Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Call Centers Missing Opportunities to Boost Business

There’s far more to handling customer contacts than improving the satisfaction and loyalty of those customers – as important as that is. As a primary customer touchpoint, the call center has significant potential to provide other business units with invaluable intelligence and support – e.g., it can help operations pinpoint quality problems, marketing develop more focused campaigns, IT design better systems, and serve as an early warning of competitive developments.

Unfortunately, far too many organizations seem to be missing this opportunity. In its recently released landmark benchmarking study, the Contact Center Operations Report, ICMI found that only 54.8% of call centers are sharing key customer data and feedback gleaned from monitoring with other departments and upper management. “This results in many missed opportunities to improve products and services, marketing, interdepartmental relationships and executive support,” says ICMI’s Greg Levin, one of the report’s authors.

While monitoring is not the only way to capture customer input, it’s a primary source, and when it is missing, that’s usually an indication that other means aren’t optimized either. With the right approach, any organization can better leverage this input to improve performance – which is especially important when the economy is so difficult.

Brad Cleveland
Senior Advisor and Former President & CEO,
ICMI
bcleveland@think-services.com

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