I have a very, very strong bias that the two most important corporate capabilities to manage, essentially the two most important energetic forces to stay in balance, are the ability to execute on your plans and the ability to adapt (to sense, to experiment, to invest in the future). Integrating the incredible technologies available to CX teams is a perfect example of organisational adaptability, and as you can imagine the team at Adaptive Talent is profoundly interested in how teams can make this happen. It’s never just about technology, as you know; it’s developing the individual leadership maturity and complexity of your team but especially those in key roles that have a larger impact on the customer experience and equipping them with the tools they need to delight your customer in such a way that they become advocates.
One framework I use with clients is from the University of Chicago that focuses on value creation and protection from your customer (and/or end consumer). Essentially if you were to interview them to learn what they value about your product or service – the experience or transformation that your product or service enables – you’d be able to work backwards for each function, team, and role in your company to understand how the work is done currently to contribute to the customer experience. As companies get larger the internal complexity has a way of getting in the way of that line of sight to the customer. People think their focus may be the internal customer and not an actual customer or consumer. Instead, if you envision a bell curve for each role with the bottom 1/3 dedicated to value protection activities (stopping bad stuff from happening) and the top third to value creation (the “secret sauce” or competitive differentiators your customers talk about or can objectively be seen using) you could try and increase those segments so more of your people’s time and focus could be on creating and protecting the experiences your customers value. The “stuff” in the middle – the required activities – are important BUT ripe for automation, or improvements to efficiency.
Anyway, enjoy this article from McKinsey about how to leverage voice recognition, data analytics, and AI to maximize the human beings on your team to create wow customer experiences (i.ei. showcasing the concept of value creation and protection in action). Essentially you need really modern language processing technologies and processes to give you the best quality data possible, and then you need help taking all your data and integrating it in a way that the AI can use to best equip your people. Please let this happen across as many call centres in the world as possible. I think I speak for all of us that we are cheering the teams on from afar to bring their A game.
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Adaptive Talent is a talent consultancy designed to help organizations achieve amazing results and ongoing adaptability. Founded in 2008 and based in Vancouver, Canada we offer retained and contingent search, assessments, training, leadership coaching (1:1 and group), leadership development programs, and culture & organizational development consulting.