Something funny happened to me at a recent communications convention. I found myself surrounded by a group of middle managers all of whom were involved in the management of a Call Centre of some description or another.
What tickled me the most was the topic of discussion surrounding the varying market pitches offered to their customer bases. They spoke of things like B2B (Business to business) and B2C (business to consumer) and a host of other interesting TLA`s (three letter acronyms). While these were being banded about I kept my ears peeled, waiting to hear the one that has been eluding me for some time now. After forty-five minutes of Call Centre and CRM babble, I resigned myself to the fact that yet again, my TLA would not be uttered at a communications convention.
Any idea as to what my elusive TLA might be? P2P (Person to Person), plain old simple one person interacting with another. I notice how easy it becomes for us to forget that businesses cannot communicate with each other. Simply due to the fact that a business is an inanimate object for crying out loud, surely the people within a business communicate with each other?
So much time and money is ploughed into the technologically perfect Customer Interaction Centre or CIC as we so fondly refer to the Call Centre today. Yet so little attention is given to the calibre of person that will be manning the operator seat in the said Call Centre. Somehow we seem to think that it`s the technology that will carry the message to our customers. This is where I beg to differ. You see people like to talk to people. More importantly, people like to talk to people with a modicum of intelligence and empathy. How many Call Centres have you called only to be answered by a moron with the IQ of a cactus and about as much empathy as a suicide pilot on his maiden mission!
Perhaps business should invest more money in their people and a little less in their technology. Instead, they go big on the techno issue and then mould the people to fit the technologies. I always find this concept a bit backward. Some may argue that they are making money. So what! I bet they would be making more money if the gave a bigger S..&* About their calling customers.
Call me old-fashioned if you must, but bring back the people. Listen to what their customers are saying and then, only then, give them the techno tools to manage what their customers are doing. CRM implies the existence of a relationship to manage. Sometimes business applies CRM to non-existent relationships, sounds a bit like "Military Intelligence", and makes no sense.
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