BBC Money Box - Have Your Say: Call centres

The BBC Money Box programme this week tells the story of the problems Gordon Love of Stirling had with Barclaycard’s call centre, and on their website, the Beeb is asking for people to tell their experiences of call centre complaints, both as customers and as call centre employees… here’s what I say…

Often, solutions such as delivering customer care programmes, training people, or changing procedures are used to tackle issues of increasing levels of customer dissatisfaction. On the face of it this sounds sensible - after all, organisations need to care about their customers, and well-trained staff who are following the appropriate procedures are best placed to deliver excellent service.

Regrettably, whilst approaches like these to dealing with the problem of customer complaints might appear to improve service quality for a short period of time, none are effective in the long run, in view of the fact that they don’t address the root cause of the matter.

This is because a fundamental part of the problem lies with the targets by which the call centre manages its staff.

Unfortunately, targets in call centres aren’t related to what customers want – instead they focus on productivity measures like call length, sales made or average abandoned rates.

All call centres need to take more customer centric approach to people management and work with their staff to understand what customers are saying when they contact them, what customers need and how to deliver it, and assessing what is important to their customers.

If they do this, a call centre can really make a difference and deliver world class service!