Establishing a Customer Interaction Center
The best way to retain customers is through proactive relationship management and outstanding customer service. A key element in that strategy is an integrated approach to customer contact—implemented through a customer interaction center. The concept takes the traditional call center a step further, integrating people, technology, and customer data.
This type of center brings staff who deal directly with customers together with support personnel, creating an integrated team, which then gives customers a single point of contact.
The organization also benefits by:
- creating "virtual teams" that respond rapidly to requests or queries from customers
- more easily sharing best practices between business units.
Not any more. Obviously call centers were created to handle all telephone enquiries and staffed by people with the telephone techniques. Up until about fifteen years ago, the bulk of enquiries would have come by the phone, but times have changed. Customers who communicate with a company via the Web or e-mail now want and expect the same level of attention and personal service that phone customers receive, and you gear up all your systems to do meet that need. Make sure your customer-facing staff receive the necessary skills and training to cope with all enquiries, however they reach you.
The customer interaction center should be an integral part of the sales or marketing department. The center should be treated as a strategic resource that contributes to long-term customer retention.
Customer interaction is becoming increasingly sophisticated, with multimedia communication becoming ever more common in consumer and business markets. The interaction center should be capable of adapting to new technological developments. Ask your IT department or external consultant to advise on how you should upgrade your systems if necessary. One good way of finding out about the average customer experience with your company is to try out some of the routes yourself. What is your experience?
Customers can now contact organizations by Internet, phone, e-mail, or fax (although this latter option is very much on the wane). The integration of the Internet and telephony in multimedia call centers is taking the process even further. That level of choice and convenience should lead to better customer service. But, in reality, the opposite is happening. When each channel has its own separate "information silo" surrounding the customer, there is no integration, and service declines. You can set your company apart by providing a single point of contact that gives excellent customer service no matter how the customer contacts you.
Here's a situation you might recognize: A customer enters a request via the Web, then calls a customer service representative in a call center for an update. If the call center has access only to its own departmental data, the rep may not even recognize the customer, which could lead to an embarrassing phone conversation and—most probably—a lost sales opportunity. Your commitment to customer service must include consistency, which an integrated contact center can help you achieve.
Your customer interaction center provides the framework for creating virtual teams, including staff from logistics, credit control, accounting, administration, customer service, and technical support. These teams can respond rapidly to requests or queries and bring together the right combination of skills for the customer's business. This high level of integration will result in even better alignment between customer service, supply/demand planning, and logistics. Virtual teams also make it easier for business units to share best practices.
The interaction center should provide a sophisticated technology infrastructure to meet its objectives. The telephone system should direct each customer call to a named contact with the appropriate skills and knowledge. If the first contact is busy, the customer should be transferred to another team member with the same skills and knowledge. The team member who answers the call should have access to all of the customer's account information on screen, and that team member should be charged with updating the customer's record. These improvements will speed up customer contact (present and future) and increase customer satisfaction.
At the heart of your company's center should be an interconnected data networking solution that collects, stores, manages, and distributes all relevant customer information via a single, integrated customer database. The database should be updatable from all customer channels and accessible by all customer-facing staff. The objective is to make communications simpler and quicker by giving every member of the customer service team access to the most up-to-date information on a customer's business. The solution can also include business rules and workflow functions that, for example, assign priorities to key account customers or accelerate support requests that have not been resolved within agreed time periods.
The center should be integrated with e-commerce systems to simplify the purchasing processes. Customers who work with a number of different locations or divisions should now have a single point of contact for all their dealings with the company, especially purchasing.
Many personalization initiatives have been built on incomplete customer data. A personal Web page, for example, would probably have been based only on the customer's Internet interactions, completely ignoring any voice contact through a call center. Your center operation should include strategies to draw information from every kind of customer interaction into your personalization initiatives.
The center infrastructure should be designed for scaling up to accommodate growth in demand. It should provide a stable platform for developing improvements and incorporating new technologies in its operations.
An effective interaction center is not a telephone call center with other technology treated as an add-on. From the outset, the interaction center should be capable of communicating via traditional and new media and incorporating emerging media.
Managed properly, the customer interaction center can provide a wealth of valuable information to support decision making and business development throughout a company.
The center should be driven not by technology but by customer service, even though technology is essential to center operation. Companies should set quality and performance standards that are focused on customer needs, not technical performance.
A customer interaction center provides a great deal of valuable information that can be used to develop service personalized to the customer. If the information simply stays on file, the company is losing a great opportunity.
Cleveland, Brad.
Tseng, Mitchell M.
International Contact Center Benchmarking Consortium: www.iccbc.org