Call Center Management Featured Article
Contact Centers Must Strike Balance Between Customer Ease and Data Security
There is a school of thought today that success in customer support depends largely on how easy companies make it for customers to resolve their issues, do account maintenance and get answers to their questions. There is a lot of truth to this: customers often cite ease of interacting with a company as a number one reason for remaining a customer.
It makes a lot of sense. Customers value their time, and they value any company that demonstrates that it’s mindful of a customer’s time. Easy, single, log-ins that cross channels, mobile apps, fast self-service tools and quick live service all win fans among customers. A constant need to repeat customer account numbers and passwords on live calls and the need to log-in multiple times on a Web site do not win customer fans. This becomes a real problem, however, when you consider data security.
Many companies have seen data breaches in recent years, and the press that results from these breaches is not positive or helpful. (Witness Target’s (News - Alert) continued struggling in the aftermath of its giant data breach.) Companies today are finding themselves in the middle of a balancing act between customer ease and data security, according to a recent article by Bruce Belfiore and Tony Grimshaw for Benchmark Portal.
“Customer-centric managers want to facilitate easy, effortless customer access to information, while security experts seek to keep information safe,” they write. “It takes an ‘eyes-open’ culture to balance the objectives of both sides. Unfortunately, many companies today do not have the culture or processes that support the appropriate use of defensive technologies, while at the same time facilitating the conduct of business with customers.”
Belfiore and Grimshaw recommend solving the problem by starting at the top, with executive buy-in to a solution, and forming a taskforce that involves all stakeholders and eliminates compartmentalization. It’s particularly critical that contact center managers be involved in the process: they are the ones who understand what customers want, and leaving it to an IT department could wind up producing a system that throws up barriers for customers. IT people, after all, see the goal as maximum security and may not have customer needs in mind at all.
“As contact center managers, you need to articulate your business requirements in a clear and documentable way,” write Belfiore and Grimshaw. “Describing your needs will also force you to clarify ideas and make the case for what you want. In the absence of compelling context, your security colleagues will generally react in a black and white, conservative way, (e.g., they may overcompensate on the controls they require), which can derail your projects. In the end, a mutually agreed upon approach may be found, but the conversations and the project will be longer than needed.”
The result solution should be well-documented, have broad, cross-departmental buy-in and have a notification and follow-up process that is effective but not too cumbersome. Once a strategy has been determined, organizations can seek out contact center vendors that offer the right combination of customer ease and security. (It’s important to include IT staff in the purchases of contact center solutions for this reason.)
With a little cooperation, a solution can be found that makes everybody happy, including customers.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi