The Giftie

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us![1]

O would some Power the gift to give us
To see ourselves as others see us!

These words written almost 250 years ago by the poet Robert Burns still have enormous relevance for us and our organisations today. This sentiment was echoed in our discussions this week as we met for an Industry Council dinner held on Burns Night. The dinner was generously hosted by Plantronics in London and lively and incisive debate took place around the theme ‘Reaching across the Enterprise’. This was based around a Plantronics sponsored piece of research, conducted by the CCA, which looks at how organisations are dealing with changing trends in customer contact. It explores how departments connect with the contact centre and what improvements can be leveraged to ensure that the customer is truly at the heart of the business. Today, when customers call, they generally have a complex or serious issue to resolve and they have a significant amount of information gleaned from self-service channels.  These queries may require more time to solve, and can require a higher level of expertise not always found in the contact centre.

The customer service industry has entered was has been referred to as a ‘perfect storm’^[2] driven by consumer behaviour and technological change. Consumer activities have become fragmented with generation Y (under 25’s) demanding access different communication techniques to those in older age brackets. Customers expect service to be more tailored and individualised to meet their specific needs. At the same time, technological advancement has expanded the number of channels available for customer contact and made contact increasingly mobile. Following on the theme from last week’s blog there is also significant issue around how the service sectored is valued in the UK with ever increasing customer expectations around the speed, efficiency and cost of service delivery.

One key emergent theme from the dinner discussions focused on the idea of exploring customer expectations and perceptions around brands and service delivery. If we can really understand how our customers perceive our brands and the products and services we deliver, we can help to ensure the most important demands around customer experience are met. One aspect of this might be around challenging some aspects we take for granted – for example, are we paranoid about hand off? Is it important to resolve an issue in the channel the customer has used to contact us? Does technology result in increasing complexity around this issue? It was suggested that there is more to do to educate our customers so that they can fully embrace the technology available and self-serve where possible. At the root of these aspirations is seen to be a need to build in much greater capabilities amongst our staff, but this again involves a fresh look at how we might engage a new generation of knowledge workers to understand and ultimately transform views of the sector.