New | How call centres open doors to positive customer experience

One of the most crucial customer contact points management should focus on is call centres. When customers deal with a contact-centre employee, it is because they have complex issues or the digital process has broken down. This means contact-centre employees are crucial to ensuring a positive customer experience.

As a consultant to financial services firms, my experience is that the contact centre has emerged as one of the most effective venues through which finance companies can deliver a positive customer experience.

To deliver such an experience, however, firms need to establish a new focus on a largely overlooked resource: the people in the contact centres who talk with customers on a day-to-day basis.

Contact-centre representatives or agents, who have historically been treated as a substitute for more expensive branch personnel, are now being asked to provide tremendous differentiation from the customer’s perspective. Their role – to humanise and establish a connection – is becoming more important in the digital era.

Increasingly, businesses are moving to a self-service and process automation model for routine inquiries and transactions (such as address changes), pushing growing responsibility to the customer. For most companies and customers, that is a good thing as it streamlines processes and makes things simpler.

However, that means that nowadays when customers deal with a contact-centre representative, they do so because their issues are too complex to resolve through automated or self-service options, or they may have found that the digital process has broken down and human intervention is called for. In other words, the customer is frustrated and has a problem. It is rarely routine.