UK Large business & public sector
It’s official that people who want to talk to government departments want choice about how they do that — even if they are more likely to choose the phone over any other channel.
That’s the findings of BT’s Autonomous Customer research, which suggests that people expect the same levels of service for government and public bodies as they do from the private sector — and they don’t want their choice of channels restricted. [Read more...]
Queuing – it may be a British pastime but it’s not exactly something that we relish doing. How many times have you just shrugged and walked away when it’s “not worth the effort”?
We are busy people who want to minimise the amount of time, energy and effort we put into things that we don’t value. Things like trying to navigate around a complicated and badly designed website, setting up a product or service or trying to get answers from a contact centre. Sometimes we don’t want to be “wowed” by customer service. Sometimes we just want it to be easy. [Read more...]
The Henley Centre for Customer Management has done some research into customer effort. They interviewed a number of companies about their experiences, and the findings inspired us to look at the topic ourselves.
People don’t hate hold music – they hate being on hold
It’s fair to say that call centre hold music isn’t popular. We all hate listening to It’s a Small World over and over while we wait for someone to sort our problem out. [Read more...]
I had one of those contact centre calls at the weekend where I was pushed from pillar to post, asked for my account number numerous times, asked for my date of birth a couple of times — and got frustrated many times.
One of the frustrations of working in this industry is that you can see clearly how much more effective some contact centres could be just by upgrading a bit of their kit. [Read more...]
It’s not a new craze that’s trending on Twitter. It’s a theory that’s been around since the 1940s.
Customer effort measures how easy a customer’s experience is – from the first time they visit a company’s website or shop floor, to when they’ve taken a product home and set it up. Not forgetting the customer service they get after that.
It’s a good way for companies to keep track of what their customers are thinking. And the most useful way to measure it is to simply ask customers how easy is it for them to deal with you. [Read more...]
There’s a basic fact behind every purchase you make – you want it to work.
Whether it’s a washing machine, a car or a broadband service, you want it to work.
And the effort you have to put in to making your purchase work will influence how you feel about the company that sold it to you. [Read more...]
Every business wants to have loyal customers – but loyalty is always a rather strange concept in business. We often only discover that a customer isn’t loyal when they never speak to us again! We’ve had ‘customer recommendation’ and ‘customer delight’ as benchmarks for loyalty for a while – but happy customers may still go to the competition, so measuring satisfaction might not be the best way to test loyalty.
A survey of 75,000 customers published in 2010 in the Harvard Business Review made a startling statement – you don’t have to delight your customers, you just need to make it easy for them! This seemingly went against all the common wisdom about customer satisfaction that had gone before it. [Read more...]
There was plenty of traffic humming around Let’s Talk in March — musing on the serious issues of the day, debating important topics in technology or simply shooting the breeze.
The topics that kept you busy ranged from how the best communications systems are needed to fly planes safely; to ensuring that human dignity and common values are at the centre of economic pursuits; to a speculation on how much more successful the Romans would have been had they been able to harness the power of unified communications and cloud-based contact centres. [Read more...]
The contact centre isn’t perfect – there are certain bugbears we just live with:
* Speaking to someone in another country.
* A noisy background.
* The time it takes to get through to someone. [Read more...]
There’s a profound lack of knowledge in call centres. And it’s making people in call centres look like they don’t know what they’re talking about. That’s according to our latest Autonomous customer update. We talked to around 1,000 customers and they said two out of three agents don’t even know what’s on their company’s website.
That goes some way to explaining why 58 per cent of people said they get better help from other people than agents. And why three quarters of people regularly end up asking to speak to someone in charge. [Read more...]
