To us, it’s what your customers feel and think when they interact with your products, services and people. There is a big emotional part to it, built on expectations we have promised and comparisons made to exemplar experiences they have in the world.

The CX movement has rapidly grown over the last decade or two thanks largely to big tech companies like Apple and Google who have reimagined what ‘value to customers’ looks like by wrapping amazing experiences around their products.

Now think of that in terms of your contact centre, do you exist to simply answer calls or do you exist to deliver value to customers?

Before we get into the 6 ways it starts with you, the leader of the contact centre.

We think about Leaders as ‘Designers’ – reimagining your role as the person that is responsible for creating the right conditions for a CX culture to flourish. You think about every part of the contact centre and align it as closely as possible to what customers need. Without this mindset you’ll probably find yourself stuck in the weeds, fighting fires, a position we have all been in at one time or another. This new mindset won’t be developed overnight, it starts with action, taking action leads to a new perspective and that is what develops a new mindset.

Here are the 6 things the design-led leader does to improve CX:

Communicate a clear vision and purpose – this acts as your compass, guiding the team’s decision making and motivating them when times get tough. You'll need to reinforce this through everything your team does.
Ensure people have role clarity - it should be clear to everyone how their role contributes to bringing the vision to life, and if there is anything getting in their way find out what it is so you can remove it.
Develop a system of gathering customer feedback, in the form of Failure Demand, showcase this to your key stakeholders and get their buy in to fix it. This highlights areas the customer experience needs to improve and shows the value that you can bring as a team.
Define your metrics – this is big, focus on customer outcomes and consign output metrics like AHT and GOS to your forecasting discussions, know that they are not what defines success for customers, instead focus on metrics like CSAT and NPS, and if you don’t have these metrics, make the initiatives that remove failure demand the measure of success.
Provide autonomy, control and flexibility for everyone – give your people the flexibility to act in the customers best interest even if a process or rule is in their way. You have set a clear vision and provided role clarity, use this to foster a trusting environment.
Explore how technology can remove effort for your people, there is some amazing and accessible tech at your fingertips that can give your teams superpowers.

It’s important to know where to start, often capacity and competing priorities are your biggest enemy as a contact centre leader. So we recommend starting by getting a handle on failure demand and this will do two things.

It highlights your biggest CX opportunities are by identifying failure demand, immediately you are the customer's biggest advocate, and you’ll feel a sense of progress.
This will remove calls that customers shouldn’t need to make, improving the customers experience and creating much needed capacity for you and the team. Giving you more time to design the contact centre around the customer.

If you would like to talk about how we can help you redesign your contact centre, get in touch