June 2, 2011

Call Centers: Cost Center or Customer Dazzle Tool?

YOU! be on the Side of the Angels
Core Service is Table Stakes
How NOT to Hanve a Competitive Position
It amazes me that most businesses really don’t want to talk to their customers.

They don’t invite them to call. They want to ‘get ‘em on and get them off’ as soon as they can. They make them wait for ridiculous amounts of time before someone answers their call. They insult them by saying things like ‘Please don’t hang up. Your call is important to us. Your call will be answered by the next available agent’. They try to avoid having a human being engage with the caller by employing complicated IVR systems that forces the person through exhausting questioning: ‘If you’re calling about our hours of business press 1’. And on and on and on it goes.

By making the contact experience so difficult and frustrating, one can only conclude that the business in question really doesn’t want to engage in a live conversation with their customers. What they REALLY want is to handle customer calls at the lowest cost. Today business generally treats a Call Center as a cost to be controlled rather than as a vehicle to create maniacal Fans.

Proof Points: most Call Centers are outsourced and the Business Case is bases on costs; performance metrics are based on things like ‘Average Holding Time’ with the objective of minimizing the amount of time a customer is on the call and cost per call drives performance management.

Kind of ironic really. A Call Center is generally not considered as a Core Competency. It’s outsourced and costs are driven to the lowest possible levels. And yet, the Service Experience drives customer loyalty and differentiates an organization from the Herd. Huh?

Cheers,
Roy


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Strategy Creation | Leadership | Permalink
Posted 6.2.11 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing | Read Comments (0) | Leave a Comment