Transformation Of Customer Service Call Centers

The Contact Center is being transformed at a rate of change that is beyond the ability of current management strategies to identify and react. Most contact centers are still using 1990 thinking in a 2020 world! The adoption rate of Smartphones, customer satisfaction scores through social media, wide availability of video options, and the mobility of customer demographics are terrorizing your call center and what are you doing about it? Still routing phone calls based on Area Code? Queueing callers on more incoming telephone lines, while employing less customer service representatives? Unless you are Google or the IRS, neither of which cares about customer service, you are about to become extinct! Here are the top five Contact Center Killers of traditional business models!
(1) Scheduled Call Back – The traditional strategy for customer retention has been to increase the size of the “catchers mitt” by adding more incoming telephone lines. Nobody ever says lets increase the number of agents answering incoming calls, but they are always quick to add more incoming telephone lines! All this does is increase customer frustration, pressure agents to short change the current customer interaction and drive abandoned calls through the statistical roof! Do not even consider this option until you have explored all the other options listed below!
(2) Mobile Phones – Without exception, unless your client demographic is that of the Jitterbug generation, your clients are mobile phone users! This means they have advanced smartphone functionality, SMS or Text capability and they are web savvy! Tap the functionality of these devices to increase customer satisfaction while reducing over all costs. Text messages can be used to initiate the Call Back function in your contact center! Smart Apps can be created to help clients “self navigate” through your call tree, with the push of a single button! Get Smart Phone integration into your contact center yesterday!
(3) Video Support – High “touch” now means Video! The traditional talk path is narrow, strangles information and is inappropriate for today’s high speed, information rich customer contact strategies. Video offers a deeper and richer personal experience. When it comes to “show me”, “teach me” and “help me” scenarios, one call completion statistics escalate when video is part of the contact center arsenal of customer satisfaction tools. Get your Frequently Asked Questions into video format, or risk being ignored by a generation that might be able to read, but find YouTube a faster route to problem resolution.
(4) Social Media – Twitter can do more to damage your reputation than a bad restaurant review on Yelp! What social media monitoring tools are in your contact center arsenal? What website integration options have you implemented? Can your Customer Service Representatives open a real time video conversation with someone who has hit your website, or just told all their FB friends what the current hold time is in your Contact Center?
(5) Home base agents – did you read (1) above? The availability of high speed network connectivity, now makes it possible to tap a labor pool that has nothing to do with driving distance to the office! Quality, trained and experienced Customer Service representatives are out there, living where they want to live and are available to the Call Center that has put distributed workforce connectivity solutions in place. Down the hall, or across the country, you can provide the exact same supervision, monitoring and training for a remote customer service representative that you provide for that boiler room Contact Center that you heat, air condition, power and remains your biggest disaster recovery and business continuity challenge!