Revealed: Obstacles That Impact the Operational Customer Experience

Simone Kovago discusses the results of a survey where companies revealed their hurdles to a great operational customer experience (OCX). 

What Is Operational Customer Experience?

OCX is a framework of metrics for the quality of how a customer experiences a company’s customer service systems.

Measuring OCX provides a company with the ability to view a customer’s journey across digital channels from an outside-in perspective using objective and repeatable methods.

OCX issues, meanwhile, are customer frustrations that happen as a result of technology-related issues. This includes everything from poor audio quality on a call to an unresponsive chat support web page.

The Obstacles That Affect Operational Customer Experience

The survey respondents, who were all either wholly or partially responsible for customer experience in their company, had to have a strong understanding of customer satisfaction metrics, including NPS (Net Promoter Score) and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score).

Companies spanned geographies across Australia, New Zealand, the USA, the UK, Canada, France, and Germany and industries including banking, healthcare, and government.

These were the key findings related to OCX-impacting issues in the report:

The top 4 issues impacting customer experience were:

• Poorly integrated systems
• Poor load handling
• Cost of upgrading/lack of funding
• Business functions/departments operating in silos

The top 5 digital (non-voice)-related OCX issues were:

• Repeating information multiple times
• Inadequate information
• System outage/failure
• Information inconsistency
• Not supporting all channels of communication

The top 5 voice-related OCX issues were:

• Long hold times
• Multiple call transfers
• Long/complex/confusing IVR routing
• Poor first-call resolution
• Poor call/voice quality

Finally, the number of incidents experienced was:

• 40% had three Severity 1 incidents per year
• 45% had five Severity 2 incidents per year
• 33% had three Severity 3 incidents per year

To download the Frost & Sullivan infographic click here.