05/10/09
Delight your customers and you'll retain them, says Sandra Busby, managing director of the Welsh Contact Centre Forum
This week it's National Customer Service Week (October 5 to 11), and therefore it's the perfect opportunity for organisations throughout the UK to consider how they treat their customers and ask themselves whether they really do wow them.
In the current recession, everyone is watching their pennies, and people are definitely not going to remain faithful to a company if they're not delivered impeccable customer service. As a major hotspot for contact centres, south Wales, which employs nearly 30,000 people, is very much at the front line of customer service in the UK and the quest by companies to find that key competitive edge.
Customer service through contact centres is one of the most visible and significant aspects of a company's product offering. If customers aren't treated with the utmost respect on the phone, they will vote with their feet, regardless of the physical quality of the product.
At the employer-led Welsh Contact Centre Forum, we have recognised this, and as such are continually developing new initiatives to improve the way contact centre operatives deal with clients over the telephone or online.
The Forum has identified that one of the key issues facing contact centres is staff retention. Before the recession, staff turnover in some centres was relatively high and as such some centres lacked the skills and expertise that long-serving members of staff bring to a company. Due to the downturn, few people are leaving their jobs, but that may change when the recovery comes. So we have devised a ‘retention round table', which will highlight to companies who had retention problems prior to the recession that they are likely to face them again unless they change their attitude towards people now. The initiative will look at why people leave contact centres and what we can do as an industry to encourage them to stay.
We're also about to introduce a team leader initiative, a grassroots scheme designed to motivate and mentor contact centre operatives on a daily basis. Like everyone else, contact centre operatives occasionally have bad days, but it is essential that customers who happen to speak to that operative during his or her ‘bad day' do not pick up on this. We also appreciate that customers can be difficult and demanding at times, but we want to help operatives understand that it is their job to rise to this challenge and to have intelligent conversations with those customers, treating them with the respect that is necessary to ensure that the customer keeps coming back to the company time and time again.
It does appear that Wales, where the contact centre pumps £400m to the Welsh economy a year through the hard work of 28,000 people in 160 companies, is streets ahead in terms customer service delivery. For example, Cardiff-based British Gas was declared overall winner at the recent European Call Centre Awards, and HMS Prison Services in Newport and Bridgend contact centre Logica were also nominated across a number of categories.
Businesses and organisations in Wales would do well to remember the vital role that customer service plays during this awareness week, particularly with the recession in mind. Customers aren't going to stick around if they're not treated well and spoken to with the utmost respect, so companies should really take the time to consider how they can add value to their existing customer service delivery. I'm not totally convinced by the old adage "the customer is always right", but I do think Mahatma Gandhi summed it up beautifully when he said: "A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work - he is the purpose of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us the opportunity to serve him."
