Anne McCrossan, founder, Visceral Business
Customer service is deteriorating because it focuses on transactions instead of relationships. It is disconnected from the needs of the user. Ideally, customer service should be the fingertips of an organisation, with all the sensory intelligence that can provide. But the service design of a call centre primarily revolves around the needs of the organisation, not the user.
The networked age is coming out of a factory-minded mindset thanks to social media. Call centres that handle service at scale and control high densities of transactions within budget return high levels of customer dissatisfaction, frustrating customer experiences and loss of brand goodwill.
Delivering low-unit, cost-based transactional efficiency ahead of meaningful human relationships has shortcomings that are amplified by social media. There's a lack of responsiveness built into the way customer service centres are designed and how they work to a script. It leads to worsening service, the risk of outmoded systems and robotic communication.
Relationships customers form with brands are stronger when they're built on "thick value", on socially led CRM and spontaneous relationships, more than on "thin value" and transactions. Social networks are user-led, and generate influence through shared values and knowledge. Inbound communication, volunteered by engaged users, can make an organisation more resilient.
Brands and call centres must consider how to manage rising levels of expectation created by being social, and look at new models of operation that can support that. Misunderstood consumers damage business potential. Not recognising this is a big blind spot of customer-service operations.
Anne Marie Forsyth, chief executive, Customer Contact Association
It is not our role to defend inferior service. There will always be poor practitioners who give customer services a bad name. But it is wrong to conclude that the UK is bad at customer service.
CCA members, who represent brands in retail, financial services, utilities, transport and the public sector, showed strong performance in a study of 467 million customer calls, with a satisfaction rate of 84 per cent. This was achieved despite a challenging business arena for many members, who faced cost cuts, closures and customer anxiety in sectors such as financial services.
There is evidence that huge investment in technology is delivering increased efficiency as well as happy customers. Voice self-service or automated service is used to handle 100 million calls annually-and our study showed a satisfaction rate of 75 per cent for these calls. We understand the frustration felt by customers left hanging on the line, but call waiting and handling times are less important than measuring whether customers' problems are solved first time round.
When customers complain about an organisation, blame is often directed at contact centre staff, yet CCA research reveals that 80 per cent of calls stem from failings elsewhere in the organisation. Our Customer Experience Council is exploring ways of achieving greater board-level understanding of the customer experience. Outcomes so far include faster and more efficient ways of identifying problems, communicating them to other parts of the organisation, and triggering follow-up action. Until more organisations take this action there will continue to be failings in customer service.
