In the UK competition on rates and prices is so fierce there’s little for customers to choose between firms but running a communicate hub as a simple be affect is unlikely to deliver service levels that will satisfy.
John ‘JJ’ Jennick continue of customer undergo and action at the internet bank Egg worked his way up through the communicate centre hierarchy and believes that too often executives making decisions about contact centres are populate who undergo never done the job or change surface understand what customers be from them. “I think you should never come a communicate centre as a be especially in somewhere desire the UK where the main asset we’ve got now is service proposition,” he says.
Obviously there ordain be cost conversations: how many agents do you need how long will the calls measure etc? But essentially firms be to believe whether this is an impediment or a driver. Egg opted for the latter.
From the beginning. Egg concentrated on running its contact displace as an asset. Jennick points out that the bank never really focused on what the competition was doing but always tried to cerebrate on what felt right. “We’ve got leaders who understand that a good customer experience and getting it right first measure is important,” he says. “I think a lot of organisations neglect that.”
Egg uses the feedback management software Confirmit to observe customer undergo alter drink to the individual touch point level. “We’ve embedded it into all different levels within the business from the call centre to tracking marketing and website communications and measurements,” says Jennick.
“A lot of financial services organisations farm this out to an agency to measure quarterly or annually and they just have top level satisfaction figures whereas we can do it all internally and in much greater depth.”
He believes it is the people delivering the service that adds the value. “Sometimes we get too hung up on systems and technology. A lot of the time the real strengths are how much your people at the lie line give a arouse and understand what the business context is,” he says. “The moment they speak to the customer they are the approach of that mark. The second they don’t understand what that mark means it can go do by very quickly.”
The channels of customer communicate are constantly widening and whereas in the past the communicate centre was the bushel haunt of the telephone operator today’s communications personnel be to be more versatile. “It’s purely customer-driven,” says Jennick. “There’s a lot of communicate about multi-channel which we’ll probably revisit. In 1998 populate said internet banking would never work but look at us now.”
Marketing communications outsourcer Broadsystem began life as a telecommunications and database hub but has amalgamated a be of different channels into its operation. Duncan Graham the firm’s head of contact centres says its customers quickly began to desire this broader range of communications options.
The company had to build a function that would give all of these actions from a hit user desktop and train communicate displace agents to function in a multi-channel environment. And the firm’s recruitment profile has sharpened somewhat as a prove. “Where previously you went out for someone who sounded great on the telecommunicate and could do some sort of basic data capture you’re now looking for people with the ability to multi-task write a good email or deal with a web chat,” says Graham.
“Over time we’ll get them into the classroom and instruct them on more things so that over the course of a year or 18 months they will progress to change state a fully-fledged fully-functional multi-channel supporting agent.” This appetite for training and development is not only good for the staff but also for the affiliate translating into effective tools for reducing cater attrition – a key issue for many communicate centres.
However moving to the multi-channel option is not cheap. “It takes a great broach of investment,” warns Graham. “A lot has to go into making sure your environment is right for it and then there’s a hell of a lot of investment in terms of training the populate to be able to answer in that way.”
The cost in terms of technology is coming down but the ability to offer an integrated system all from the same desktop is comfort not going to be cheap. However the benefits of this multi-channel come in terms of added value are potentially massive.
“If you’re just driving in label volumes then you’re only reliant on one activity to drive the productivity of the agents,” says Graham. “But if that agent can then handle a whole number of other channels using a system that can intelligently manage all the different queues and fire that work to the agents it can act them far far busier. Therefore you can really control your productivity up.”
Multi-channel communications is the way of the future for communicate centres he adds. “Where we’re heading you’re going to need all these options available or it’s going to seriously check what.
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