One of the most important leadership priorities is to ensure that your customer contact center delivers maximum strategic value to your organization. That, in turn, is what will get you the support you need from colleagues across the organization. It’s what will secure adequate funding, and will facilitate the means to attract the talents required. And it will help you hurdle any notion that the operation is a cost center that merits only minimum investment.

There is a specific mindset that has been cultivated in leading organizations: They know that providing great customer experiences is not a program, an initiative, a department, or a specific set of capabilities; it’s much more – it is a way of doing business that spans the entire organization. When customer service is seen through that lens, it underscores the responsibility and opportunity of every functional area.

The contact center’s contributions generally fall into eight areas:

1. Boosting customer satisfaction and loyalty
2. Improving quality and innovation across the organization
3. Better leveraging marketing initiatives
4. Enabling more focused products and services
5. Delivering efficient services
6. Encouraging the use of self service systems
7. Preventing further escalation
8. Contributing to additional revenue and sales

In short, there’s far more value to handling customer contacts than improving the satisfaction and loyalty of customers. That’s a vitally important part of it – but working with other business units is where you really begin to leverage the opportunity to deliver service that can differentiate in the marketplace.

Read more about these eight areas of contribution in the article “Boosting the Strategic Value of Customer Interaction.”