Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

Some of the CFI Group report's findings are less than incendiary: customers who ring off without having their issues adequately satisfied wind up, um, unsatisfied; the contact center often represents the public image of a particular company; paying attention to what customers actually say and think, rather than steamrolling on to the next call, is a sound practice (and one that I seem to have heard about somewhere before).

But one area that jumps out of the CFI Group study is its breaking out of eight individual industries. The "Hotels" category makes its debut with an impressive 78 score, followed closely by "Retail" (at 76, down from 2007's 80); "Insurance" (75, up from 68); "Cell Phone Service" (72, up from 69); "Commercial" (72, up from 70); and "Personal Computers" (69, up from 64). "Cable/Satellite TV" -- surely, everyone's favorite center to contact -- actually remains fairly flat, with this year's score of 66 not that far off from last year's 68.

Where things get really interesting, though, is in the final category, "Banks," which falls from 77 last year to 71 this year. That's certainly reflective of the running theme at last week's Forrester Financial Services Forum,
where a running theme was how customer care seems to be an afterthought at best with most financial firms. Any time you sit through not one, but two, seminars on how to create a compelling website -- "Keep it simple!" "Don't use too much text!" -- you know you're dealing with people who just don't get it ... and haven't, since about 1995.

At any rate, all this contact center talk has left me wondering if our readers have experienced a noticeable uptick or downtick in their own contact center relations. Please enter your responses below, and one of our attendants will be with you shortly ...