Contact centres should ensure customers can choose their contact channel, be it e-mail, phone, chat, the Web, or in person, says Paul Bornnutter, Africa and Middle East GM of contact centre solutions provider FrontRange.
Bornnutter was referring to a report on 23 best practices for customer service centres compiled by research firm Forrester Research.
He said call centres should provide different ways of interacting with customers. "Best practices integrate real-time knowledge to custom tailor the response to the customer with the minimum amount of customer interaction," he said.
Forrester research revealed the contact centre agent space is changing, Bornnutter said.
"Before the use of real-time technology solutions in the call centre environment, a call centre agent would operate a telephone and PC separately, thus taking time to respond to calls and queries. Today, agents have one screen in front of them with all functionalities and data to handle calls quicker.
"Call centres need to make their environment favourable for the benefit of their customers, by creating a single point of access and profile their customer`s interface," he said.
Bornnutter said the research revealed the majority of customers stop contacting call centres for reasons such as poor service from agents, poor access to the right person and high prices.
"Make sure agents have consistent responses to customer queries and the tracking system can gather all interactions," he said. "When a person calls a call centre they do not want to wait long for a response."
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