Call centres are either tools for improving customer relationships or thorns in customers' sides.
Jed Hewson, director of 1Stream, describes a company's contact centre as its "shop window", as it is the first port of call when a customer experiences a problem, has a query, or would like to purchase a new product or service. If the shop window creates a perception of inefficacy or ineptitude, the image of the entire operation suffers, he says.
According to Hewson, one of the most common mistakes marketing departments make is launching an advertising campaign promising top-notch customer service but failing to inform the call centre that the campaign is going live. This results in the call centre experiencing an influx of enquiries, he says, adding that the company can't live up to the campaign promise.
"Others chose to invest in the latest and greatest technology, without thinking about how that would affect the customer experience. Voice recognition was one of the tools introduced that sounded incredibly cutting-edge, but anyone who has experienced the robotic monotone that tells them that they 'did not understand request, please repeat' would testify to the merits of speaking to an actual human being," he says.
For Hewson, when multimedia was introduced to call centres, it came with the promise of reaching customers quickly and effortlessly via their preferred channel. But customers often leave e-mails and SMSes in their inboxes for days with no resolution for the call centre. "Unisa serves as a good example. They decided to close down their voice channel to force students to interact with SMS, Web and e-mail - to their detriment. Thousands of dissatisfied students complained that they still needed to speak to a human being," notes Hewson.
Interactive voice response (IVR) was also intended to save callers and agents' time, he points out, but as countless complaints and comedy sketches have shown, a poorly implemented menu does anything but.
Last year's SpeechTek academy study showed that only 1% of customers feel that IVRs benefit either the company or their clients, and 34% of customers said they believe these automated menu systems are only in place to save companies money, says Hewson.
However, the problem is an implementation one, he notes. "Why does a company require customers to key-in their phone numbers, and then immediately request the phone number when he/she gets an agent on the line?" That, he says, is a small annoyance that could easily be fixed.
Simple changes can turn an IVR into something people would want to use, rather than something they have to use. A few modifications to the set-up of the call centre process could make the overall experience more positive and efficient for all involved, adds Hewson, but at the end of the day, no one intuitively knows what makes a call centre good or bad. It takes time and experience, rather than simple technical knowledge.
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