Support (call centres)

Customer Service For many companies, the call centre (support line) is increasingly becoming the only point of contact between the company (brand) and the consumer (the experience). The whole point of these call centres was never to give the consumer f&q type answers – there’s the frequently asked questions section for that. But many companies still don’t understand that they are actually making it increasingly difficult to maintain any loyalty to the company with the type of (dis)service they are offering.

There are several factors, according to Adam Faulkner, that influence how the consumer relates to the company during the call. How long they have to wait, do they receive a recorded message or do they get to speak with a live agent and whether their problem/query is resolved.

One of the measures of success is how quickly the calls get answered – if you live in Portugal and have rung Medis, Netcabo, TVCabo to name a few, I know what you are thinking. Some companies are reportedly “hiring large numbers of temporary staff just to meet their call answering SLAs (service level agreements)” – that begins to explain quite a lot.

These same companies will over spend on their advertising – to compensate on high customer losses? It’s so obvious that customer service is an essential strategic issue and that brands will only be able to differentiate by being different!

It actually just boils down to one thing – resolution. Did you get an answer for your problem? And unfortunately, it is almost always no. Worst of all (Medis) is when the service is down right bad and when you ask to speak to a supervisor, you are told that there’s no point as the supervisor will give you the same information – who are they to tell you what a supervisor will and will not do or say? Is this the death of hierarchy? I was actually surprised to have the supposed supervisor repeat the same thing. I cannot even hear the word Medis. I’m not even sure how I’ve managed to type it – must be therapeutic.

With effective CRM, support agents should have all your information on the screen once you have identified yourself. But that doesn’t seem to happen either. These agents should log all your calls – that doesn’t seem to happen either – but then again how do we know? Their vagueness always leaves doubting if we are in fact a customer at all!

Companies that are getting this right, have customer retention in the high 80%s as they analyze every touch point and look to improve their performance. At a time when everything has become so commoditized and consumers have become price sensitive, excellent service and trust will probably be the last barrier to switching brands, and it’s never been easier. Faulkner asks the crucial question: