3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

For years, the contact center has been considered a necessary evil. No one wants to build and staff a contact center – it’s expensive and time-consuming. Yet, since customers expect support, there is no way to avoid it.

Still, this “necessary evil” mindset remains, and many organizations, either consciously or unconsciously, tend to “punish” the contact center for its very existence. According to Jordy Leiser, cofounder and CEO of StellaService, writing for the Next Web, this attitude is short-changing customers greatly.

“It’s easy to fall back on old notions of customer service as a necessary evil that should be executed with as little overhead and only when necessary, especially for young companies just starting out,” writes Leiser. “There are a thousand other things you could be focusing on and it’s tempting to cut customer service from your essential to-do list.”

What many companies don’t remember is that, today, their customers are more demanding than ever, have zero tolerance for delay in having their issues resolved, and are extremely quick to go to a competitor if they don’t get what they want.

To build an effective customer support culture, the entire company must be on board. Leiser cites examples of companies that have built excellent customer service into their very corporate identifies, nothing that in some organizations, notably Apple (News - Alert), Amazon and J. Crew, the CEOs themselves (including the late Steve Jobs) would often attend to customer service issues personally.

While nobody expects the CEO to sit around answering customer e-mails, it’s critical that companies put an effective support structure in place that encompasses all departments but is ultimately engineered in the contact center.

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There are some things companies can do to build a more robust customer support infrastructure and ensure nothing falls through the cracks. These include:

1. Having the right technology. It’s easy to dismiss solutions such as analytics, up-to-date workforce optimization or call monitoring as unaffordable when you’ve been limping along with patchwork processes for years. Understand that these are no longer sufficient. Customers expect you to be proactive today and have an idea of why they’re calling even before they call.
2. Focusing on customers. Too many contact centers build out their infrastructure to suit the business, not the customers. The purpose of the contact center is to support the customers and create customer delight and engagement. If a new process or solution doesn’t accomplish this, it’s likely a waste of capital or operating expenses.
3. Monitor the quality of your customer service. This means putting advanced call recording solutions in place, together with a robust analytics system that can extract, interpret and share intelligence from raw contact center data.
4. Bring in professionals. If your customer service still isn’t up to par, you need to know why. Organizations such as BPA Quality sample recorded or live calls and measure the customer interaction based on either the client’s standards, or standards developed by BPA Quality.   These observations are produced as actionable scoring and feedback to agents and supervisors: – feedback that the contact center can use to positively affect the performance of the agents on the front lines of the call center. 

Focusing on quality and customer-facing processes helps a company build a workforce of fully engaged employees who are ready and properly trained to help their employer meet its goals. More importantly, by ensuring that contact center processes are as transparent as possible, companies can avoid the unpleasant surprises they might find in the future.