The VoIP Mag

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. So that you can read the latest updates about VoIP Technology, Providers, VoIP Hardware, our Reviews or Price Comparisons for You to save and many more. Thanks for visiting The New VoIP Magazine!

By Joe Outlaw

 “Of course not!” you
say.  Don’t be so sure.

First, let me say I appreciate
there are many call centers filled with enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and
customer-focused people doing their very best to address customers’ questions
and problems.  I also know there are many
call centers applying the latest techniques and technologies to make their
people both efficient and effective in support of their missions. But having positive attitudes and working
hard while necessary are not sufficient to ensure your call center is helping
your business not hurting it.

One very significant question to
ask yourself about your organization and its call centers is how aligned with
the core business strategies of the organization are they? Dimension Data, in its past several year’s
annual global contact center survey of large enterprises, found that less than
half viewed their customer service organizations and call centers as strategic
to their businesses. If your
enterprise’s call centers are fully aligned with your business strategies
consider yourself lucky, but don’t stop there in determining if your call
centers are doing all they can to help your business.

Your Call Centers: Helping or
Hurting — 10 Questions to Consider

1. How open for business are you?

Is your call center operated only from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday throgh Friday, or is it open 24
hours a day, 7 days a week? The key here is
not how many hours your call center is open, but whether your customers can
access people or applications for help when they need it or when it is
convenient for them. The right answer is
not necessarily 7×24, but whatever is appropriate for your target market
customers.

2. How easy to do business with are you? 

This is a topic for several books, but some of the customer
service and call center considerations include:

• Do
  your people speak your customers’ languages–actual language (English,
  Spanish, French …) as well as the specific language of your
  products/services (plumbing parts, cell phones, landscaping)?
• Do
  your applications (voice and web) speak your customers’ languages and are
  they intuitive and easy-to-use?
• Do you
  always offer live-person help as an option in your automated customer
  applications?
• Are
  your call centers adequately staffed to provide minimal wait times to
  speak with an agent?
• Are
  your agents trained, equipped, and organized to provide prompt
  service? This raises several
  important topics in addition to ensuring agents are properly trained and
  experienced in the use of the tools provided, including: Do your call
  center systems have sufficient capacity to operate with sub-second
  response even under their peak loads? Are your agent processes streamlined and all bottlenecks and
  redundancies removed, such as duplicate data entry and logging on/off
  multiple applications to access information or to make changes?
• Are
  your automated customer applications available, fast, and responsive?

3. Can your customers get answers to their questions and
problems?

I am not talking about the customer is always right or
whether your company should always give customers the answers they want. That would be determined by your business
strategy. In your call centers, the
question is just whether you are providing your customers with any answers to their
questions and resolutions to their problems. For this, the issues include:

• Are
  your call center people fully trained to do their jobs, such as how to
  operate the necessary systems and how to interact with customers?
• Are
  your call center people and applications supported by the necessary
  customer and product information to answer questions and resolve problems?
• Are
  your call center people empowered to resolve customers’ problems, at least
  the majority of those that reach the center? 
• How
  successful are you at resolving customers’ questions/issues during their
  first contact?
• For
  questions/issues you cannot answer during the first contact, do you have
  escalation and follow-up processes to close the loop in time frames
  acceptable to your customers?
• Are you
  able to effectively deal with questions about the “off-label”
  uses of your products or interactions with your products and 3rd-party
  products?
• Are
  you providing customers with consistent answers and resolutions across all
  of your customer interaction points, in-person at your stores or branch
  offices, calls to your call centers, on your web site?

4.    Are you providing personalized service to
your customers? 

When customers contact your call centers, can you quickly
access information about them and provide services and offering which are
tailored to that customer? Can you do
this across all of your customer interaction points?

5. If your products/services are sold through partners
and resellers how well are those customers supported?  Are your partners and resellers using the
same systems or are their systems fully linked with yours in order to provide
seamless service?

6. Do you provide pro-active service to your
customers?  Do you reach out to your
customers to provide useful information and offerings or do you wait for them
to contact you?

7. How closely are you monitoring your customers’
satisfaction with your products/services? 
Do you know whether your customers’ questions/issues are being addressed
successfully by your call center?
Really, based on actual responses from those customers or something
else, like a report that lists closed tickets?

8. Does your call center support both customer service
and sales?  Of course, it depends
upon your business strategies, but if your call centers only interact with your
customers for service while a separate organization only interacts with them
for sales, how can you even hope to provide your customers with consistent, let
alone accurate information during those interactions.  Likewise, if your company is not in some way
leveraging its call centers’ customer interactions for sales purposes it is
missing a great many opportunities.

9. Have you struck the right balance between
effectiveness and efficiency in the management of your centers?  Are you still operating your call centers
primarily as cost center with a heavy emphasis on efficiency?  Alternatively, have you found a balance
between how well and how cost-effectively they provide services to your customers?  While this balance point may move depending on
the company’s success and market dynamics, it should not swing wildly back and
forth.

10.  How well do
your call centers support your brands? 
All of the other questions are about the mechanics of staffing and
operating your enterprise’s call centers.  This question is more of a style question for
those enterprises whose call centers are strategic.  Do your call centers, and your other points
of customer interaction, deliver a consistent reinforcing branded-experience to
your customers, the Nordstrom’s experience, for example?

And Now — The Answers

You already know there are no one-size-fits-all answers to
these questions. You need to do what is
right for your businesses. The questions
themselves as well as a few hints shed some light on what I think is
important. However, otherwise I
apologize for raising so many questions and providing so few recommendations. You also know the answers to most of these
questions are not to be found solely in new solutions or technologies. There are, however, insights to be gained
from the successes of leading enterprises and also increasingly new techniques
and technologies that are being applied in support of customer contact
strategies. My next column will be about
proactive customer contact and will contain more insights and recommendations
than questions, I promise.

Joe Outlaw is
President and Chief Analyst of Outlaw Research, a firm that provides
results-oriented analysis and consulting of the customer contact marketplace.  The objective of Outlaw Research is building
a community around the leading edges of customer contact — the advanced
strategies early-adopter companies are applying and the technologies and
vendors they are working with.  His work can be found at www.outlawresearch.com