Colin Hay at Puzzel takes a look at how to realise the real potential in contact centres
Contact centres and those in them work hard. In fact they are obsessive about efficiency and reduced cost to serve. That’s the problem – too much attention on the wrong thing.
While contact centres remain content to act as a dustpan and brush to the rest of the organisation, they will always be under appreciated and unnoticed for what could be a far greater contribution to brand reputation and corporate effectiveness. The point is missed when contact centres remain separated from the rest of the business. Except, of course, for the necessary ping pong between front and middle office teams to resolves a customer issue. Instead contact centres should be housed at the centre of things.
Why the sudden aspiration?
Customer service has a unique perspective. Marketing holds one sided conversations. Sales tell a story of how it might be. Customer service hears the story of how it actually turned out. In other words, customer service hears the exam results before the rest of the class.
Seen in this light, the contact centre holds an incredibly important source of feedback for the rest of the organisation to learn from. Pretty much everything that does and does not work across all customer journeys gets discussed over a call, a web chat, a Twitter session or messaging exchange.
What does the contact centre do with it? Mark it as a certain type of enquiry and move onto the next one! This is a criminal waste of insight that could be driving the rest of the organisation onwards and upwards. For this reason, contact centres need to give up on working harder and instead focus on working smarter. And they can do this by seeing themselves as an ongoing source of insight, to fuel a never ending cycle of improvement and innovation.
That is a much more useful role to play and therefore transforms contact centre bragging rights in terms of investment and influence.
How is it done?
Of course this does not happen by chance. In fact it is a whole lot more work. But not necessarily requiring a whole lot more resource. This kind of activity really can become a self-funded transformation as service demand reduces and customer journeys become optimised and better aligned with customer expectation.
The cycle of activity involved can be resourced entirely by the contact centre. However, it is more likely to be a shared activity with central teams which contribute change management or voice of the customer analytic skills.
Puzzel has written a white paper that provides a detailed description of how to set up this approach. Download a copy at Puzzel (UK) and take your contact centre on a new journey to greater value.
Colin Hay is VP sales at Puzzel (UK) formerly Intelecom
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About Puzzel
Puzzel builds on 20 years’ heritage. It was one of the first pioneers to develop a cloud-based contact centre. Puzzel also encompasses leading mobile messaging and mobile payments to deliver a flexible and customisable customer interaction platform to meet the needs of today’s omni-channel and mobile environments. Puzzel can be adapted to accommodate from one to several thousand agents using any device, in any location and integrates with multiple applications seamlessly.
Headquartered in Oslo, Norway, Puzzel employs over 130 people who are all passionate about delivering innovative customer interaction solutions for contact centres and mobile environments.
For more information please visit www.puzzel.com
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