Last week I attended the Genesys Experience Summit to gather more insight from our partner on the latest thinking around Customer Experience.   Some of the market research they presented just confirms what we all instinctively know: people in the UK have less and less tolerance of sloppy customer service and are increasingly prepared to move to a competitor in search of a better experience; or worse, spread the word about that negative experience more widely than businesses thought possible just a couple of years ago.

 
This got me thinking:  ‘Is Customer Service becoming the Achilles heel of British business as consumers become more active and less tolerant of poor service?’   A Datamonitor report on the subject found that 75% of UK consumers have ended relationships with suppliers because of poor experience in dealing with a supplier.  We are clearly not the stoical, uncomplaining types we once were.
The availability of more choice through much greater competition and the stimulation of interaction through the arrival of an array of new communication methods to our desktops and smart phones  – email, text, web chat, YouTube videos, blogs, and social media sites like FaceBook and Bebo – have given us many more tools to get our message across.

For many, the complaining that used to be done about poor service behind closed doors, has a potential to proliferate worldwide in days.  You only need to look at the impact of the ‘United breaks Guitars’ video posted on YouTube by one disgruntled passenger to realise the true dangers of not being more Customer Experience orientated.
The potential financial and reputational damage of poor customer service must finally be alerting board directors of most firms to the importance of being better engaged with customers.  And in the public sector, it is also becoming much more visible to us as taxpayers.  The National Audit Office’s government departmental reports such as the recently released ‘HMRC: Handling Telephone Enquiries’ reveals the impact of its contact centre deficiencies all too clearly.  This report revealed that HMRC simply failed to answer about 44 million phone calls last year – that’s 43% of all calls made to HMRC were not answered.

So if there is nowhere to hide for poor deliverers of customer service.  How can customer service directors make sure clients are having positive experiences when they make contact with their companies?  Clearly having enough staff in the contact centre, trained to the right level, supported by the right technology and motivated to deliver a resolution for the customer are all important considerations.  It is also important to measure contact centre agents not on how many calls they complete (i.e. via Average Handling Time figures), but on what they achieve for both the company (e.g. in terms of additional sales) and for the customer (e.g. was a customer request actioned or a satisfactory response given?).   Customer services directors should now be demanding access to this management information which it is now possible to get it in near real-time.

It is also important to realise that customers, particularly ‘Generation Y’ under 25-year olds, are just as likely to communicate with you by email or text.   If they have a complaint, they might share the negative experience with their army of friends via Face Book.
So customer service is increasingly about gaining rapid visibility on all the communication channels through which your customers are trying to reach you or send you a message.  The technology is already out there to trap this information.  These new channels can also be used judiciously for outbound communication to keep customers informed of new offers and new developments in the company. 

There is no doubt that the world of customer service is changing fast and as the call centre evolves into the multi-channel contact centre over the next few years, it has a real opportunity to be at the leading edge of this change.

Faraz Khan is managing director of ProtoCall One.