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Call Center Solutions Featured Article
December 16, 2008
The Best Gifts: Attractive, Quality Products and Solutions
By Brendan B. Read, Senior Contributing Editor
There are two affordable, feasible, and sensible solutions that contact centers, and their sponsoring enterprises can deploy to cut costs, improve performance, and retain customers. These are: (1) ensuring that their products and services are attractive, priced right, and problem-free and (2) that they buy and deploy correctly the right products and services for the money for their contact centers.
The first solution is covered today. The second one will appear Thursday. Together they represent the best gifts organizations can bestow on their operations, people, customers, and ultimately themselves.
The case for ensuring quality, attractively priced products and services
In tight economic times one of the first functions too many enterprises target for expense reduction is customer service because it seemingly is a cost rather than a source of revenue. Yet if they paid greater attention to the product and service quality they could shrink costs because they would not get the high call volumes and keep and even grow more of their customers and sales.
Contact centers at best can provide information and help to fix problems and deliver an empathetic face to corporations, yet they cannot correct the flaws and make up for the poor impressions that generated the contacts in the first place or prompt customers to go elsewhere. Nor can contact centers significantly change pricing or delivery, which in most cases is out of control; at best they can offer discounts or a 10 percent off the next time they buy.
Stuck in between are frustrated contact center agents who get screamed sometimes cursed at by angry buyers who would rarely behave so outrageously in public. This creates added stress that too often drives these employees into another line of work and drives up turnover and costs.
Corporations need to get centered on quality, not to give it lip service. To make this happen contact centers need to step out of their cubicles to approach the other departments, or their clients, and engage in an open two-way dialogue on this subject. There also needs to be ‘circuit-breakers’ such as keyword spotting in speech analytics and specialized screens to detect and report new and repeated issues such as defects and pricing issues directly to senior management.
In fairness all too many of the calls that come in are as a result of customer incompetence i.e. not reading the ‘friendly’ manual before flipping the switch. Even here steps can be taken by other departments to minimize calls, like rewriting manuals and promising more in the hype that can be delivered, like ‘plug-and-play’ for complicated devices.
Working together to make and deliver the best goods and services for the money may not by itself significantly stave off losses or prevent cutbacks. Even top firms noted for quality right-priced goods like Toyota are also suffering in today’s economic climate. Yet it is the most productive and positive strategy there is to minimize costs and hold on and keep buyers, and to be in the best position possible to grow when sunshine returns to the economy.
Brendan B. Read is TMCnet’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi
