From Contact Center Professional 2008)
Ten Trends in Contact Centers - Barton Goldenberg, President of ISM, and Dr.
Richard Feinberg, director of Purdue University Center for Customer Driven
Quality
Today’s best in class contact centers have a secret – they are implementing the following
trends for greater efficiency, effectiveness and ultimately operational excellence. Based
on research of contact center executives, vendors and thought leaders by the Purdue
University Center for Customer Driven Quality, best-in-class contact centers either
already have or will be adopting these trends in the near future.
1. Segment Callers By Economic Impact – In today’s environment, you cannot meet
the demand of every customer making contact. As meeting that demand will get
worse in the future, you have to know who your best customers are, be able to
recognize them when they call and deliver superior service that fences them off
from the competition. These customers are your most valuable asset and need to
be treated as such.
2. Process Simplification: Make It Easy – Every customer contact system must have
a process that minimizes what the customer needs to do (they don’t have to give
their authentication information twice) and what the CSR needs to do (prior
contact information is available). The technology is in place, but process
simplification is the goal.
3. Provide Opportunities for Customer Collaboration – Let the customer tell you
what they need by providing multichannel access and support. For example, if
you want customers to move to the Web, then find out exactly what they need to
try it and like it. In addition, make each call an opportunity to collect valuable
and relevant customer information.
4. Align Customer Touch Points – Customer contact channels must be “one”. The
information on the Web must be the same as the store, the catalog, the salesperson
and the phone. When touch points are aligned, the company presents a single
image to the customer.
5. Make First Call Resolution A Priority – Research at the Center for Customer
Driven Quality shows that first call resolution is the key to caller satisfaction.
Getting the technology, process, policy and information for first call resolution
will become the prime directive for contact centers. Therefore, you have to
understand if the problem prompting the call is being solved, how the problem is
being solved or what you need to do to solve the problem.
6. Utilize Real-Time Information Management – Translating the information in the
contact center into actionable information is crucial. Any technology that allows a
closer look at what the consumer thinks, feels and wants is good technology and
has a payoff. Make certain that whatever it is you collect that someone is using it.
Collect reports and find out who is using what for what. Get rid of the things that
are not being used.
7. The Customer Experience: Pleasantries Pay – It is more than answering the call
and solving the problem. Customers pay for a pleasant experience and the cost of
providing that is nothing more than employing CSRs that understand the customer
and will deliver a pleasant experience.
8. Self-Service: More Than An FAQ – As you cannot build out contact centers fast
enough to keep up with demand, the solution is to keep customer satisfaction high
by allowing customers to solve their problems in a self-service channel. Not all
customers want this, but enough callers will to allow you to pay attention to more
in depth issues. However, self-service takes more than a Website FAQ. One of the
more successful applications to be adopted is natural speech recognition. We
estimate that 35-75% of all telephone contact can be successfully handled by
these systems. As these systems are now affordable and there are vendors with
complete implementation experience, this technology will be adopted by all major
contact centers in the next 10 years.
9. Adopt Technology that Delivers – Each week we get a call with a new
technology, and some of them are quite intriguing. You must stay on top of new
technology and have a team that assesses its potential benefit. Language
translation, speech analytics and natural speech recognition systems are having a
big impact.
10. CSR Selection and Continuing Training – A poor CSR loses customers, so hiring
individuals who can quickly learn and adapt and providing ongoing training is
essential to a successful contact center. Contact centers who invest in training
programs to ensure CSRs have the tools and knowledge to best deal with your
customers will succeed.
About the Authors
Barton Goldenberg (bgoldenberg@ismguide.com) is President and Founder of ISM Inc. (
http://www.ismguide.com), a CRM, contact center and digital client consulting firm in
Bethesda, Md. He is the author of CRM In Real Time, and CRM Automation. He is
founder and director of the DestinationCRM Conference. Richard Feinberg, Ph.D.
(xdj1@purdue.edu) is a consumer psychologist, a professor in the Purdue University
Department of Consumer Sciences and Retailing and the Director of the Center for
Customer-Driven Quality at Purdue University (www.ccdq.com), the leading academic
center for the study of contact centers and customer contact and home of the largest and
deepest database of contact center measures. He is co-author of Cases in Call Center
Management: Great ideas (Th)at work and co-founder of Call Center Campus.