In her recent article, Krista Sheridan discusses the significance of having diverse ideas and viewpoints on a customer experience team. The idea is that the more diversity you have on your team, the more unique and innovative ideas you’ll create that will offer better solutions for your customers. Sheridan stresses the value of companies encouraging their customer experience teams to be innovative and creative so that they develop an entrepreneurial mindset when developing strategies that will benefit customers.
But what does it mean to have a diverse customer experience team? Sheridan explains the concept by giving an example of a team she worked on in the past. The group consisted of people from a variety of company departments (marketing, sales, customer service, HR, legal, etc.) in addition to external partners of the company. This approach allowed the team to utilize diverse viewpoints when examining customer feedback and fostered an open and collaborative environment that yielded high quality results at a faster speed than other customer experience groups.
In addition to utilizing the help of people across a variety of departments, Sheridan also recommends adding diversity of ideas by: Going out of your comfort zone and asking input from people you disagree with, working with people from different age ranges and career stages, and working with people from different personal backgrounds and communication styles. The basic idea behind Sheridan’s article is to open up your team to variety and broaden your horizons if you want to see truly innovative results in your customer experience programs.
How can we apply this article to call centers?
There’s a couple ways we can take the concepts in Sheridan’s article and apply them to call center performance management. To start with, it’s important to be open to different backgrounds when interviewing and hiring new call center agents. The main priority is to hire a person who has a mindset that is geared towards customer service and empathy, but beyond that ability, you should always be open minded to people who have the ability to use their own life experiences to make decisions. Call center best practices provide certain procedures and scripts agents will have to follow, but encouraging them to think on their feet can lead them to deliver innovative solutions to customer inquiries.
In terms of management and executives within call centers, Sheridan’s article can be applied to the idea of maintaining an open mind and environment with agent feedback. Surveys and other forms of feedback tactics are great for getting surface-level customer emotions and opinions, but agents are the ones interacting with customers on a daily basis and they have valuable insight into areas of the customer journey that could use improvement. Call center managers should foster an environment where their agents have a voice and can contribute to the overall progression of the customer experience. Welcome information and ideas from a diverse group of sources and your customers will greatly appreciate it!
This blog post is based on an article from CustomerThink. To read the original article, please click the link below:
Build a Diverse CX Team to Boost Everyday Innovation – Krista Sheridan
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