Great Customer Experience through your people

Brands frequently talk about differentiation; that prized nugget that separates them out from their competitors.

One of the most talked about differentiators is customer experience, yet so many organisations fail to approach it head on because they can’t quite work out how to create great customer experience as a culture. 

There are a number of ways to provide a great customer experience and one of the most powerful is through your people.

But many organisations continue to overlook the strong correlation between a great customer experience and great employee experience and this is no more evident than within call centres.  Love them or hate them, call centres are a fundamental part of many organisations.

Your Call Centre is Your Brand

How often have you seen the advert, loved the brand, been swept along with the fabulous marketing messages and then had the rude awakening when you got through to a disengaged call centre agent?  Pow!  The feeling is gone and you’re back in the real world.

Call centres are not only the voice of the brand, they’re also the voice of the customer – you don’t get a more powerful asset than that.

 

It’s a Company-Wide Commitment

But this is no simple fix.  Engaging your call centre agents requires commitment from the top of the organisation.  Many Call Centre Heads struggle to motivate a team who feel broadly ignored outside of their immediate environment while Marketing and Research teams work across the corridor trying to understand what the customer wants.

But it’s the call centres that have many of the answers.  Engage with them and watch them engage with your customers.  Do it time and time again - Get their advice, give them projects, get them to innovate… and watch them come alive.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book ‘Outliers’ cited 3 key things that work has to have to be satisfying:  Autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward. 

Many would say that this isn’t possible in a call centre environment – but that’s a view based on the traditional approach to the call centre.  A radical change to the thinking around call centres, a change of positioning is required for brands to be truly customer centric.

 

What can CEOs do?

There are a few questions CEOs should be asking themselves if they are serious about giving their customers the experience that differentiates from competitors and drives loyalty:

-       Does my team involve call centre agents when we want to come up with new ideas and innovate?

-       If we target our agents on call volume and sales, will they get frustrated if their callers want help instead?

-       Does Marketing, Product and Business Development actively seek feedback from the call centres?

-       Does my team consult call centre agents before they make decisions that affect our customers?

-       How much importance do I put on active staff development, motivation and feedback when I target my team?  Are they clear about the expected outcomes?

-       Do I regularly chat to call centre agents to get their thoughts and feedback?

-       Is the work carried out by our call centre agents the same every day?  Do we accept that it is always dull?

-       Do I accept that the high attrition in my call centres is just the nature of the beast?

-       Can all of my team’s targets be viewed as a number on a spreadsheet or are there other fundamental success factors that I’m missing?

We are now in a time of unparalleled change.  Very soon, those who really grasp the delivery of a great customer experience and embed it as part of their culture will be the ones to survive.

Those who have customer centricity as nothing more than a line on their mission statement and forget to involve their customer-facing staff will be left wondering what happened.