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Don't Get Caught on the Tail End of Service
Most contact center professionals know and understand that customer satisfaction and customer engagement are critical components of effective customer service. And the way to improve upon them is to continuously anticipate and accommodate customers’ needs.
But if a company’s communications channel is not integrated with the rest of the organization, then customer loyalty is at risk. Without integration, companies cannot deliver an experience to the customer that is tailored and one that they’ve come to expect.
I’m currently attending Frost & Sullivan’s Customer Contact West in Huntington Beach, CA, and have realized, after speaking to a number of contact center executives, that cross-channel integration is a common challenge among many companies across a variety of industries. Challenges are ubiquitous: from unsuccessfully disseminating information and not achieving a holistic view of the customer, to not obtaining cooperation in the culture and having the inability to optimize customer information from outside the organization.
Some executives (from well-known corporations) told me that their enterprises still operated in silos; others said that executives didn’t want to make the investment to integrate the technologies and process; and others added that their organizations were in dire need of someone in a position to champion and own the customer strategy, such as a chief customer officer.
Despite all our progress in delivering effective customer care, we’re still in the initial stages of the customer service evolution. Customer engagement is more rapidly becoming the key differentiator in today’s fast-paced business climate. If your communications channels aren’t integrated, than you aren’t providing the level of service to your customers that they deserve and anticipate. If you don’t pick up the pace, eventually your competition will.
The challenge is (presumably) not the willingness to get in synch as a mission statement, but getting the silos to understand that they are not in synch to start with.
I suspect that organisations can grow to become truly unmanageable, although individual managers are highly motivated to ensure that their own silo is managed well.
Interestingly it is they who are following their own wild goose! I am (almost) an amused spectator. They do seem to have reneged on their promise to call me, however. I wonder if they have stopped chasing the geese!
Tim,
It sounds like BT sent you on a wild goose chase. But it doesn't have to be that way. If BT gets its enterprise (people, process, and technology)in synch, experiences like yours shouldn't happen.
I am currently experiencing massive internal silos. BT used to be the monopoly telecoms supplier in the UK and it still owns the vast majority of the infrastructure. I had a simple problem to solve - a faceplate needed to be changed on the master inbound socket to my home.
While you would think this could have been mailed to me, that was not to be. One department told me to contact another department, who told me to contact the first department. A saga, nay an odyssey, ensued. Eventually the golden fleece of a new faceplate was obtained. It was fitted on Monday by a very nice engineer in about 3 minutes.
That saga cost BT about £1,000 in staff time. Yes, it took that long!
I met a very large number of extremely helpful and totally incapable people in offshore call centres and repeated the problem a substantial number of times. The whole story is on my blog, linked by my name!
Somewhere along the line, deep in a simultaneous email trail, one incapable, incompetent and yet extremely helpful offshored email centre person suggested I lodge a complaint and gave me the url to do so.
I did so.
I think that was my real error. The email correspondence with the complaint desk told me I was through to the incorrect complaint desk, and that I should now submit my complaint to a BT email address that bounced as "unknown address".
The dangers of offshoring to people who speak accent with a trace of English suddenly became startlingly apparent. When the email agent (I later learnt that is what they are called by the outsourcer) saw that the email had bounced he told me how pleased he was to have been so helpful, and that I was now sure to be handled by the right person.
I almost said a rude word!
Not only do they have silos, but silos that can't do the job!
And last night, after an email exchange 40 emails long (I am either very patient or I am Don Quixote), an alleged manager called me to tell me that i was speaking to the wrong department and "must call...."
Customer service has no "must" for the customer. It has "I see the problem. I will make sure that you are connected correctly."
Well, good customer service does, at least!
Eventually this happy individual got "the man who can help you" on the line. Regrettably he had not passed any information to "the man who could help me", and this man refused to contact the man who had put us in contact to get the information in order to help me.
The whole thing is high farce. I would walk away. I walked away a few years ago, but circumstances forced me back into the arms of BT. And, to be fair to them, when you get through to a person who owns the problem they do a superb job.
The challenge is that they only seem to employ three of them!
So they exhibit silos, made worse by separate, probably geographically separate, offshore, outsourced, non native English speaking call and email handling centres that have no obvious mechanism of either talking to each other or escalating the issue correctly and seamlessly.
It will take quite some champion to put that right!
I could apply, I suppose, but the authority for their National Sales Prevention Team must come form so high up that no-one would be allowed to be employed.