The importance of Customer Experience (CX) has grown leaps and bounds in the past couple of years. As the digital world continues to evolve, it will remain the number one priority for a majority of enterprises. According to research, more than 80% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. And 49% of buyers have made impulse purchases after receiving a more personalized experience. Coupling other factors such as interaction with customer service centers, the importance of multi-channel servicing, self-service, and mobile customer experience, organizations are leaving no stone unturned when it comes to understanding and acknowledging their customers’ needs.
However, if we go back a few years, we realize that the situation wasn’t exactly the same. In 2018, a prominent media company published a report that illustrated that poor customer service can cost companies around $339 billion globally. And the losses were calculated to be about $13 billion until 2016.
During the same time, a visionary personality stood tall in the industry and thought about doing something about this huge revenue shift. And thus, Jonathan Shroyer went on a journey with Scott McCabe to establish Officium Labs in order to help organizations harness the power of customer experience and come back from these huge losses.
And today, Officium Labs has evolved into a decentralized network of thought leaders and innovators that assist businesses in providing their consumers with the greatest possible service experiences. What began as a four-member team has grown to include more than 20 individuals from all around the world, with experience spanning sectors as diverse as gaming, telehealth, and on-demand delivery services.
A Tale of Perspective
The difference between Jonathan and other companies in the industry was primarily of perspective. While most organizations perceived CX as a business strategy or were just involved in solving important problems around CX, Jonathan Shroyer saw it as a way to maximize lifetime customer value and revenue.
This conundrum troubled Jonathan and Scott as they took several long walks around the San Francisco Bay Area in 2019. Both being erudite personalities, having over 20 years of experience in CX and helming teams in established companies like Microsoft, Monster, and Autodesk, as well as startups like Postmates, Kabam, and Forte Labs, came to a conclusion that a new model was indeed needed in the industry. Hence, they came up with a new model that will not only create revenue for their organization but also bring in new customers.
Deliver Incredible Customer Experiences
Officium is a Latin word that means ‘service’. As such, Officium Labs believes in delivering experience as a service, as a business, as a social responsibility. The company is founded on the premise that excellent customer service increases customer loyalty, and they want their clients to be renowned for generating exceptional customer encounters.
At present, Officium is a worldwide network of industry leaders and professionals that have joined together to give their clients best-in-class people, products, and processes by collaborating on a global scale. Together, they are changing customer service from a cost center to a source of revenue development for their organizations.
Officium’s TalentPlace platform links on-demand customer service professionals with businesses in need of customer service personnel. Its ServiceStack™ offers professionals the ability to give advice and coaching to service executives of all levels and in all environments.
TalentPlace platform
As a decentralized network of people and currencies, Talentplace helps create a remote workforce model that promotes work/life balance while also shifting money away from big cities and into new communities across the world. Considering the fact that it is available in real-time and is extremely adaptable, the service has been dubbed as ‘the Uber of customer support’ and ‘AWS of human capital’. It brings together exceptional individuals and outstanding brands in such a way that both parties benefit from the encounter.
Officium has used the service to assist hundreds of businesses in improving their customer interactions, improving the workplace environment, and generating large returns on investment (ROI) that can be traced back to improvements in the customer experience.
ServiceStackTM
Officium Labs, via its service-oriented approach, illustrates the relationship between an organization’s service and its financial success, as well as the strategic role that customer experience plays in creating income for companies. Officium does this through the use of their proprietary ServiceStack methodology.
The purpose is to encourage individuals to think differently about the significance of their service experience. Over the course of two years, the company has demonstrated 15 times that CXAAS (customer experience as a service) provides savings to the bottom line while protecting the top line of the company. And in order to assist customers, develop excellent customer service organizations, the proprietary framework is used in conjunction with best practices, a technological service platform, and a network of front-line and specialist human resources.
Therein, everything is improved by integrating the people, product, and practice aspects together as part of the experience design process, which is accomplished via the use of ServiceStack methodologies. It aids in the demonstration of synergy.
A Culture That Breeds Excellence
Officium has a workforce of more than 10,000 employees that are trained in areas such as customer service, coding, and quality assurance.
Some businesses employ their own customer service agents, there are other businesses that rely on ‘business process outsourcing’ firms, or BPOs, which are extremely expensive since they must maintain personnel levels.
However, companies only pay for the assistance they require when they use Officium Lab’s scheduling and workforce management solution. This leads to one of the most important factors in Officium’s success, aside from its proprietary technology, i.e. a highly adaptable and worldwide workforce.
The company also offers ‘AI Agent Assist,’ which allows artificial intelligence to load the initial portion of an answer to a customer’s inquiry and then have a human go in and fine-tune the response. The AI saves a significant amount of time that would otherwise be spent curating a response. This technology is assisting humans in working in a hybrid and elastic manner to meet customer service requirements.
With compassion, communication, and generosity at its core, Officium Labs earned an employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) score of 100+ this year. The eNPS measures how employees feel about their company. This outstanding score is a testament to the firm’s employees and the positive all-around work environment and culture.
Customers Are the Future
For the future roadmap, Jonathan will continue to design incredible customer experiences using the most innovative techniques available. For the foreseeable future, he believes that customer experience will continue to be the competitive difference for businesses. In addition, these businesses will continue to develop innovative methods for their clients to succeed while being at the forefront of experience design innovation.
Jonathan Shroyer will also see to it that the customer experience community participates in more innovative workshops, hears from top experts, A/B tests customer experience challenges, and is encouraged to be more creative.
