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 What VPs Should Know About Call Centers

     By Chad McClennan

Your call center is not just a department down the hall nor a cost center out of which you continuously try to squeeze savings.  Allow me to offer an alternative perspective.  Your call center is the window into your entire organization and the pulse of your customer.

One day I walked through the call center of one of my clients with the company's president and other senior managers.  As we were talking, the president grumbled something under his breath that was indistinguishable to me.  When I inquired as to the nature of his remarks he commented that the call center was "just a constant source of frustration" - specifically in terms of logistics, planning (they had recently moved into a much larger facility) and operations (due to the heavy "personnel" and changing technology aspects).  He did not view the call center in a favorable light. 

I asked the group the following question, "What percentage of your customers interact with this 'problematic' call center annually?"  After just a moment of thought one of the VPs responded, "Just about all of them."  I pressed further, asking, "How about last month," to which his response was the same.  Day in and day out, thousands of customers are touched - for a litany of reasons - purchasing products and receiving service.

With little further dialogue, they knew where I was going with my line of questioning.  They realized their attitude towards their call center posed a significant risk - loss of focus on the customer - a key ingredient that had contributed to their enormous prior success.  However, continuing to view this critical customer touch point as a "frustration" could result in a shortfall in attention, investment and the necessary commitment to the customer that will contribute to future success.

The nature of this company's business is such that constant customer interaction is a cost of doing business.  More than simply a business necessity, customer interaction drives sales, service quality, retention and growth - while also being a source for potential cost savings, if designed and executed correctly - keeping the customers' needs in mind. 

What VPs should know is that they must …

   1. Leverage Information Captured Across Customer Touch Points

Mine for experiential data regarding the customer experience and satisfaction with products and services - the call center must be viewed as a strategic data source.  Conduct live observations, compiling a database of customer interactions to identify trends and obtain insights into just exactly what is going on when it comes to the customer.  Capturing this information is necessary to create a feedback loop, providing nearly real-time input to marketing, product development, customer operations as well as back-office and fulfillment areas that could also benefit from a better understanding of customer needs, issues and expectations.

   2. Understand the Cross-enterprise View of the Customer

What types of interactions, how often and why. Develop a customer touch point map, by customer profile, to better understand the behaviors and preferences of customers.  Customers interact with various departments over the many stages of the customer lifecycle - all contributing to the total customer experience.

   3. Regularly Engage in Retention Studies

Understand why customers leave and what the company can do to increase satisfaction resulting in increased retention and profitability.  Are you losing your better customers - or do you know who your less desirable customers are?  Did they leave for reasons that were controllable?  Were there signs that valuable customers were at risk before it was too late?

   4. Selling Efforts Must Focus on Understanding the Customers Current Challenges to     Effectively Sell Technology in Today's Marketplace

Focus on benefits.  A focus on features will only dazzle the most gizmo happy of tech buyers.   Business people and most decision makers want solutions that deliver benefits.  Only once the potential benefits are understood will the buyer then want to understand the "features," which are the enablers of the solution, answering the "how"...only after the "what" and "why" have been fully understood.

   5. Coordinate Efforts with Customer Operations - Service and Support

Ensure messages are consistent across an organization.  Too often silos emerge, communication breaks down and customers are the victims.  Understand the value of customer service and the impact of heightened levels of service on bottom-line profitability. Use service as a weapon in the strategic arsenal for differentiation - positively.  Leverage the information obtained within the service organization within other departments.

   6. Regularly Calculate and Understand Return Investment for Sales and Marketing     Efforts and Tools

Gauge the impact against the costs and ensure that sales and marketing efforts deliver the desired results.  Develop assumptions, pilot efforts and focus resources on the areas that will deliver the largest benefit at the most reasonable levels of expense.  Explore multi-channel interaction efforts for campaigns, follow-up and customer selling efforts.

   7. Capture Customer Feedback - Regularly and Accurately

Assess satisfaction across the enterprise.  Gather valid samples - acting on trends rather than anecdotes.  Do something with the results; otherwise future efforts to obtain feedback will not deliver actionable results.

   8. Address Changing Customer Expectations Related to Self-service

Websites and speech recognition auto-response units are becoming more mainstream, with estimates reaching levels of 50 percent for customer interactions taking place via self-service.  However, overall customer interaction levels continue to rise, but most businesses are not seeing a reduction in overall live interaction workloads.  What's actually occurring is that the more basic inquiries are automated and live customer representatives are handling increasingly complex interactions.  Understand customer preferences and integrate the web and self-service into the overall customer interaction mix.

Those responsible for running the day-to-day call center and customer contact operations are extremely busy with day-to-day issues.  Personnel, scheduling, technical infrastructure stability, reporting, practices and procedures, service levels, etc - all infringe on their ability to think and act strategically.  This is a fact of life - just ask them.  It is not that they are incapable - they just lack resources and time (and in some cases, expertise).

Directors, supervisors and managers may also tend to be territorial and protective, defending their call center turf and managing the information disseminated related to performance.  Change becomes a challenge - which explains why performance is at the level it is. 

Efforts must be dedicated - above and beyond existing levels of management and supervision - to mine the call center for data and insights.  Only then will the entire organization be able to realize the benefits - and your customers receive the experience that they increasingly expect and demand.

As you can see, there are a variety of factors and issues that play into the effectiveness of managing and integrating a call center into the strategic arsenal of a business.  The area is rich in valuable customer, product and performance data.  Product managers, marketing, logistics, billing and IT can all learn a great deal from the information available within a call center.  And remember - the people who sit there everyday have their fingers on the lifeblood of your organization - responsible for selling and servicing - and without an appreciation for this level of responsibility, there is vulnerability. 

Chad McClennan is Founder and President of The Customer Group, LLC, a niche consulting firm advising businesses in the delivery of Customer Interaction Excellence. Contact him at www.customergroup.com.

Reprinted with permission from the July 2002 issue of Software Business Magazine, Webcom Communications Corp., 7355 E. Orchard Road, #100, Greenwood Village CO 80111 USA
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