Your Call Is Important to Us...
Everyone has a bad call center story. It's as American as baseball and apple pie. In general, it's an industry where competence could be seen as a competitive differentiator. Companies are working to change their efficiency focus to more reflect the call center's impact on the customer relationship, but unfortunately the industry overall still has a long way to go.
Today's lead 1to1 Weekly story gives results of a 10-year study on call centers. And it doesn't give a very good grade to call centers in general. Call abandon rates, due to long hold times, increased during the 10-year period by nearly 127 percent, while the average time to answer a call rose by some 70 percent, from 23 to 39 seconds.
Martha Rogers, Ph.D. says in the article that a short-term efficiency goal is most likely the heart of the problem:
"Using the call center as a quick way to make your quarterly numbers is a stupid thing to do," she says. "Focusing on first-call resolution rather than on length of call increases customer satisfaction scores enormously."
It's not all bad, however. She cites companies like FedEx and Costco that do a good job of keeping customer strategy at the heart of every interaction, whether in-person, on the phone, or online. And as self-service options grow, customers have more avenues to solve their problem.
What do you think? Do you agree that service is on the decline at contact centers? And if you operate a call center, how is the strategy changing to reflect the changing times?
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