Building a Customer-Centric Contact Centre Strategy: The Key to Reversing Declining Satisfaction Trends
With the backdrop of declining customer satisfaction across industries in both the US and the UK, it’s clear that as contact centres leaders we’ve got a global sized challenge on our hands! Across the Pond your American cousins, The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) and a little closer to home, UK Institute of Customer Service (ICS) have both reported a drop in customer satisfaction, reflecting the growing challenges we face in meeting customer expectations. To address this, Contact centre leaders must adopt customer-centric strategies that truly prioritise the customer’s experience at every touchpoint.
During the 40th episode of the Contact Centre Network, Garry Gormley, host of the Contact Centre Network and Founder of FAB Solutions, invited a CX specialist panel including Katie Stabler, founder of Cultivate Customer Experience by Design, and Miles Courtney Thomas, co-founder of Customer Start to share their thoughts. The discussion highlighted practical frameworks, insights, and approaches for putting customers at the heart of contact centre operations. Here’s what we discussed!
Defining Customer Centricity: Going Beyond Buzzwords
Katie Stabler framed customer centricity as the lifeblood of an organisation, saying it’s “where the pulse of the organisation flows customer.” This means designing policies, processes, and strategies that are not only customer-focused but also rooted in understanding customers’ needs and expectations. From hiring employees with strong customer-facing values to embedding customer-centric principles in company mission statements, Katie emphasised that customer centricity must be embedded in every facet of the business.
Miles Courtney Thomas added that while many companies talk about being customer-centric, they often stop short of embedding these values into their daily operations. “It’s about translating those visions into the everyday work of every employee,” he said. A key component of this is rewarding the right Behaviours and ensuring frontline employees are actively involved in shaping customer-centric initiatives. These employees, after all, have first hand knowledge of the friction points that frustrate customers.
Katie Stabler’s “3 S’s Framework”
Katie introduced a practical framework to guide contact centres in building more customer-centric interactions, known as the “3 S’s Framework.” The three principles—Success, Satisfaction, and Sentiment—are critical for creating a holistic and engaging customer experience:
- Success – This principle focuses on ensuring that every customer interaction helps the customer achieve their intended goal, whether it’s resolving an issue, getting information, or completing a transaction.
- Satisfaction – Achieving success alone isn’t enough. The interaction must be satisfactory, meaning it should feel seamless and convenient. Katie explained, “Success without satisfaction doesn’t guarantee a great experience.” This could involve having the right channels open for support or providing knowledgeable and empathetic assistance.
- Sentiment – The final piece, and often the most challenging to achieve, is sentiment. For a truly memorable experience, the interaction should engage customers emotionally in a positive way, creating loyalty and trust. “You will never create a loyalty-building customer experience unless you engage some form of emotion,” Katie noted, reinforcing that sentiment is essential to long-term customer loyalty.
This framework helps contact centres ensure that interactions are not only goal-oriented and satisfactory but also leave a lasting emotional impact.
Miles Courtney Thomas’ 3 Key Aspects of Customer Experience
Building on Katie’s framework, Miles highlighted three core aspects of customer experience that must be prioritised in contact centre strategies:
- Enabling Customers to Achieve Their Objectives – The primary goal of any customer interaction is to help the customer achieve what they came to do. “If you don’t help the customer achieve their objective, you’ve already failed,” Miles emphasised. Whether it’s solving an issue or answering a query, customers must feel that their needs are met.
- Minimising Customer Effort – Once a customer’s objective is clear, the next step is ensuring that they don’t have to exert too much effort to achieve it. “Customers don’t want to spend unnecessary time on an
issue—if the process is hard, the experience is ruined even if the issue is resolved,” Miles explained. - Making Customers Feel Valued – Finally, the emotional component of the interaction is key. Miles pointed out that how a customer feels at the end of the experience is a critical differentiator. “Making customers feel valued is what sets great service apart from average service.”
Together, these principles serve as a blueprint for contact centres to deliver more meaningful, emotionally fulfilling experiences that align with business goals.
Aligning Customer Centricity with Business Metrics
One of the most significant challenges facing contact centres today is balancing operational efficiency with customer satisfaction. Katie introduced the idea of the “watermelon effect”—a situation where metrics look healthy on the surface but hide underlying customer dissatisfaction. “We could be ticking all the boxes for efficiency, but that doesn’t mean our customers are happy,” she explained. This disconnect often occurs when businesses focus too heavily on metrics like call handling times at the expense of customer outcomes.
Miles shared an example from his time at the International Baccalaureate, where they shifted from merely responding to customer queries to proactively identifying and addressing common pain points before they became issues. “Instead of focusing on just answering queries, we focused on reducing the need for queries,” Miles shared. This proactive approach improved both efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Using Technology to Enhance Customer Centricity
While technology is crucial in supporting customer-centric strategies, it’s essential to use it in the right way. Katie raised an important question: “Technology is the answer—but what’s the question?” She emphasised the importance of understanding what problem technology is meant to solve before investing in tools like conversational analytics or AI. “Don’t adopt technology for technology’s sake,” Katie advised. “Ensure it aligns with your broader customer strategy.”
Miles echoed this sentiment, warning against the common mistake of adopting new technologies without fully evaluating the customer experience implications. He highlighted conversational analytics as a valuable tool for analysing unstructured data from phone calls, emails, and chats to extract actionable insights. “Technology allows you to transform unstructured data into powerful insights,” Miles noted. However, he stressed the importance of aligning tech investments with clear customer-centric goals.
The Role of Employee Engagement in Driving Customer Centricity
Both Katie and Miles agreed that a great customer experience begins with engaged employees. Katie emphasised that “You can’t have a good customer experience without a good employee experience.” She pointed out that frontline employees have a deep understanding of customer pain points and must be involved in shaping customer-centric strategies.
Miles expanded on this by discussing the importance of servant leadership—an approach where leaders focus on providing employees with the tools, support, and training they need to succeed. “When employees feel valued and empowered, they naturally deliver better customer experiences,” he said. Engaged employees, who feel like their voices are heard and acted upon, are more motivated to contribute to positive customer outcomes.
Closing the Feedback Loop: Turning Insight Into Action
One of the most critical aspects of a customer-centric strategy is closing the feedback loop. Katie noted that many organisations fall short in this area, collecting feedback but not acting on it in a meaningful way. “Few companies are excellent at bringing all their customer insight together,” she said, noting that without a robust process for turning feedback into action, businesses miss opportunities for improvement.
Miles stressed the importance of closing the loop with both customers and employees. He advocated for giving frontline staff direct feedback on how their insights have contributed to tangible changes in processes or policies. “If agents identify recurring issues, involve them in the solution process, and let them see the results,” he explained. By doing so, companies can both improve customer outcomes and increase employee engagement.
Final Takeaways: Building a Customer-Centric Strategy
Considering declining customer satisfaction trends, the insights shared by Katie and Miles offer a powerful roadmap for contact centres aiming to reverse these trends. Here are the key takeaways:
- Start with Customer Insight – Understand your customers’ needs, wants, and pain points through robust data collection and insight generation. Katie emphasised that this is the foundation of any successful strategy: “You need to know what your customers really want and need, not just assume you know.”
- Engage Employees – Engaging employees is key to driving a customer-centric culture. As Miles pointed out, empowering frontline staff and giving them a voice in decision-making can transform them into customer experience champions.
- Use Technology Wisely – Technology can enhance customer experience, but it must be deployed with clear intent. Ensure that any tech investment aligns with your overall customer strategy and that it’s solving real problems rather than just being “shiny and new.”
- Close the Feedback Loop – A successful customer-centric strategy involves continually collecting feedback and acting on it. This not only improves customer experience but also helps employees feel valued when their insights lead to real change.
Hopefully, you’ll see the value offered by our panel and how it can help transform operations, improve customer loyalty, and reverse the downward trend in customer satisfaction. As Katie succinctly put it, “Every interaction must strive for success, satisfaction, and sentiment—because that’s what builds real, lasting loyalty.”
