Many people believe they are best served by real people, not by voice robots. That’s the rationale behind GetHuman.com. But the economics and utility of self-service as an alternative to live agent interactions are so compelling that self-service solutions are here to stay.

Providing multiple touchpoints is a huge technology investment. Technology is great, but you can’t just diligently manage the implementation process and then assume all is well with the customer service experience. Because nothing’s static in this world it’s extremely important to confirm from your customers’ perspective that your contact center technology really is capable of delivering the experience you intend, one that defends your brand promise.

In 17 years of supporting clients through all phases of the contact center lifecycle, we’ve learned many lessons about how to best evaluate and optimize the Customer Service Experience (CSE) that is the foundation of delivering your brand promise. This article introduces a process that ensures the contact center technologies are in fact offering the customer service experience you intend, one that delivers on your brand promise.

How?

INTRODUCING VC101®

VC101® is a proven process that ensures the customer service experience delivered is aligned with the intentions of the Customer Experience & Brand Management teams because its first step is identifying key customers and defining how they will interact with the contact center technology you put in place. By doing so, VC101® goes beyond using only internal metrics that confirm everything is Working As Designed (WAD) to monitor & measure actual customer service experience as it’s delivered.

Once you have actual Customer Service Experience data, you can create a feedback loop by tweaking your systems and observing impact on the actual CSE delivered, not just on internal metrics such as CPU time or QoS.

And when you know the service experience delivered by your contact center technologies defends your brand standards, you can also be confident the experience delivered increases loyalty and creates advocates.

WHAT IS VC101®?

VC101® is a multistep process that first defines and then deploys Virtual Customers (VCs) to perform real end-to-end transactions for the purpose of evaluating application and technology performance related to Customer Service Experience impact.

WHAT ARE “VIRTUAL CUSTOMERS”?

Virtual Customers are automated processes that follow test case scripts to interact with the Contact Center just like real customers performing real transactions.

DEPLOYING “VIRTUAL CUSTOMERS”

Once the VCs are defined and the rampup and rollout plans are drawn up, the VCs are deployed. Key considerations in deploying VCs include:

• Risk analysis and consequences
• Selection of the right VC interactions
• Clearly defined availability and performance objectives and metrics
• Benchmark assessment
• Reporting and notification criteria

WHAT IS CSE OPTIMIZATION?

• A process for deploying VCs to collect data that can be used to evaluate and improve business solution performance relative to defined objectives and metrics
• May involve identification and integration of tools and services not provided by IQ Services
• An iterative process that tunes the CSE as it’s delivered

CONCLUSION

Properly implemented, VC101® is a critical element of an integrated continuous improvement process that hones & perfects a customer service experience that defends brand promise, thereby positively impacting key customer service metrics such as customer effort, customer loyalty, and net promoter score. Experiences that defend brand promise ultimately have bottom line impact, resulting in reduced total cost of operation and achievement of intended ROI.