Who says innovation has to cost gobs of money?

I just had a conversation with a couple of members of Vertex North America’s management team – John Hall, managing director, and Kurt Thearling, head of decision sciences. Vertex North America is a facet of Vertex, a United Kingdom–based business process and customer management outsourcing group.

Amidst talk about customer experience, and the metrics used to measure it for different verticals – according to Hall, the company is focusing on utilities, retail banking/consumer credit, travel/leisure, telecommunications, technology, and retail in North America – the notion came up about many companies still not recognizing that contact centers are more than just cost centers.

Hally says it is especially important today that, instead of trying to focus on automating all communication channels, to uncover the “pockets of value that have been untapped in overall customer interaction.”

“There is a place for automated channels, but it is not the whole story,” Hall stresses. “This may mean moving people to a higher-cost channel [like a live agent] because the cross-sell or upsell can be closed more easily. It’s very important to understand what the value and role is of each channel, and divert the right transaction to the right channel.”

Sounds like a new technology solution is necessary – which goes against what many companies are allowing for in today’s recession. In fact, CRM magazine did an entire issue devoted to the recession back in February, specifically focusing on how companies should deal with it. In my feature, a major message that resonated throughout the piece was the fact that contact centers should do better with the technology it already possessed, rather than searching for more technology to dump on top, offering a superficial band-aid solution.

Thearling says that many of the organizations in Vertex’s customer base are looking at tinkering with the customer experience from the point of view of experimenting with customers. No, not high-school anatomy class experiments. “The experiments can be very simple, from changing your script to varying your product offering for various subsets [of consumers] to see if customers exhibit different behaviors,” he says. “It’s all about poking and prodding the world to see what it is like. As change comes, customers want different products, different terms, and interact on different channels.”

What is great about this kind of experimentation is that it can bring results without the large layout of a capital investment for a new customer experience management solution. “Very often, there are a bunch of operational things you can do to capture that performance without making a major technology investment,” Hall says. “That’s resonating quite a bit with clients today.”

At this point in the recession, are you finding that your company is willing to look more long-term at how to improve the customer experience now so you come out of the recession stronger than the competition? Or, are you still constrained to cost pressures? What experiments, if any, are you able to do in your contact center to try and find small ways to improve customer experience without breaking the budget?