Customer Street is about customer service
You hear the phrase "plain old customer service" used in life but I don't believe there is any such thing. Plain old customer service meant people dealing with people but the world has changed. Now it is rarer and rarer for people to meet face to face and have meaningful discussions. In this day and age everything is done via the internet and telephone which means businesses have to change but most businesses have not properly grasped this.
At Customer Street we learned a lot from the mistakes we made previously. When I took over this role I had a number of opportunities to address our problems including throwing more people at our problem to see if we could deal with our customers more effectively but one thing was for sure, if we didn't improve our customer service quickly we wouldn't have a customer service problem for very long as they would all leave us.
I decided to take a new look at customer service and we started from the ground up to review systems, roles and responsibilities and I am pleased to say that it has been an outstanding success for us. The review is not complete but we have slashed call times, increased satisfaction dramatically and become much more organised. We have introduced a number of new systems which again have been designed from the ground up to match customers problems with agents who know how to fix them.
All of these changes have actually lead to us needing less staff to provide a much better service. Its truly incredible and we are aiming higher.
I read an article today which encompassed the approach I take to this problem in that companies with less foresight (and indeed us in a former life) think it is acceptable to have customers waiting in queues of several minutes while incompetent agents hide behind phone systems and in some cases take approaches with customers that they would never dare in real life and face to face. We have turned that on its head. By implementing a new system where one person deals with a customers issue from beginning to end we have substantially changed the fobbing off that continues throughout most call centres. By introducing a point scoring pay deal that rewards agents who work hard and fix lots of customer issues we get through work loads we would never have done in the past. Best of all if a customer calls back in with further issues the agents bonus is reversed until they properly fix the issue meaning there is no incentive to "get rid" of a customer quickly without fixing problems properly.
At Customer Street we know that our telephones are our shop window. If you had to queue many minutes to get in to Marks and Spencer you would soon stop going there and yet many companies like ours think it is OK to ask people to queue for many minutes to speak to someone. I, like everyone else out there dread calling companies with queueing systems and find it refreshing in the rare instance that someone answers quickly. At Customer Street we re-invested the support centre model and this is allowing our customers to get through that virtual door more quickly and then leave the problem with us, go home, have a cup of tea and wait for us to PHONE THEM with the solution.
Now its true that my approach will horrify some traditional call centre managers and indeed it sent shivers through the spines of some of my colleagues on the board of Iomart plc but I can safely say that it was the correct thing to do. Despite the doubts about how it would be received by our customer base and the "naysayers" within our organisation we have had excellent feedback that the new system works great for customers and our support agents alike. I know that in time each and every one of our customers will come to appreciate the changes we made to ensure they can get in our shop more quickly and with no fuss.
We aim to get our customer service 100% right in all cases but I know my team slip up sometimes. If they do, let me know and I can assure we will learn from it and address your issues directly. Email me via our special customer service quality control squad.
At Customer Street we learned a lot from the mistakes we made previously. When I took over this role I had a number of opportunities to address our problems including throwing more people at our problem to see if we could deal with our customers more effectively but one thing was for sure, if we didn't improve our customer service quickly we wouldn't have a customer service problem for very long as they would all leave us.
I decided to take a new look at customer service and we started from the ground up to review systems, roles and responsibilities and I am pleased to say that it has been an outstanding success for us. The review is not complete but we have slashed call times, increased satisfaction dramatically and become much more organised. We have introduced a number of new systems which again have been designed from the ground up to match customers problems with agents who know how to fix them.
All of these changes have actually lead to us needing less staff to provide a much better service. Its truly incredible and we are aiming higher.
I read an article today which encompassed the approach I take to this problem in that companies with less foresight (and indeed us in a former life) think it is acceptable to have customers waiting in queues of several minutes while incompetent agents hide behind phone systems and in some cases take approaches with customers that they would never dare in real life and face to face. We have turned that on its head. By implementing a new system where one person deals with a customers issue from beginning to end we have substantially changed the fobbing off that continues throughout most call centres. By introducing a point scoring pay deal that rewards agents who work hard and fix lots of customer issues we get through work loads we would never have done in the past. Best of all if a customer calls back in with further issues the agents bonus is reversed until they properly fix the issue meaning there is no incentive to "get rid" of a customer quickly without fixing problems properly.
At Customer Street we know that our telephones are our shop window. If you had to queue many minutes to get in to Marks and Spencer you would soon stop going there and yet many companies like ours think it is OK to ask people to queue for many minutes to speak to someone. I, like everyone else out there dread calling companies with queueing systems and find it refreshing in the rare instance that someone answers quickly. At Customer Street we re-invested the support centre model and this is allowing our customers to get through that virtual door more quickly and then leave the problem with us, go home, have a cup of tea and wait for us to PHONE THEM with the solution.
Now its true that my approach will horrify some traditional call centre managers and indeed it sent shivers through the spines of some of my colleagues on the board of Iomart plc but I can safely say that it was the correct thing to do. Despite the doubts about how it would be received by our customer base and the "naysayers" within our organisation we have had excellent feedback that the new system works great for customers and our support agents alike. I know that in time each and every one of our customers will come to appreciate the changes we made to ensure they can get in our shop more quickly and with no fuss.
We aim to get our customer service 100% right in all cases but I know my team slip up sometimes. If they do, let me know and I can assure we will learn from it and address your issues directly. Email me via our special customer service quality control squad.
posted by Stuart Forrest at
16:02
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