The old adage of:- ‘if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen’ makes you feel that the rules of the kitchen are expanding into the contact centre space – and maybe they should.
Paul Cooper, Director at the ICS talked about customer trends, stating that customers will always vote with their feet if they are unhappy and the barriers to moving to a new supplier are not too painful. As barriers to switching suppliers in some industries have dropped to nothing more than a mouse click away (utilities comes to mind), it doesn’t take a lot of dissatisfaction for the switch to occur.
Paul went on to explain that it is a simple case of ‘supply and demand’; customers have a greater sense of importance and power because the market as a whole is chasing them with competitive offers of products, services and delivery routes. In short, customer expectations have risen and tolerance has decreased. This trend coupled with operational challenges such as severe skills-shortage and the inability to find key customer information when requested, have to be addressed if suppliers are not to be left behind.
Attention was focused on research showing that those organisations that have a great reputation for service; were able to show that they had a ‘service culture’, committed staff and were easy to do business with. All of which comes down to focusing on employees and the development of service excellence. |
