Your Call Center: An Agent of Change for Your Company

By Barbara Burke

There is one really good reason to institute process change in your call center, to develop customer service delivery processes that are proactive rather than reactive -survival. Now that companies like Southwest have raised the bar when it comes to customer service, your customers have higher expectations about what will happen when they pick up the phone. If you are unable to meet those expectations, you face the very real possibility of heading down the path to oblivion all too familiar to many Southwest competitors.

A Single Point of Contact

One demand customers are making loud and clear is that you create a single point of customer contact; a one-stop shop where they can have as many of their needs as possible met. The need to satisfy that demand is both a challenge and an opportunity. Obviously, it means you must feed into your call center all of your customer voice and data channels so your agents will have all the information they need to give customers the help they need. But once you meet the technical challenges inherent in modern call centers, you have an amazing opportunity to transform your center-and eventually your whole organization-into a smooth- running, solutions-oriented customer relation's machine.

When your agents are practicing solutions-oriented customer relations they are, almost automatically, fattening your bottom line. Here's why: When customers call your center they want you to go beyond your agent handling their concern in a friendly and efficient manner. They want your agents to tell them what they don't know. That means offering solutions that will prevent the issue from re-occurring or suggesting products or services that will add value. What results is superior customer experience; the key to retaining customers over the long term.

And here's the good news: Customers appreciate your additional effort to provide solutions in the form of products and services. In the utilities industry, for example, customers who purchase more than just basic electric service are consistently happier with their service. The conclusion here is simple; if you empower your agents not only to solve customer issues, but also to offer your full range of services, you will increase your sales and have more satisfied, loyal customers. The cycle of selling success will continue.

Turning the Power on in Your Center

As we said above, your agents must have access to all available customer data and be given the green light to match the right solution to the customer's problem. Ideally, once the customer accepts the recommendation, the agent should complete the sale as part of the call. If the product is too complex for a one call close, agents can generate leads for future follow up by an expert. This requires immediate follow up and a seamless hand off that can be aided by technology.

There are a number of ways to empower your agents to practice solutions-oriented customer service:

• Give your agents the space they need to create real relationships with your customers. That means placing less emphasis on reducing talk time and more on relationship building and problem-solving. Emphasizing quality over quantity requires monitoring and coaching to support the more subjective performance standards.

• Understand that customer service representatives work best in a team environment. Front line service representatives are, by the very nature of their work, team players that thrive in a collaborative, cooperative setting. Your goal should be to constantly emphasize and bolster the success of your agents as a team.

• Ensure that management plays an active, visible role in reinforcing the value of customer relationships. This sends a strong message that the organization-at it’s highest levels-values and supports its "front line."

• Consider bringing in an expert from the outside to assess your call center's level of function and train your agents in solutions-oriented service delivery. An outside party offers the advantage of shortening the inevitable learning curve and preventing costly mistakes and missteps. Outside experts also are in the best position to deliver to management the sometimes- unpalatable news that new expenditures are necessary to boost call center effectiveness.

• Empower your agents to work with staff in other areas of the company to find customer solutions. If an agent is trying to solve a billing problem and bumps up against resistance from the billing department, you risk canceling all the good work he's done to that point.

Currents of Change through the Organization

That last point brings us full circle to the premise that solutions-oriented service in the call center can change the way your entire organization operates. Your call center straddles all the different areas of your company-offering a tremendous opportunity for change. As your center successfully implements solutions-oriented customer service, increasing both sales and customer satisfaction, that success is certain to prompt change in every department the center touches-and, as we said above, that's just about every department. Soon, everyone in your organization will be selling complete customer solutions, not just solving isolated problems in his particular area.

Placing your call center at the core of your company-with the ability to reach out and affect other departments-carries an added, often overlooked benefit. It lets your whole organization take advantage of the fact that the professionals in your call center are the new knowledge workers. Thanks to modern CRM technology, they have access to all the data your company needs to build accurate customer demographics and create just the right services for your customers. And that's when you become a truly solutions-oriented organization.

Next Article