Sales & Service Centers, VerizonOpens a new window . Here are edited excepts from that conversation!

Who is the primary owner of CX in an organization – is it marketing, customer service, or any other function?  

Patrick: That’s the major shift in the CX equation.  Sales and Marketing are taking the leading role in establishing the engagement channels and driving customers to those new channels like chat, SMS, self-service and finally voice.  Customer service is the staffing and delivery of that new strategy.

Kelley: Historically, I believe customer service organizations were thought to own CX. However, I do not believe there can be a primary owner. If there was only one owner, we would not be able to deliver on our commitment of customer centricity. Different organizations impact different parts of the customer journey based on where they are in their lifecycle. We focus on how all organizations work in parallel to deliver on differentiated customer experiences. It is only when we engage Marketing, IT, HR, Legal, Finance, Operations, etc. that we can truly be customer-centric.

What are your thumb rules or foundational best practices for an organization to start on a successful CX journey?

Patrick:

• Know your customers and your existing engagement models.
• Be clear about your CX platform capabilities first, and design your strategy from there.
   

Kelley:

• Aligning organizational goals, structure, and resources around customer experience is critical to break down the silos that traditionally caused CX to take a back seat to operational KPIs. 
• Our secret to success includes investing in our analytics and intelligence capabilities. We worked to create a customer interaction model that enabled us to be purposeful in how we served our customers across digital and live channels.
• We have fostered a culture of innovation by creating an empowered team and an asynchronous workflow at scale to build domain expertise and customer centricity in everything that we do. 
   

How can CX leaders best balance the people-technology-data trio for optimal CX-related business outcomes?

Patrick: By developing a 360-degree view of customer engagements. Not only from the outside-in, but from the inside of an organization out. The voices of employees are very valuable in this equation.

Kelley: It takes firing on all three cylinders to be successful.

• People: we need to continuously invest in our talent and create a culture of empowerment and autonomous workflow. By giving our teams the space to co-create and innovate, we allow them the opportunity to anticipate our customers’ needs across existing and new technologies.
• Process: enabling our teams to deliver business priorities and understand the value they create.
• Technology: continuous investment in platform and analytics capabilities enables us to deliver for our customers in ways that are predictive and personalized.
   

When you blend all of these attributes together, we are successful in delivering frictionless, data driven experiences that are good for customers, employees, and the business. 

What are the best metrics to track customer satisfaction and CX in the omni-channel digital age?

Patrick: First call resolution (FCR), seamless experience and Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Kelley: At Verizon, we are relentlessly focused on driving Net Promoter Score (NPS). We look at cross channel engagement to understand how customers interact with us across multiple channels. We also look at the number of decisions we ask the customer throughout their journey and work to simplify to reduce the amount of cognitive overload. We recognize that better customer experiences attribute to higher lifetime value and retention which ultimately contribute to profitability.  “Experience Scores” are the next big thing that are gaining traction – basically using machine learning to look at relationships between what happened with happy (or mad/sad) customers in the past and identifying key events or occurrences that were strong predictors of that happy/mad/sad customer, then scoring all of your customers based on those insights.

What are the most exciting and relevant 2-3 transformative trends in the CX or Customer Service space you are tracking, at the moment?

Patrick: 

• The “desire” to provide omni-channel engagements and the dilemma on how to get there.
• Bots/AI for customer self-service
• AI for agent assistance and augmentation
   

Kelley:

Two trends that come to mind include:

• AI and how technology is not only being used to promote automation but how augmentation can be leveraged at scale across a business like Verizon
• Conversational experiences – as Voice interactions become the norm with technologies like Alexa, Google Home, and Siri being not only within the home but within your car too, we have to think about how this changes the way we traditionally interact with our customers so we can continuously meet our customers where they are.
   

Catch Patrick, Kelly and a range of other star speakers live, talking about all things customer service and CX at the CCW this June at Las Vegas! Register now:

Opens a new window