Call Center Management Featured Article
Customer Service Excellence Requires Two-Way Communication to Build a Sense of Community
Despite years of expensive efforts to improve the quality of customer support, the goal remains elusive for many companies. Programs to boost customer engagement – or at least lower complaints – are costing money and time and not yielding any real results. Too many companies believe that their efforts are making a difference: witness the discrepancy between the quality of customer support organizations think they are providing, and the opinions of their customers on the matter, which often differ to a comical degree.
The problem that many companies run into is failing to listen to their customers. They spend time and money making what they hope are improvements, but they don’t bother to check whether customers agree they are improvements. (Sometimes it seems like companies don’t want to know, in case they hear something they don’t like.) Customer service excellence requires continual customer polling for opinions and suggestions.
The most successful organizations on the customer front are those that build a customer community between their own organizations and customers. In a recent article for Madison Commons (Wisconsin), writer Susan DeVos describes a customer service initiative by the Madison Metro Transit System. While her comments apply to a public agency, the wisdom is appropriate for all customer-facing organizations.
“Less appreciated and sometimes even forgotten is the fact that a public agency is part of a community, needs to be in constant two-way communication with it, and needs to keep reminding the community and its own staff that it performs a vital function ‘by and for the people’,” she wrote.
Too many customer-facing workers, tired from “putting out fires” all day, come to think of customers as adversaries, or a necessary evil. Without efforts to build community between customers and employees, the relationship will become strained, adversarial and unpleasant. DeVos says the two-way communications rule applies to the Transit System, but it’s also an important lesson for all companies.
“Nor is it just a matter of providing information, as communication goes both ways,” she wrote. “Metro Transit needs to hear from its riders, and people like being asked to comment.”
Companies can poll customers and build a sense of community at the same time by (for example), presenting questions on social media vehicles such as Facebook (News - Alert). The more open-ended the questions, the more customers will open up about what they’re looking for. Short opinions can be elicited by Web site polls, automated IVR opinion gathering, text message (to customers who have agreed to receive them) or other channel. While it may involve some cost – not necessarily to gather opinions, but to take the time for contact center agents to read and digest the information – it will be worth it. Customers who feel their opinions are valued (and acted on, if there is a consensus of opinions from customers) will remain more loyal, more forgiving of mistakes and more likely to return.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi