Customer Consulting welcomes contact centre report

The customer and change management company Customer Consulting Ltd (CCL) has welcomed the findings of the ‘UK Contact Centre Decision-Makers’ Guide 2009’, a report which examines the performance, operations, technology and human resources aspects of UK contact centre operations.

Commenting on this recently published seventh annual report into the UK’s contact centre sector, CCL’s managing director, Simon Rustom, said: “The good news from this report is that successful contact centre management seems now to be about providing a high quality customer experience, rather than hitting operational metrics to the exclusion of everything else.

“This puts the emphasis on the agent, rather than merely systems and processes, to provide customer satisfaction and overcome ‘failure demand’,” Rustom added. “It’s encouraging to see from the report that 54% of respondents state that empathy – the ability to see another’s point of view – is the most important characteristic in an agent, outweighing other characteristics such as sales ability, multi-tasking, reliability and teamworking.”

The report portrayed the successful contact centre agent as versatile, reliable, a good listener and, of course, empathetic. Rustom commented: “Callers must feel that that the person they are talking to is both listening and understands their point of view.

“Moreover, callers must believe that the agent is trying to resolve the issue. As such, empathy is vital for improving customer satisfaction and loyalty – as well as the increasingly key tasks of cross-selling and up-selling.”

The report states that UK contact centres handled 700m complaints in 2009 – some 5.4% of all calls made to contact centres in the UK - with the retail and distribution sector receiving the greatest proportion of complaints (some 10.5% of all calls). The report revealed that 87% of all complaints received by contact centres related to ‘failure demand’ caused by a breakdown of processes somewhere in the organisation, with only 13% of complaints relating to the contact centre itself and its staff.

Rustom said: “Failure demand results in more costs for the business because of the time and resources spent in responding to additional customer enquiries and complaints as a result of processes that do not work.

“In our experience, organisations find it hard getting to grips with this area of wastage. In fact, the only way is to carry out a ‘root cause analysis’, which discovers facts about the real causes of unnecessary contact and the resulting costs of failure demand. This often affects other departments outside the contact centre and so requires a strategic approach – enlisting Board level backing – to achieve success.”

Combating failure demand is just part of CCL’s customer management strategy. This strategy enables CCL to work with its clients to deliver against their core shareholder value objectives: to build market share; increase profitability; grow revenue and improve operating costs.

“In many circumstances the return on investment (ROI) can be tens or even hundreds of millions of pounds,” revealed Rustom.

“An unprecedented shift of power to the customer means that, to remain competitive, companies need to optimise value from a range of interrelated ‘customer management’ disciplines: customer insight, value propositions, customer service, customer experience, relationship management, channel integration and so on,” Rustom explained.

“There is now evidence that neither piecemeal nor technology-led approaches to this issue have delivered value,” he continued. “To be successful requires strategic, organisational and operational elements to be aligned within a long term plan - and those operational elements comprise people and process as well as technology.

“It is all about improving the customer interfaces and internal processes that lead to increased performance. It paves the way for cross-functional and cross-business cooperation and integration. It provides a powerful context to carry out development from the customer’s point of view and it articulates the required infrastructure, capabilities and culture needed to deliver all of these things.”

CCL advocates a three step approach to effective customer management: ‘fixing the basics’ and defining strategy; embedding best practice, and then growing customers’ lifetime value to the organisation, enhancing brand value, matching investment with potential in marketing, sales and customer service while also reducing marketing, sales and operational costs.

CCL is currently implementing this three step approach to customer management in a number of organisations – with excellent and encouraging results so far.

4th March 2010