A typical television commercial could be seen by a few million people for 30 seconds. After those 30 seconds are gone, most of us forget what the commercial was about.
Within this context, it is astounding that, according to Gartner, 60% of customer interactions happen over the phone, yet how we manage call center services doesn’t focus on positive customer interactions, but instead on handle time and other traditional call center metrics.
There’s a big disconnect and a large missed marketing opportunity.
Consider this:
Suppose a typical call center has 2000 customer service agents, each handling 50 calls per agent per day – this means that this call center will have over 35 million customer interactions per year.
Can you think of very many marketing campaigns that can reach that many people per year? No, not just reach, but intimately speak with that many customers per year?
Yet, despite being armed with this knowledge, how most organization manage call center services isn’t biased toward making each customer interaction rich and aimed to strengthen the customer-to-company relationship, but is instead aimed at “how quickly can we get off the telephone with the customer?”
Imagine if we invested more in the customer relationship in the context of the call center – where it is most intimate and personal, and less on email marketing, internet marketing, and traditional public relationships and media campaigns – do you think that organizations would make more money in the long run, but actually also save money?
What do you think?
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Enrique Herrera says
The last five years, I´ve worked as an internal consultant for a large multinational american company, that based part of it´s customer service here in Costa Rica. It´s been five years and only this last year, after dealing with metrics in red, staffing issues due to headcount attrition and rotation, has the company finally set eyes on the customer relationship. Let me tell you, it is a challenge to find the perfect balance between satisfied customers, metrics hitting target and proper staffing and adding marketing campaigns to the mix will make it more challenging, but I find the idea fascinating. I would like to analyze this one a bit, maybe get some thoughts of the folks at work. Great post!