Contact Centre Leadership #1: Value our people – improve our service
Consider this – which part of your business has the MOST contact with your customers?
The contact centre, of course! Imagine the numbers – across Australia – millions of daily voice and digital interactions, involving call centre staff at the front line of customer service.
How do we value the work they do? Are boards and management listening?
We note this week that Commonwealth Bank is keen to hear what customers are saying. CEO Matt Comyn announced “above all we have to keep listening”. Especially after the Hayne Royal Commission. Comyn has launched an initiative to hold a forum in early November, to get feedback from 400 retail and business customers.
At Citrus Group, we believe feedback from staff in contact centres is one way that senior management can discover very valuable insights about products and services and customer pain or satisfaction.
By placing higher value on insights from our contact centre staff, do we better serve our customers?
We spoke to industry leader Darren Sutton, of HealthShare NSW, who pinpoints 2 things about refining service delivery:
- Learn from your organisation – listen to your people, they have more valuable insights about how to improve what you do than the average consultant does.
- Learn from your organisation’s customers – customers will tell you what they expect, but are you listening?
Put simply, your contact centre people and your customers are two critical sources of information that that can feed your service strategy.
Your people are at the front line of service. They can tell you what customers care about. They hear the pain points, they identify problems and, if enabled, can be in a position to solve them. Call centre personnel collect some of the most current, relevant insights into the business.
How to support and value good people in our contact centres:
- Great contact centre staff know the customer, know who they are, know what they’re after, and go out of their way to find a solution as soon as quickly as possible.
- Customer service is an emotional transaction. Customers are time poor, want resolutions and most of all, confidence. Give them people who understand this and who want to provide it.
- Eliminate complexity – many barriers create anxiety in customers. Once they get through, their frustration can burst down the phone line to your staff. Reduce the effort your customers have to make, to grow your advocacy and reputation.
- Some technology may please some customers some of the time. Technology has its role in our industry, but human customers expect human service – your people make the difference.
- Expand staff capabilities. Give them variety to build skills in a constant learning environment – they’ll thank you for it.
- If you build the call centre strategy around the worst-case scenarios – that is likely what you’ll get.
- Accentuate the positive – the contact centre is a recruitment incubator. Your people at the front line of customer service become experts about the whole business and its services. It is an incubator for people embarking on a career in customer service. Plan for it so it works in your, and their, favour.
Let’s look ahead to opportunities in 2020 and beyond, for our contact centre people to play a bigger role at the front end of customer service.
————————————————————————————————————————————–
With thanks to: Darren Sutton – HealthShare NSW, Associate Director – Customer Service
Ph: +61 2 8203 5760