Few areas of business operation have been called into greater question in recent years than customer contact centers. Between impersonal automated systems, frustrating menus, and the hot potato topic of overseas outsourcing, the operational model of the customer service contact center has lost touch with its core reason for being – to service the customer.
Not only have customers lost faith in this service, companies also seem at a loss as to how best to improve the experience. It is an industry that has relied on technology that is now perceived as overly commoditized and rather mundane. For most solutions providers, the emphasis seems to continue to focus on helping organizations make contact rather than assisting them in how to resolve issues.
More Premise Than Promise
When the technology revolution of the ‘90s helped transform call centers into contact centers, the idea was straightforward enough: give customers the flexibility to decide how they wished to make contact – in those days, primarily by phone, but also Web or email to some degree – and empower representatives with converged technology to retrieve account histories with one click. But the premise rarely kept its promise. Complexity and incompatibility hindered effectiveness and efficiency.
As the distance between customer expectation and contact experience widened, customers grew more annoyed. Add the occasional denial to customer requests due to standard company policy, and the results were customers who were, at best, disappointed and, at worst, highly annoyed. “Great product; lousy service” – a verdict customers would freely spread across very public forums, was commonplace. Which brings us to today... Read More
