Steps to Satisfaction: The Customer and the Call Centre

When attempting to obtain an objective appraisal of the way any area of your business functions, it can be difficult to ensure that the information you receive can be interpreted, worked upon, can lead to practical change. In gauging and optimizing call centre performance this can be notoriously difficult for a number of reasons, which we shall duly explore.  Research from the Harvard Business Institute (Frei, Everson, Hawker: 2000) has previously shown the varying factors that lead to the incredibly changeable customer appraisal of a call centre, and what measures can be taken to remedying problems within the system.

The research was telling in the extent of the impression customers took from call centre activity: in interviewing customers on their satisfaction with financial service call centres, it soon became apparent that not only was the opinion gained from the call centre decisive, but that there was a direct correlation between customer and CSR contentment, for reasons extrapolated below.

Though of course not all call centres are anything like the same, the research found that in most cases the CSR is on the back foot and is being assessed in more criteria than is probably assumed by the team leader or method of staff performance monitoring. An instance would be the amount of transfers required for the completion of a satisfactory call: where managerial outlook might often be that transfer means a customer being put through to a specialist (special treatment), it was found that dropped call rates and turnover were both affected by the ability of the CSR to intuitively cater to the customer’s needs at first contact.

It was found here also that automated systems were experiencing a clear lack of realism in the conception they betrayed of the customer as an individual. Labyrinthine touch-tone webs and excessive voice response units, though often imagined to be streamlining customer complaint or request, were ultimately detrimental unless they had been clearly designed with a full working knowledge of both the customers’ needs and the time needed to solve frequently encountered customer complaints or requests.

As mentioned earlier, the measurement of tenure of CSRs per year as to the satisfaction of both customers and ‘empowered employees’ given proper training has great implications for the perception of customer service overall, where cost is also a major factor. Perhaps apart from the case of comprehensive business process outsourcing (from Vertex) of call centres where these costs are negotiated beforehand, the research from HSB shows that narrowing the generalist/specialist gap through training is vital to the maintenance of customer satisfaction and generating return customers.