Contact centres have always been good at leveraging new and scalable telecoms technology, opening the door to delivering a better, personalised service.
You only have to look at recent industry surveys reporting that 22% of consumers now see online ‘peer-to-peer’ ratings as being influential or very influential in their decision to purchase, to see why contact centres are using social media technology to communicate with customers.
Also, consumers increasingly expect the brand representative they are communicating with to have a full understanding of their relationship with that business, including past custom, issues and interaction.
They know technology has evolved and have high expectations of service they should receive from organisations. Consumers no longer want apologies from a business whose departments work in silos without insight. Organisations that do so risk the wrath of consumers online.
But for contact centres to operate their customer service function effectively, they still need to lean on some of the more traditional technologies. Forecasting and planning software, as well as data recording systems for quality benchmarking are both good examples.
Clearly, all of the above technologies offer big benefits to an organisation that is serious about winning business and delivering a level of customer service that adds value to retention and brand advocacy, but there can be an Achilles heel to all this.
The risk is that when you’re running a contact centre it’s easy to start seeing your technology as the ‘winning feature’ of your proposition, when in fact these tools – no matter how complex or sophisticated – are deemed by many customers to be ‘business as usual’ and in effect, merely enablers.
In truth, the real differentiator in winning the hearts and minds of customers is the same as it’s always been; the quality and capability of the people empowered to own and drive the customer experience. This means recruiting and maintaining enthusiastic contact centre staff who can deliver an engaging ‘human’ service that builds the relationship between the brand and the customer.
Now more than ever, contact centre managers need to ensure that, along with their focus on technology, they commit themselves to the right cost and allocation of resources in order to develop their people to be the best they can be.
Nick Mylum is contact centre director at Eclipse Marketing
