Customer contact centers have the potential to create value on three distinct levels: efficiency, customer satisfaction and business unit value (strategic value). Level three -- working with other business units -- is where you can really begin to leverage the call center's potential to deliver enormous value to the organization.
As a primary customer touch point, the call center has significant potential to provide other business units with valuable intelligence and support. This can include input on customers, products, services and processes --information that, when captured, identified, assimilated and turned into usable knowledge -- can literally transform an organization's ability to identify and meet customer expectations and demands.
The benefits can be significant --and varied. For example, consider the impact when the call center:
-Helps operational areas or manufacturing units pinpoint and fix quality problems, which boosts customer satisfaction and repeat purchases, reduces costs associated with warranties and repairs and prevents unnecessary contacts to the call center.
-Helps marketing develop more effective campaigns. For example, having a better understanding of what customers need and want, and ensuring that marketing efforts target best prospects can improve response rates, reduce relative marketing costs, and even help the organization boost market share.
-Serves as an early warning system of potential legal troubles. Product defects, reactions to food or prescription drugs, security holes discovered in a firm --Web site, inaccuracies in warranty statements or customer invoices --the list could go on and on, and the call center is often first to hear of these issues. Having strong, collaborative ties to other areas of the organization is a prerequisite to handling them as quickly and effectively as possible.
-Helps research and development (R&D) identify customer needs and the firm's competitive advantages and disadvantages. In many ways, focus groups, market research and traditional broad-based surveys are no match for the intelligence the call center can capture through interactions with hundreds or even thousands of prospects and/or customers. This input can ultimately help the organization focus on providing better products and services to better defined customer segments --favorably impacting costs, revenues, marketshare and even the organization's reputation and brand.
-Enables the organization to improve self-service systems, based on the specific assistance the call center provides to customers who opt out of or need help with these systems. This not only lowers the costs of providing customer service; it can also boost customer satisfaction and ensure that the call center has capacity to focus on issues that really require or benefit from agent involvement.
In short, when the call center has an eye on the larger implications of quality and innovation, it will positively impact the entire organization's workload, productivity and quality.
How do you leverage the potential your call center has? Start by developing good working relationships with the individuals who run other areas of the organization. Learn about their goals and objectives and how the call center might best support their needs. And work on cultivating an understanding of the call center's role and potential (this takes time and persistence - stay with it!). Ensure that the prevailing perspective is that the role of the call center is to positively and constructively serve, not just to point out problems with processes, products and services in other areas.
Next, you'll need to build a team that is focused on capturing, analyzing, sharing and using value-added information across the organization. A suggested ratio is that you need one business analyst for every 30 to 50 agents (though that can vary depending on many factors). You'll also want to ensure that quality at the point of customer contact is given the broadest possible definition -- e.g., that coaching, monitoring and objectives at the agent level support these major strategic opportunities.
Ensure the information is useful and usable, based on an ongoing commitment to understand business requirements. And don't get overwhelmed. There is an infinite amount of information that you could provide to each business unit. Instead of focusing on quantity (by trying to ensure that everything that may be valuable is shared) concentrate on providing just the information that is likely to be most useful.
Every customer contact your center handles provides implicit and/or direct insight into processes, products, policies, services, customers and the external environment. You have the opportunity to play a central role in building a stronger organization with better services and products across the board -- but it's a role that must be earned.
Please drop me a note with your stories, comments, feedback… I'd love to hear from you.
Brad Cleveland
President, ICMI
