Improving customer retention through the contact centre

Guy Tweedale says now is the time to eliminate desktop complexity and allow customer service representatives to focus on customers, not systems.

“Companies must rebuild their organisations and their contact centres around the customer”
-Guy Tweedale

As the green shoots of economic recovery are being reported - if not yet necessarily felt - still-battered companies are realising they need to change from survival mode, where cost-reduction is key, to growth mode. This means re-examining how they are should conduct business to reflect how their industries' cultural, operational and general market challenges have changed. To ensure sustainability, effective customer retention strategies - prioritising improvement of customer experience across all channels - are key.

Consumers, more market aware than ever before, have heightened expectations when it comes to customer service; they want to do business with companies where, when and how it suits them. They don't want to listen to hold music. And if they want to get an insurance quote or deal with a gas bill query at 11:00pm it should be an option. Particularly as many consumers are now making selections based on price and service. In order to provide a consistently positive customer experience, companies must rebuild their organisations and their contact centres around the customer. They need to become customer-centric. In order to accomplish this, companies will need to break some bad habits in the contact centre.

Effectiveness and efficiency

Operational issues in the contact centre plague many large organisations. For example, most companies are plagued with departmental silos and inefficiency. Although there is evidence that this is improving, the many old, monolithic systems companies are using - which they are hesitant to replace because of the value of the data on them - are slowing the pace of change. In addition, high agent churn rates in call centres result in significant training and recruitment expenses, and can negatively impact the customer experience. These challenges pale in comparison to the real issue, which is desktop complexity in the contact centre. With many companies having more than 20 applications and tools on the desktop (most of which were implemented to satisfy the needs of other departments), agents end up spending most of their time - and attention - navigating through dozens of non-integrated applications, rather than focusing on the customer.

Eliminating desktop complexity

No-one really wants to call a service provider or retailer. And, in many cases, customers are already frustrated and emotional before they call. They do not want to have to provide their account number eight times or to sit on hold listening to bad music or the agent explaining, "I'm so sorry, my computer is slow today, it'll just be another minute or two..." How can call centre agents focus on providing a quality customer experience when they are navigating through dozens of applications and screens?  A unified desktop solution will integrate all of those disparate applications and present one, easy-to-navigate desktop for the agent. All of the information the agent needs to complete the call easily, quickly and effectively is right there at their fingertips - at the right time - in context to the current conversation. Making agents much more efficient and effective.

The leading unified desktop solutions sit on top of current applications, so it is not necessary to tear out existing applications or infrastructure. Companies can keep their existing line-of-business applications such as CRM systems, policy systems, billing systems, and yet the agents will have all of the information they need, when and how they need it. Given the realities of today's business landscape, now is the time to focus on the customers' needs. A unified desktop solution is the quickest and most efficient way to improve customer retention while reducing your cost of operations. In other words, it's the insurance policy you need to keep your customers' business for years to come.

To find out more go to www.jacada.com.

Guy Tweedale is Senior Vice President of European Operations at Jacada. Tweedale's 20 years' experience of managing people, running businesses and interacting with customers gives him the knowledge and skills to lead Jacada's European team to provide customer-facing organisations with the tools to turn their customer service operations from a cost centre into a strategic, income-generating part of the business.