The customer-intimate contact center

What makes it so special?

As enterprises strive for greater customer intimacy through personalized service, customer-based sales and proactive outreach, the value of the contact center increases. Successful organizations concentrate on the customers who will grow their business in the future (especially important in today's economy). What sets the winners apart is that they focus contact centers around their customers rather than internal requirements or arbitrary benchmarks.

Processes, people, channels and technology are designed to support the customer. And key performance metrics balance enterprise strategy and customer experience to measure success or failure. The customer-intimate contact center engages customers, enabling companies to foster strong relationships and loyalty.

Building processes to increase customer intimacy

Unfortunately, building customer intimacy isn't isolated to interactions in the contact center Customer experience cuts across many departments, systems, media, channels and processes, and is often influenced by things completely outside of our control. So a flight that's delayed because of a storm impacts the customer experience. On a logical level, customers understand that is outside of our control. Nevertheless, it takes an emotional toll, and how we handle it makes the difference between a satisfied or disgruntled customer.

For companies serious about building customer intimacy, it's critical to step into their customers' shoes and live the experience. What does it take to set up a new service, to dispute a charge on a credit card or to purchase a product? Where are there memorable experiences and where are the roadblocks? Where do external factors affect the overall experience?

If you work for an airline, make a reservation, check in for your flight and actually take the flight. Use a number of different channels. Where is the experience positive and where is it lacking? Think like a passenger – is the check-in experience easy and intuitive, are agents and others friendly and helpful, is the flight comfortable? How does your experience with security affect your overall experience? If you work for a utility, see what it's like to start or stop service. Map each experience, note the external factors, and list all the 'satisfiers' and the 'dissatisfiers'.

Customer-intimate contact centers:

• Create memorable customer experiences.


• Empower and engage employees and customers.


• Enable customers to personalize their channel experiences.


• Celebrate customers every day and through special recognition.


• Share knowledge of the customer.


• Collaborate and communicate with other parts of the business.


• Seize all opportunities to get closer to the customer.


• Promote and embody the brand (what differentiates us from the competition).


• Maintain and champion the customer's perspective.


• Balance measures of customer intimacy with operational metrics.

Now map the ideal experience from the customer's perspective. Where are there gaps? What can we do to mitigate negative incidences outside of our control? Look at processes, training and tools. Identify the process and training and redesign to better engage your customers and build intimacy. For example, redesign processes and train agents to provide bank customers with general information about other accounts even if they're calling on the mortgage line, empower CSRs by providing them with guidelines, but letting them use their judgment about a payment extension, rather than force them to adhere to strict and arbitrary rules. Also, think of ways to celebrate your customers – my local bank delivers a catered lunch to business customers when they've been with the bank for 10 years.

But don't forget your brand and values – if you're a low-cost airline, you may not want to provide lots of costly services that your customers may say they want. Focus on what's achievable within your brand and deliver it well and consistently. Focus on the things that you want customers to remember.

Case study

A rental car company requires all new branch employees to experience what their customers encounter when picking up a car at the airport. After a long day of training, the company drops new hires at baggage claim with two suitcases full of telephone books and instructs them to get their rental car. The employees have to navigate the airport, get on a tram and then transfer to a bus that takes them to the rental car location. The result? Branch employees understand the long and challenging process that their customers have to go through. When customers arrive at the counter they're greeted with empathetic employees, plenty of smiles, snacks and great service. And if they're not too busy, employees drive customers back to the airport and drop them off rather than make them take a bus and a tram back to the airport on their return. These employees truly understand the customer experience and work to make it an intimate and memorable one.

What does a customer-intimate organisation look like?

Customer-intimate contact centers hire agents with the right skills to support the overall strategy. These companies look for strong analytical skills, problem resolution and empathy. Supported by a solid training programme and strong coaching, agents are empowered to resolve customer issues rather than hand off a problem. They are trained to look at the entirety of the customer relationship and use their judgment rather than make a convenient decision because it shortens their talk time. Everyone in the contact center is a customer advocate, yet they understand that the success of the organisation depends on balancing customer centricity with brand and budget.

Customer-intimate contact centers not only work differently, their organizational structure is different because their focus is on customer intimacy, not on internal silos or products. Depending on how customers are segmented, they may have specialized agent groups to work with specific customer segments, or agents as part of teams that include account management or sales.

Channel strategy that engages customers

The customer-intimate contact center engages customers through personalization at every touchpoint. Rather than generic voice menus or flat websites, they build a sense of shared goals, based on customer knowledge. Even previously impersonal channels like ATMs are getting facelifts to become more customer-centric and offer a more personalized service.

And the customer-intimate contact center prides itself on offering customers lots of ways to do business so that they can personalize their experiences based on their preferences. Service can take place anytime, anywhere, via text messages, video, live chat, social networks or whatever may be your customer's channel of choice. For example, our local bookstore has a Facebook group that regularly sends out event invitations to fans, keeping customers engaged. It also hosts discussion forums, has book recommendations, book club updates and reminders of when authors are instore doing readings. All of these efforts keep customers involved, build loyalty and increase foot traffic into the store.

Finally, one of the keys to success of customer-intimate contact centers is customer involvement and usability testing when implementing any new channel or channel interface.

Customer-centric technology

Customer-centric technology is more than just a CRM system. This is an important component, but tools are only as good as the data they contain. The customer-intimate contact center maintains current and comprehensive customer data and uses tools that make it easy for agents to retrieve and analyze It uses data from cross- channel customer experiences and other customer information to predict the customer needs, providing an intimate experience that fosters loyalty. Look at Land's End – even without a complex CRM engine, you can bet that the customer service rep will know that you're calling to order something for your wife's birthday.

Common data sources are also critical to the customer- intimate contact center – both within the organisation as well as for customers. Data and interfaces are common, clear and user friendly, regardless of channel.

Measures of success

The customer-intimate contact center looks at success by measuring the customer experience, customer brand loyalty and corporate objectives (which should be driving customer intimacy). The customer-intimate contact center measures things that show success in building customer relationships. So rather than obsess about average handle-time, the focus is more on the quality of the contact. Instead of focusing on the number of web hits, the focus is on the level of visitor involvement with the site.

When you focus on customer intimacy and the benefits it brings to the corporation, your contact center moves from being a cost center and becomes a valuable contributor to the success of the organisation as a whole.

Elaine Cascio is Vice President of Vanguard Communications Corporation, an independent consulting firm specializing in designing and implementing strategic solutions for customer contact. Linda Van Doren is a Senior Consultant at Vanguard.

Both Elaine and Linda are passionate advocates for customer-centric design based on clearly defined customer experience and channel strategies. They regularly conduct workshops on multi-channel strategies and self-service design, speak at conferences and write about customer experience and channel strategy.