Close attention to user feedback will help improve each stage of the customer service lifecycle.
It’s the age-old dilemma, given new urgency by savage economic pressures: how to maximise your customers’ goodwill while minimising the cost of keeping them happy and loyal. The secret, says Matthew Vallance, managing director for Europe at global business process outsourcing company Firstsource Solutions, is to treat as much as possible of the customer lifecycle as a single series of processes.
Customers are steered towards the best-value communications channels and the knowledge gained at each stage is fed back to improve the process from start to finish. “The management of the entire customer lifecycle is a growing field for us, from customer acquisition and provisioning, through servicing, to billing and debt collection,” says Vallance. “The days of the customer service centre as purely reactive are over; it’s turning from a cost centre into a profit centre.”
Sales through service – cross-selling and up-selling whenever a contact centre agent trained in ‘empathetic listening’ spots a possible opening – is on the rise. And the same agent’s specialist customer service training often means they can make a better job of early-stage debt collection than a clerk in the accounts department.
Early-stage collectors can also benefit from the skills of well trained customer service advisors. Back office functions often form part of the offering, enabling the outsourcing provider to suggest or initiate process improvements based on direct customer feedback.
“It’s a case of figuring out what the customer is thinking and feeding this back into the service and delivery,” says Vallance. It could be glitches on the company’s website: dead links, unpredictable response times, little grouses that might never reach the company via more formal channels.
Or the service provider might discover that large numbers of customers don’t understand their mobile phone bills, and help the client redesign these to increase customer satisfaction and reduce the number of (costly) queries.
Analytics is becoming a powerful tool, says Vallance. Contacts or responses via different channels can be analysed to determine which channel is most effective or has the best conversion rate. Or the service provider can analyse every link in a process and identify bottlenecks and imperfections.
If, for example, home-buyers are more likely to take up a mortgage offer if they receive it quickly, the analysis can quantify this and suggest (and cost justify) ways to get offers out faster.
Much effort is expended on increasing the number of issues sorted out on the spot (‘first contact resolution’, or FCR, in industry jargon). Service providers may be incentivised to increase FCR rates by a set annual percentage as part of a risk-and-reward sharing deal. “We’re keen to have contracts that reward us when the experience is most rewarding for the customer,” says Vallance. “The Holy Grail is that we charge per customer, not per transaction.” This is already possible for highly ‘linear’ processes such as managing life insurance policies.
Part of the battle is persuading customers to use the most cost-effective communication channel. Self-service channels such as websites are now promising real savings in sectors such as telecoms, banking and insurance, says Vallance. Customer contact experts can advise on how to make them consumer-friendly to encourage widespread usage that will more than offset the set-up costs. For direct contact the phone remains the most popular – and generally most expensive – medium. But email and live web chat are finally making inroads, especially among younger age groups. Email is cost effective if FCR is achieved, but can prove costly if there’s a lengthy ‘ping pong’ exchange, so agents are trained to pre-empt this, says Vallance.
However, he adds, “I don’t believe that one channel will entirely replace another. Different media suit different population profiles, and individuals may use more than one channel at different times.” It is yet another reason why a fully joined-up, listening approach is so important.
by Paul Bray
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