We’re all somebody’s customers. We know how we like to be treated and we’ve all had experiences that have influenced our opinion of a brand quite apart from the product or service itself. As the late Maya Angelou said, “people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” A combination of stiff competition and ever-increasing consumer empowerment has led to customer experience proving to be the only truly durable competitive advantage in retail today.

You can’t provide a joined-up customer journey with incomplete tools to manage it, but simply throwing budget at CX technology is no predictor of success. So here’s our 7-step plan to guide your contact centre CX transformation.

  1. Acknowledge the need for change. The first step toward recovery is admitting you have a problem and having a deep, heartfelt commitment to solving it. Don’t focus exclusively on customer complaints—negative emotions—to guide your transformation. Look at positive feedback too, to identify what you’re getting right so you can start doing more of that.
  2. Create a clear vision of the customer experience you are trying to deliver. Many organisations still have an incomplete definition of customer experience, or functional silos mean that CX transformation has become the proverbial elephant being examined by three blind men.
  3. Get executive buy-in. Of course your CEO or CFO needs to be on board, to sponsor any contact centre transformation initiative and lead from the top down. But also consider whether you need a dedicated position—a Chief Customer Officer, if you like—who owns the customer experience and has the authority to ensure the requisite focus.
  4. Achieve organisational alignment. People can be parochial—anxious about what change will mean to their own work and targets. Consider establishing a CX Council to bring together all departments who impact the customer experience, and empower them to work as a team with a unified vision: to put the customer first, no matter what.
  5. Get on your (bench)marks. Once you have mapped the customer journey, start by assessing the current state of your strategy, people, processes and tech. Determine how you are going to measure the delta of change in terms of positive customer emotion, not just reduced holding times or other operational metrics.
  6. Collaborate to differentiate. Working with a true solution partner, rather than simply a software vendor, will help set you on the right path to true omnichannel engagement, while avoiding operational pitfalls. Use their expertise to identify opportunities for business alignment and ways to apply technology to accelerate your transformation journey.
  7. Build your business case. A good customer experience will have a positive impact on your bottom line, and that’s a legitimate justification for a CX initiative, but you need a solid business case based on logic and metrics rather than intuition. Again, the right partner should be able to shape and inform this process.

At Genesys, customer experience is our obsession. Much of what our people do on a daily basis is about helping organisations to evolve their CX culture and practices, as well as their technology landscape. We’re proud to call ourselves CX-aholics. There may be no cure for it, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

This six-point checklist from Genesys provides some further insight if you’re thinking about upgrading your retail contact centre.