You guessed it right. The new buzz in marketing is “Social Networking”. It is interesting to see how technology providers are pursuing this buzz. We recently had Salesforce announcing acquisition of Radian6 to monitor, analyze and engage in social media conversations within its CRM platform. Now Cisco has released a self-commisioned whitepaper on next generation contact centers conducted by Forrester. It mentions customer dissatisfaction as a key finding. We all deal with customer service for services like banking, insurance, phone plans, cable and internet. I have left out many more services. The general perception is that customers are left unsatisfied while dealing with customer service contact centers to resolve outstanding issues.
What can we do about it? This white paper talks about opening new channels of communication through social networking tools. I would rather that organizations setting up customer contact centers take some time to analyze the root cause of this less than stellar customer satisfaction.
Contact centers are the first level of interaction with the organization for most customers. Customer service representatives cannot resolve issues if they are saddled with many broken processes in the back-end. They should not be used as a buffering layer to shield management and process inadequacies. Companies should market products and services after installing adequate processes in place to handle all the customer service interactions.
Modern day contact center technology platforms come with very good tools for CTI integration to CRM, ERP and other customer applications driving the business. Contact centers running with good Dialer and ACD software can effectively integrate to all Web based and proprietary solutions in the back-end. It is not more and different channel types but effective processes that will ensure success of customer service. Front end call center representatives cannot be effective with broken back-end processes. Unhappy customers will eventually move on and the cost of bringing new customers might prove to be more expensive.