Developing a Customer-Centric Center

In a competitive market, the ability of a company to be customer-centric and develop strong relationships with its customers through its customer service channels becomes a prime differentiator that favors success. It is therefore essential that companies wishing to stay competitive and gain customer loyalty must stay focused on the customer. Being customer-centric begins at the highest levels of management and is often exemplified through its mission statement and executive actions.

Here is a list of 10 Best Practices that foster a customer-centric call center:

1. Mission statement – review the mission statements for your organization and your call center to assure that they clearly define an interest in meeting and exceeding customer expectations.
   
   
2. Customer relationship – Manage the relationship you have with your customers, not just the numbers.
   
   
3. Agent training and resources – make sure that agents have the necessary and required training and resources that will enable them to create an optimal customer experience for each caller/customer interaction. Agent errors account for 65% of all repeat calls and detract from the centers abilities to provide higher levels of first call resolution and increasing ROI to the organization.
   
   
4. • Listen to what’s being said
   • Acknowledge what you heard: “Okay, so if I understand correctly you are having trouble with…”, or “I’m sorry to hear that you are having difficulties with… but I can help you…”
   • Respond accordingly
   • Close (with sincerity): “thank you again for calling in today, and is there anything else I can do for you?”
     
     
5. Empowerment – empower agents to meet customer expectations, but do not discipline them for going above and beyond when trying to salvage the customer relationship. One way to make agents more customer-centric is to make the call center more agent-centric.

Maintaining the balance between call quantity and call quality is the challenge all managers face; however, the extra effort taken to develop a customer-centric call center will become well appreciated as the burden of unnecessary repeat calls decrease, customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention increase, and the organization enjoys a positive financial return on its call center initiative.

Tip of the Week: Hire for attitude, teach aptitude.

CallTalk™ Caramels: Sweet Snippets from BenchmarkPortal’s Best CallTalk Episodes
This CallTalk Caramel was compiled and edited by Bruce Belfiore and Kamál Webb.  It was drawn from a CallTalk episode with Dr. RosanneD’Ausilio entitled “Developing Agents Who Are More Customer-Centric”.   To listen to the entire episode click play below: