Call Center Management Featured Article
Creating a 'Customer-Obsessed' Contact Center Starts on the Front Lines with Managers and Agents
What is it that sets mediocre customer support operations from great customer support operations? What is it that the companies at the top of the heap of customer service – think Zappos or LL Bean – do that the laggards (every cable company in the United States) seem incapable of? For starters, it’s the quality of people they hire. But there’s more to it than that. It’s about the attitude these top performers have when it comes to their customers. Support isn’t a “necessary evil,” it’s an opportunity.
In a recent blog post, Matt Knott of Salesforce calls the best companies in the support industry “customer obsessed.” These are organizations that don’t measure success in average handle time, or the number of calls handled per day. They measure success in how pleased their customers are with their support experiences. They’re also willing to go above and beyond for customers every day.
“Customer-obsessed call centers view transforming the customer experience as a movement – a way to motivate and inspire the front line to think and act differently,” wrote Knott. “It requires leadership to evoke an emotion, to influence and convince the front line of their unique position and role in improving the customer experience. The front line must see that leadership is prioritizing change. The more engagement seen by the front line at all levels of the organization, a greater sense of belief, trust and commitment to action will be demonstrated by the front line.”
Leadership, or call center management, is the make it or break it factor when it comes to support success. Harried managers who spend their days putting out fires rather than fireproofing for the future will never be able to create a customer-obsessed contact center culture. Companies who ensure their call center leaders have one job function – to lead – will be able to implement the kind of changes required in hiring, training and motivating necessary for success.
One of call center management’s biggest challenges is creating the kind of employees who want to succeed. To do this, companies need to stop expecting their agents act like robots. You have self-service channels that are automated. When customers call a human agent, they want a person who can problem-solve like a human. Overly rigid contact center rules can stifle this.
“The most successful call centers empower agents to be creative in their day-to-day customer interactions,” wrote Knott. “Enabling your agents flexibility in their customer service delivery, rather than forcing strict scripts, allows the front line to emotionally engage with the customer on a level that becomes personal to them.”
A set of clearly defined service or sales behaviors can be implemented that deepen the customer conversation and empower the front line to consistently connect with the customer. Rather than measuring agent success on the steps they took to please a customer, focus on the outcome itself – a pleased customer – rather than the details about how the agent got there.
Front-line behavior in the contact center will dictate what kind of experience customers consistently have. Great customer experiences are not made in the boardroom, the executive suite or the marketing department. They are made in the daily actions of agents, who need to be supervised by customer-obsessed managers. Only then can a company create the kind of dynamics that produce happy customers, every time.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi