TMCnews Featured Article
August 29, 2011
Leverage Performance Management and Coaching to Turn the Voice of the Customer into Actionable Data
By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor
Frontline staff – they are the ones creating the experience for your customer base. Is that experience one that will encourage your customers to return and purchase from you again? Will they instead tell their friends to patronize your organization? Whether you leverage call center outsourcing or you support your agents in-house, you have to focus on the experience that you are creating for a vast customer base through performance management and coaching.
A recent Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) white paper focused on the importance of agent motivation and performance management and coaching, highlighting that the contact center often acts as the primary interface point for the customer. If you can effectively capture and analyze the voice of the customer through your agent interactions, you’ll gain valuable insight and better understand the needs of your customer base.
The focus on performance management and coaching is essential simply because customer interaction is a significant service channel in the contact center. Agents play a vital role in the delivery of high-quality service experience to meet the needs of today’s sophisticated customer. To achieve that level, you have to practice effective performance management and coaching. Fortunately, there are a number of solutions available to streamline that process.
Performance management and coaching has proven an effective way to improve agent efficiency in the contact center, yet optimizing customer service is also gaining priority placement. Back office problems or underlying challenges to processes can impact the delivery of service, even when you have the right performance management and coaching in place. As contact centers are increasingly becoming profit centers, performance parameters have to change.
Call recordings that capture customer-agent interactions can provide a wealth of information on customer likes and dislikes. This information is often used to understand customer experiences that also allow contact center managers to more effectively take action to improve performance. With the right performance management and coaching in place, performance can be improved at the contact center and enterprise levels.
Analytical solutions that leverage performance management and coaching have been used by enterprises to successfully extract customer intelligence. This allows the company to gain a better understanding of the customer experience and take the necessary action to improve performance. When you focus on the voice of the customer in this analysis, you can determine why customers are buying, why they are canceling a service or why specific marketing campaigns prove to be more effective than others.
When you incorporate performance management and coaching into the customer service optimization cycle and make it a priority throughout the enterprise, the overall customer experience is optimized.
Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2011, taking place Sept. 13-15, 2011, in Austin, Texas. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register, click here.
Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Jamie Epstein
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