Johannesburg, South Africa, 13 June 2007 - Quality in a contact centre could be considered as much of an oxymoron as “tax return”, “healthy tan” or “plastic glasses”.

This is mainly because, while they are an important customer touch point for businesses, contact centres usually operate at the back-end of the service chain and inevitably become the dumping ground for blame about faulty processes from other parts of the business.

These defective processes really aren’t the domain of the contact centre to begin with – a billing department’s mess up of a utility bill for example, or even a lack of technical education on selling a product on a retail floor – but it’s the contact centre that inevitably needs to sort out the problem.

95% of the calls received by a contact centre are highly commodity-based. Consumers rarely think about the issue and normally seek a favourable outcome immediately. Yet, the calls can carry a high level of emotional content, hidden reasons or motivations for the call, which is not openly visible to a contact centre agent sitting at the other end of a telephone line.

To that extent, the demands on a contact centre agent are enormous – to provide a good service and retain customers despite falling victim to the proverbial executive mandate.

This mandate ensures that contact centres are used as a vehicle to find, win, retain and develop customers, all the while driving customer satisfaction and ultimately profitability – a big order from a part of the business that is not usually top of the priority list.

Where it all goes wrong

Some of the worst performing companies in the world, list cost reductions as their main business drivers instead of customer satisfaction, putting contact centres at an immediate disadvantage because in many executive minds, contact centres are cost centres to begin with.

For a long time, companies have been measuring the wrong metrics when assessing a contact centre’s performance, which were borne out of having a misguided sense of what the key business drivers should be.

In most organisations, management does not know which the correct levers are to pull in order to improve performance and, as a result, many of the wrong behaviours are being rewarded.

First call resolution versus average handling time is one small example – customers would be much happier with a call resolved first time than having many short engagements with a contact centre agent to resolve a single issue. Besides, which, many contact centres measure first call resoltuion and outsourcers, such as Merchants, for example, are penalised if a customer phones back.

The issue here is that first call resolution is measured incorrectly i.e. if the same number appears within a relatively short period of time it is deemed that the first call was not resolved. These collected statistics are dangerous as, invariably, the customer could be calling about something else entirely.

So, first call resolution with appropriate and well-defined wrap-up codes are important. A competent business should evaluate these codes and then ensure their communications, scripts, processes, etc. are adapted to bring call volumes down.

In any event, rewarding wrong behaviours leads to staff dissatisfaction, which has a domino effect on customer satisfaction. This results in the company spending more than it should have if the right strategic components had been adopted in the first place.

The customer is always right

Overall, the way you make your customers feel has an effect on how successful your business is. Customer satisfaction leads to customer retention and that should be critical for any organisation.

Poet and author Maya Angelou once said: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

That’s so true and sums up what could be some of the defining moments in customer interaction with your contact centre – having a knock-on effect of whether that customer will remain loyal or not.

Training and capability development is the key

Merchants places a huge amount of importance on training and staff development. But training doesn’t end in the classroom, it’s an ongoing process that includes developing staff capabilities.

You can train somebody to do something, but not everyone will be able to take it all in and apply it practically. This means that building the capability for contact centre agents to understand what the business’s purpose is and how they as staff members fit into the process for fulfilling that purpose is critical for success.

So what is the true essence of quality in a contact centre? Not just customer satisfaction, but driving customer loyalty. There’s very little brand loyalty in this modern age, so businesses that are able to foster brand loyalty are playing their cards right.

It’s important to listen to what your customers say and to cater to their needs, and not necessarily what you think their needs are. By doing this, the effects cascade down the entire service chain until each part of the business runs in tune with the next.

For further information please contact:

Vanda Dickson, Marketing & Strategy Development, Merchants
Tel: +27 11 575 2479
Email: vanda.dickson@za.didata.com

Lee-Anne Poon, Tribeca Public Relations
Tel: +27 11 208 5500
Mobile: +27 82 818 4041
Email: lee-annep@tribecapr.co.za

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