Monday, July 26, 2004 Antonio: Call center customers, employees By Kiko Antonio Night manager
HELP FOR CLIENTS. Once viewed simply as low-cost channels for resolving customer concerns, call centers are increasingly seen as powerful service delivery mechanisms and even as generators of revenue.
When a company manages its call center well, effectively linking a triad of service, information technology and internal processes, both the customer and the company can triumph.
But before being able to generate revenue through the call center, institutions have to fully understand and be able to implement superior customer service.
Each service interaction forms the basis of a consumer’s perceptions of the overall quality of an organization. How well a business is able to manage and implement the service delivery process has a direct effect on retention of existing clients, and can have a significant impact on acquiring new business.
The result is that satisfaction is based on how well an institution meets and exceeds a customer’s expectations in every interaction.
Successful service delivery is vital for retaining customers and increasing sales. Although most call center managers would agree with this statement wholeheartedly, it sometimes proves difficult to justify additional investment into an entity that is typically thought of as a cost center.
QUITTING. An organization that cares about its customers also cares about its employees, and vice-versa. For example, when a company encourages and expects its customer service representatives to handle the majority of calls on their own, without transferring queries further down the line, it is evidence that the company places equal focus on its representatives (so-called “employee empowerment”) as it does on its clients.
When quitting, an employee is more likely to cite work environment over compensation issues. However, that is not to say that good call centers have the luxury of offering lower salaries and still expecting employees to stay.
Turnover at call centers can be affected by a number of other factors too. For example, turnover is lower when employees have been promoted from within the ranks of the company.
Similarly, employees who are not given responsibility for a wide range of queries were found to be more likely to leave. This seems to indicate people’s preference for having more responsibility in the work place, and feeling capable of dealing with a broad range of issues.
(email: kiko_antonio@yahoo.com.)
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