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Telecommunications "Trying to keep my customers satisfied": the new mantra for call centres
Telecommunications "Trying to keep my customers satisfied": the new mantra for call centres | "Trying to keep my customers satisfied": the new mantra for call centres |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Friday, 18 September 2009 | |
  
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According to Martin Dove, Dimension Data's global managing director for customer interactive solutions, keeping existing customers has become a top priority. "Rising in importance this year, more than 20 percent of respondents named customer retention as the number one trend affecting their contact centres." Dove added: "It's widely accepted that it is seven to eight times more costly to win a new customer than retain an existing one. For this reason, companies are waking up and focusing their energies and resources on delivering better service to the customers they already have." He said the survey had uncovered clear signs that companies are looking at new ways to place the customer at the centre of their business. "Businesses are offering more options to customers to improve overall service levels. For example, this year, we're seeing more contact centres - a rise of 10 percent to almost 70 percent - focus on how to streamline and simplify processes, and also offer more self service options, for their customers' convenience." But changes in customer behaviour are putting pressure on contact centres to implement new channels of communications that match customer preferences. "Fifty-two percent of consumers between the ages of 16 and 34 are using the Internet as their first port of call," Dove said. "As younger consumers change the way they interact with businesses, and in light of the global rise in popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, companies need to find ways to offer these customers more communication choices, or face losing them." Dove concluded: "The good news for consumers is that they should expect to see a greater degree of consistency and continuity across the board." However the bad news for call centre managers is that they will have to cater for this shift in customers' contact preferences with diminishing budgets. Sixty six percent of call centres managers surveyed said they had a strategy in place to cut the costs of serving customers, this figure was almost 10 percent up on the 2008 figure. Dove sees companies' ability to meet these seemingly conflicting goals as a sign that the contact industry is maturing. "The important shift is away from pure cost optimisation to the next stage of evolution where driving revenue and value becomes a priority...The global contact centre industry is still relatively young, and it may take some time to get the basics of cost optimisation right...We expect this transition to value creation will take the next three to four years to fully take hold, and it is within this context that we expect to see investment decisions made."
This article first appeared in ExchangeDaily, iTWire's daily newsletter for telecommunications professionals. Register here for your free trial.
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