Moving the customer centre stage
'The customer is king' may have been a mantra for companies over a decade ago, but in the early days of help desks and call centres at least, such a worthy corporate objective was undoubtedly observed more in the breach than the execution.
At the outset, both were set up primarily to make internal processes more efficient rather than driving customer service.
Help desks, traditionally defined as points of technical resolution, have been manned by staff with the necessary expertise to talk a client through to resolution. More broadly-based call centres, on the other hand, have not as a rule included the necessary skills base to resolve client problems at first pass.
As a result, customers, given little choice but to take the call centre route if they wish to contact an organisation, have had to suffer the frustrations of long delays and the need to repeat personal details and the query several times before achieving a satisfactory response.
However, companies are learning from their mistakes. Today, increasingly, as the distinction between help desks and call centres is increasingly blurred with the emergence of the all-embracing concept of the contact centre, companies now have the ability to put the customer 'centre stage'. And this applies both to enabling access via the medium of the customer's choice - telephone, email or webchat for example - and increasing the likelihood of effective problem resolution during the first call.
So, whereas five years ago the only way to discuss your phone bill was via the one (centralised call centre) number at the top of the BT invoice, today the customer has a number of contact options depending on the nature of the query and the required speed of response.
CRM helps organisations to analyse how they interact with customers and partners - and make best use of developments such as IP telephony, routing and screen popping - company-wide contact centres are designed to consolidate these interactions. The old distinctions between inbound and outbound, telephone and the web, fax and email are all disappearing in the drive to connect the customer with the most appropriate contact as quickly and smoothly as possible.
Marketing lead organisations are also finding creative ways to use multi-channel customer interaction proactively to stay ahead of the competition. Who would have thought five years ago, for example, that you would be able to order a pizza from Domino's via your Sky Box remote control while watching the Saturday night movie. A far cry from the simple door-to-door-to-bin leaflet drop!
So, is everything in the garden rosy? Far from it, as many companies still have to switch focus and put customers at the heart of the business. In our daily interactions as customers, we are still only too well aware for example that call mis-management means that only one in five business calls get through to the right person the first time; or that it takes, on average, fully 45 seconds before an agent knows who you are and the nature of your call.
Support Challenges
Contact centre managers also experience a number of 'points of pain' in trying to satisfy internal pressures and an increasingly demanding customers and prospects.
Common pleas include the inability to log calls quickly enough, lack of access to critical information and an inability to support users remotely. Yet the technology to address such problems is available and already in use by truly customer-focused organisations.
Let's take two examples. In order to maximise the number of problems resolved at first stage, solutions exist both to enable real-time access to company-wide knowledge - such as frequently asked questions and previous customer call history - and to provide remote technical support without the need to visit the customer's desk-top.
Why is this important? Costs typically increase five-fold if the issue is not dealt with at the first call, staff become demotivated and disenchanted customers vote with their feet. All of these can now readily be addressed and the 'holy grail' of win-win achieved.
Similarly, managers often complain about hearing of problems too late. Here the answer centres around published service level agreements (SLAs) which set realistic expectations and enable customers to find out about - and, ideally, track via the web - the progress of the issue in question.
This is especially important when several companies are involved, such as a retailer, manufacturer or service agent. If there are no SLAs in place or no structured way of managing escalations, no-one takes ownership of the problem and the customer may well be 'bounced' from department to department or company to company.
The result? He or she will almost certainly circumvent the established escalation procedure - the polite way of saying you will have an angry customer on the phone demanding to speak to the managing director. Which then rebounds on the help desk or call centre manager.
So to make service an integral part of your organisation, boost customer retention and improve employee productivity you need to carefully consider the channels your customers might use to make contact and how you will keep track of the interaction.
Did I say win-win? Make that win-win-win.