Frost & Sullivan's Customer Contact Research, Analysis, Trends & Great Content : FROM THE TRENCHES

Frost & Sullivan, Customer Contact eBulletin, Vol. 7 Issue 1

Drive Value to Other Teams and Make the Contact Center an Integral Part of the Enterprise

By Greg Brass
Director of Client Consulting
CareerBuilder

Do you know the biggest issues your company’s Sales teams are trying to solve? What does the executive team see as the biggest opportunities for your enterprise? Can you name the top five customer complaints about each of your products?

If you are unable to answer all of these questions then your contact center is not positioned best to empower the enterprise. The contact center needs to be the team that educates and enlightens the entire enterprise on the wants and needs of all your customers.

The drive to provide world-class customer service caused us at CareerBuilder to put all emphasis on supporting customers and ignored the need to power other departments within the company. We lost perspective and the realization that to truly make customers happy, we needed to effect change throughout the enterprise. The contact center was only addressing the symptoms. Without the contact center, these other departments had to seek out their own forms of customer feedback and would only get a small sampling of what the customer was actually experiencing.

The turning point for the CareerBuilder contact center was when the company transitioned to a software as a service (SaaS) provider. Sales were no longer transaction focused. Relationships and renewals were now reliant on knowing what was happening with all customers post-sale. The legacy systems that supported the contact center were no longer adequate. There was a need for a single customer relationship management (CRM) system and the need to bring in subject matter experts from sales and product development to connect the contact center knowledge with the needs of these departments.

Replacing all legacy systems was not required, but having a CRM that would talk with these legacy systems was critical. If the data was not surfaced in the CRM, it was not driving value. Providing transparency into these legacy systems not only saved time it allowed the new subject matter experts to proactively reach out to their old teams and show them that they would reap significant value at a much reduced cost and with a faster turnaround.

The new direction of the contact center became evident in supporting a new fast growing product. This product was enjoying good sales but 12 months later the renewal rate was below 50%. There were no answers to what was happening. Was the product broken? All efforts were initially focused on fixing the product.

The new contact center, with a single system of record and a 360-degree view of all customer interaction, was able to identify the true issue. The product functionality was misaligned with customer expectations. Changing the product at great cost was not needed but rather educating the sales team and shifting the product positioning would solve the problem and not just address the symptoms.

With a win in solving this problem, it created an environment at CareerBuilder where executives started seeking out the contact center for other answers. The leaders of contact center were now being invited to enterprise strategic discussions. Product development started to use the contact center to gather customer feedback as well as monitor for new developments with product adoption and use.

You do not have to become a software as a service provider to benefit in the ways CareerBuilder has. What you need to do is ensure is that the knowledge and insight that your contact center gathers is available and usable by the entire enterprise. Your biggest challenge will not be collecting customer feedback but will be to champion this insight.

Any type of enterprise can and will benefit from a contact center that goes beyond supporting the customer and start empowering the entire business. You will also be able to answer the three questions that I initially asked and improve your seat at the executive table.

About the Author:

As a thought leader of over 20 years in the staffing and recruitment industry, Greg has worked in Product development, marketing, technology, and human resources. At CareerBuilder Greg has driven major change and innovation throughout the organization while improving the experience and profitability of some of CareerBuilder's biggest products. Now working with customers and our global operations team, Greg is working to drive a single voice of the customer that empowers the entire organization from customer care to sales, marketing, and product development.

With a bachelor’s in business administration and a master’s in computer information systems, Greg brings a unique combination of both business and technical acumen which has brought many accolades and awards and most importantly better solutions and experiences to CareerBuilder's many customers.