Call Center Management Featured Article
How Call Center Management Can Drive the Ritz-Carlton Experience
The Ritz-Carlton hotel chain has the ‘total customer experience’ concept down. So famous is the brand for its positioning of the customer experience that many a company has tried to follow suit and create a similar experience. For call center management, adopting a few of the hotel chain’s priorities may not be a bad idea.
The question that may pop up, however, is how do you take an experience in the hospitality industry to one where the customer may never set foot on a property, but instead buys a product or service? The answer is simple – it’s all about the mindset. You’re not worried about the comfort of the pillow or the temperature of the coffee in the lobby. You’re worried about how you make the customer feel when interacting with your brand.
In today’s contact center, customers are reaching out and making connections across a multitude of channels. If those channels are not connected and the customer experience is not designed to be seamless across all channels, there’s no effective way for call center management to create the Ritz-Carlton experience. And while complexity is certainly a challenge in today’s multi-channel environment, there are technologies available to make the seamless experience possible.
Those who are leading in the industry today are the companies that have made the real investment in the customer experience. They understand the same thing that drives the Ritz-Carlton – they know the customer experience is directly tied to their relevance in the industry. As such, they not only make the investments, they also adopt the priority in driving the overall experience.
Such companies also integrate across all channels, giving call center management the opportunity to deliver that seamless experience and the trained agents to make it happen. It’s not enough to say you can interact with customers via social media – you have to integrate that channel with all others and with your customer relationship management (CRM) solution. The customer who sends a request via Twitter (News - Alert) should receive a follow-up call, tweet or message from the contact center agent to preserve the experience and learn from the interaction.
While it’s important that call center management insist on the right way to support the customer base, it’s also imperative that the mindset is established from the top down. If the CEO and everyone below within the hierarchy of the organization doesn’t support the importance of the quality customer experience, it won’t be a priority. To truly make this part of the culture, everyone internally must live it. Only then can you create the Ritz-Carlton-like experience for all customers.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi