Contact Centres get Personal

Kim Robertson, Management Consultant at BT Ireland, tackles the issue of increasing Customer satisfaction in the face of declining contact centre budgets...

How do we in this current environment of saving money, ensure that we can cater for the varied demands of the new Generations X and Y who require "digital conversations" with the contact centre while still trying to improve customer satisfaction levels ? Can it be achieved by just trying to change the customer conversation? Hanging on a line waiting to speak to a customer service representative is no longer acceptable and the worst type of interaction between a company and its customer.  There is now a need to be more dynamic and personal and there is no point offering a service if there isn't anybody to take the call or webchat promptly and deal with the issues. We are seeing innovation in the contact centre that has already helped large corporates personalise their customer-facing services and use it as a way to differentiate. Banks and airlines have been early adopters but it's an approach that more companies will embrace because the benefits are too big to ignore. Now it's about leveraging multiple communication channels and making the contact centre part of a digital conversation. Customers will use whatever they want wherever they happen to be, and they expect to start each conversation where the last one finished off, regardless of the different channels. The contact centre has to start where they finished the last conversation and make it personal to the customer.

Can we say that the traditional contact centre is dead and along with it the traditional IVR?

Agents are now armed with headsets and laptops and the ability to communicate in different languages across the channels juggling different channels simultaneously working from anywhere. We would love to get the views of other Contact Centres who have tackled this conundrum - Add a comment below to share your experience. Register to attend the upcoming CCMA Ireland event on 26th September kindly sponsored by BT and listen to Kim's presentation on this topic. This blog post was contributed by Kim Robertson, Management Consultant, BT Ireland - Learn more about Kim Image kindly repoduced from activegarage.com