After 10+ years in the CX, Customer Service and Marketing industry, I have a slightly controversial opinion.

No matter how much we talk about our people and our customers, and how important that first customer service touchpoint is, most companies still see their contact centres as a division tasked only with solving customer problems as fast as possible. They see them as operations, not as mechanisms that can drive ongoing customer loyalty.

I’d love to hear anyone argue differently.

Part of my role includes surveying and interviewing Executive-Level leaders, and when I look up survey results and interview notes, I can’t see a lot of difference today from 5 years ago:

• NPS, AHT and First Call Resolution remain key metrics
• Everyone’s taking about their people, but the investments in gamification and experiential learning are almost non-existent for contact centres
• There remains a reliability on having frontline managers do the heavy lifting in CX, with execs focused on operational costs
• Digital is a strong investment area (which is great!) but it’s done with the intention of reducing costs, not improving CX

That last part could be wrong depending on the business, but the sentiment remains the same.

Very few organisations are successfully measuring the impact their customer service division has in driving repeat business, customer loyalty and sentiment analysis. There are exceptions to the rule of course, but these exceptions are few and far between.

To be fair, the reason for this could be because it’s incredibly difficult to measure loyalty and retention. When someone calls a contact centre, they’re calling because they have a problem – so once the agent fixes that problem, it’s hard to know whether the customer comes back because their problem was resolved efficiently, or DESPITE their problem in the first place.

NPS and VOC surveys are good ways of finding out overall customer sentiment, but unless there are systems in place to amalgamate social media analytics, VOC surveys, sentiment analysis, voice technology and facial recognition (when someone is in-store or communicating via video call), it’s impossible to get a full picture view of the results and weight contact centre agents have on the customer experience.

Finding these investment solutions that help us understand customer behaviours is the easy part. The next challenge is understanding who needs to own the solution, the data, the technology. Should sentiment analysis sit within the CX function because it’s linked to customer loyalty and retention? Does Employee Experience solutions sit within HR because they should be the ones driving strategy and insight from the ground up? What about social media analytics? Is that marketing because social media comments can affect the brand’s image?

We talk a lot about the importance of the contact centre in driving customer loyalty, but until contact centres can truly own the solutions, metrics and technologies that actually assist in driving customer loyalty (beyond traditional operating costs), I fear the contact centre will always remain an operational machine trying to reduce costs and headcount, as opposed to a true mechanism for quality CX.

That is my personal opinion and I’d love to welcome conversation from anyone who feels differently.