Call Center Management Featured Article
Call Center Management Must Pay Attention to Stability in Age of Technology
Advancements in technology continue to play an integral part in how businesses are run today. Business leaders can streamline a great deal of activity when moving from manual processes to automated solutions or cloud-based technology. Call center management changed considerably when collaborative solutions went online, but not all activities change just because technology keeps moving forward.
For instance, how do you define what the customer experience should look like? Is it based on the technology solutions offered and best practices throughout the industry or on customer feedback gathered in the process of interacting? If you’re not designing the customer experience based on information gathered from your customers, you’re missing a key point in the experience.
A recent study by Forrester (News - Alert) suggests that executives shouldn’t be the ones who decide how customer-centric their companies are; customers make this determination. Sure, there’s new digital technologies added to the mix, customer data is added to Big Data and we strive to develop customer loyalty programs that actually deliver. All of these things have an impact on customer expectations, but call center management must have the mechanisms in place to capture the voice of the customer.
For instance, the fundamentals surrounding customer service haven’t changed, regardless of the technological investments made by call center management. Customers want to feel valued, they want to be recognized and they want to know that they are being heard. Organizations dominating in their space focus on the continuous evolution of their service offerings to ensure they are addressing the needs of their client base to drive brand loyalty and growth.
A SourceWire report from PR Artistry highlighted three trends that stood out in the Forrester report. First, customers will embrace emerging channels in an effort to reduce friction. They still want to easily and quickly resolve issues or find answers to questions and will take to the channels that deliver these interactions simply and painlessly.
At the same time, the agent experience has to be improved. This means customers want personalized service with cross-sell and upsell opportunities. That’s right – customers want to be sold to when it’s relevant and customized according to their preferences and user experiences. This puts more pressure on call center management to ensure efficiency in the use of new applications that meet this need without significantly hurting the bottom line or pricing products and services out of the market.
Finally, call center management is likely to adopt SaaS (News - Alert) solutions to ensure agility. Yes, there are certain elements of the customer experience that stay the same, but channels, market availability and other variables still change. Companies have to be nimble and leverage solutions that are agile enough to respond to demand. When this is done correctly, customers become loyal and internal processes are streamlined according to customer demand, keeping everyone happy.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi