Customers are Communicating More
2 May, 2011
By: Matthias J. HauptWhen have you been in touch with a contact center lately? Or when have you sent an e-mail to "info@companyname.com?” Or simply, when have you last talked negatively about a product – among your family, friends or even on the Internet?
Probably not that long ago. Today’s customers do talk about their experiences, and they are more ready to change. As a result, the cancelation rate for a company after a bad customer experience has increased significantly compared to just a few years ago. On the other hand, the majority of all customers consider outstanding customer service as the main reason to recommend a company to others.
Thus, forward-looking organizations should try to encourage and channel customer communications instead of hindering them, whether they are complaints or accolades. In this new form of marketing, in addition to broadcasting across all possible media, you must listen to your customers carefully.
Contact centers must constantly focus on improving customer satisfaction and managing a change in their role from a cost center into a revenue generator. Nowadays, a well managed contact center provides a significant competitive advantage, and its function as a “customer interaction center” will continue to grow, primarily because in a mature market, products and solutions are converging, and customer service will serve as the main differentiator.
Contact center quality levels have been improving, but you may need to deal with the same contact center several times before you recognize the difference. Generally, you will reach a different agent each time you call, and, unlike other industries, contact centers cannot pro-actively send the best technician for difficult problems. Therefore, the quality of a contact center is based on the average of the knowledge and capability level of all agents. In order to change, almost all contact centers apply some sort of continuous improvement process. But, surprisingly, only a minority of contact centers use voice recording as an essential component!
In addition, while many contact centers focus on adjusting their own performance, optimizing processes in the entire enterprise must be considered as well. It’s the responsibility of top management to drive this change. Analyzing customer interactions provides value for R&D, product management and marketing, but it can help order processing and documentation as well. High-volume contact centers often struggle to find the right subgroup of relevant information and should consider implementing speech analytics as an integrated capability with their communications recording solution.
There are excellent tools available to analyze customer communications. Every company must strive for continuous improvement and optimizing all processes in a holistic manner. Unfortunately, many managers focus primarily on internal factors to eliminate waste and reduce costs. But today’s business world is driven by external elements such as customers, markets and competitors. Successful enterprises will listen carefully to their customers and incorporate lessons learned in a step-by-step approach to adjust processes and improve performance throughout the entire company. Today’s customers are willing to communicate more, but they expect more and are prepared to change vendors more often!
