Recently, the research and consulting firm Gartner asked hundreds of Customer Support and Service (CSS) leaders to share the strategies they are pursuing to navigate global economic headwinds like inflation, rising interest rates, tight labor markets, and disrupted supply chains. Let’s see how your approach aligns with the Top 5 Support & Service Leader tactics:

1. Improve, automate, or eliminate inefficient processes.
2. Migrate volume to digital and self-service.
3. Contribute to the top line by creating customer value.
4. Influence the C-Suite on cost reduction and avoidance.
5. Assess outsourcing options and partnerships.

The Ramifications of these Tactics

While these five approaches offer significant employee and customer benefits, they also can have potentially adverse consequences. For example, automating, eliminating inefficient strategies, and migrating volume to digital and self-service should produce:

• Improved employee engagement
• Greater employee retention
• Reduced customer effort
• Increased customer convenience
• Faster service, and
• Long-term cost savings

Unfortunately, automation and migrating to self-service can also lead to unintended consequences like:

• Workplace disruption
• Layoffs
• Decreased morale
• Customer confusion, and
• An experience that lacks humanization and personalization

Similarly, increasing the C-suite’s focus on cost reduction and enhancing outsourcing or partnerships should:

• Maximize efficiencies
• Increase operational effectiveness
• Leverage core competencies of vendors/partners, and
• Enable businesses to scale up or down as the economy and workforce ebb and flow.

However, excessive cost reductions or sub-optimal partnerships can result in a company running lean with poorly integrated third parties.

Getting the Most from Efficiency Efforts

So, how do we trim fat without cutting into customer experience (CX) muscle? Here are a few tips:

• Ask and Observe Your Customers – Through direct inquiry and observation; we can determine areas where customers feel our businesses create friction or require unnecessary customer effort. Use that information to craft scalable and efficiency-targeted solutions.
• Ask Your Team Members – Solicit input from your team members on where automation will free them from mind-numbing tasks so they can engage in value-creating activities.
• Vet Your Partners and Solutions – The cheapest partner or software solution is not always the best choice. Culture fit and interoperability are essential to ensure your partners reflect your brand, and technology tools produce minimal business disruption.
• Test and Learn – Wherever possible, beta test automation and conduct trials that drive customers to digital self-serve options. Evaluate utilization and gather subjective feedback from those who use the new technologies. Don’t assume technology is better. Listen and optimize!

You don’t need to be a theoretical physicist to appreciate the challenges of streamlining and simplifying processes; however, one of the most influential physicists weighed in on the topic. According to Albert Einstein:

“Any fool can make things bigger, more complex…It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”

May you have that touch of genius and the courage needed to navigate economic headwinds by driving human-centric efficiencies!

Written by Joseph A. Michelli.
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