Does your customer center help or frustrate customers

Public Relations and Customer Service professionals need to review the impact of contact centers and the importance of integrating these centers with the core services departments.

So often I have called contact centers to follow up on an earlier complaint only to be met by a clueless executive who has no idea of how far the resolution process is. The disconnect between the customer care team and the operations team is appalling. A few good ones will ask you to hold on phone as they find out the status while the average ones will tell you to wait for the core department to contact you or fix your problem. Contact center executives at work

My recent disappointment was this weekend as I sought help from Kenya Power contact center. Severally the customer care staff told me that they had sent my request to the operations team and they had no way of knowing when the work will be done. At the end of the day for me the contact center remained a funnel of information with no feedback on whether I would be assisted and if so when. If the impact for contact center is to collect complaints from customers then the contact centers have done well. However if they are to facilitate delivery of services then I believe more needs to be done.

The modern contact center needs to integrate its systems with those of the operations department and track the progress of the resolutions of issues. Ideally at the touch of a button your customer care executives should be able to know the status of the request and give feedback to the customer. A customer care executive telling a customer that they have no idea what is happening with the resolution of an issue just defeats the purpose of having the center in the first place. The second learning point for PR executives is the need to train their customer care representatives on basic people relations and customer service skills. Going back to my experiences with customer care executives, at one point I requested one of them to call me back with the indication on when I would be assisted and the answer I got was shocking. “I can’t call you back because my shift is ending in a few minutes,” was the answer she gave. While all she needed to do was to pass on the call back to her colleague she just exposed her ignorance on customer care etiquette

If the impact for contact center is to collect complaints from customers then the contact centers have done well.

It is clear we have a long way to go when it comes to customer service within customer care centers in this country. The question however remains, will my fellow PR professionals do anything about it?