Page 154 - DMGT308_CUSTOMER_RELATIONSHIP_MANAGEMENT

Unit 6: Technology for Customer Relations

 Frequent shuffling of customers from agent to agent Notes
 Customers often left on hold for extended periods of time
 Customer issues that frequently require multiple contacts before they are resolved
 Low employee morale and high turnover

 No way to measure customer satisfaction—or, if there is, scores are low
 A poor understanding of metrics or performance
 Harried staff running from crisis to crisis, putting out fires but not getting ahead

 A lack of improvement in working conditions
 The wider corporation grumbles about the contact centre, complains about costs, and
questions the results; some talk about outsourcing
Fortunately, as ugly as the symptoms of a bad contact centre are, they can be solved. It takes
determination and perhaps a complete “rethinking” of your organization, but solutions do
exist. This book provides a few strategies, tools, and skills to help you control what your contact
centre produces.
As with any business, a competent and productive contact centre is the result of well-planned
objectives and conscientious alignment—management needs to align practices so that they are
consistent with objectives. When this is done effectively, the contact centre will have many
characteristics of the good, few if any of the bad, and none of the ugly. A well-run contact centre
is not an accident. It’s a result of good planning and good execution by good people.

!
Caution Not all contact centres operate in ways beneficial to either themselves or the
organization as a whole. These are some things you’d expect to see in a contact centre that
isn’t working properly. Long delays for customers to get through to “the next available
agent”

6.1.2 Future Prospects

As technology and management practices improve, so will the sophistication, capability, and
service of contact centres. If it has not happened already, your contact centre will likely continue
to evolve, integrating all methods of communication into one quick and seamless channel,
regardless of what language or device your customers are using.
One of the fascinating things about contact centres is their never-ending pursuit of improvement.
Effective managers are constantly looking for better technology, better processes, better people,
and better training for those people. It’s all part of the original charter for contact centres: to find
more effective ways of communicating with customers so the company can serve customers
better and cheaper, while generating more revenue.
Accordingly, I look for contact centre services to become more customized to the needs of
individual customers. There will be technological advancements, perhaps some “ohhs and ahhs”
in what contact centres can do with automation. But the end result will be that more contact
centres will provide better service. Great one-on-one service will become the minimum
expectation for doing business, regardless of the medium.

Fortunately contact centres aren’t alone in their quest to better service their customers. Leading
vendors, such as Avaya, continue to provide groundbreaking technology specifically tailored to
the needs of a modern contact centre. Such companies stand ready to partner with organizations

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