Customer experience is fast becoming a differentiator for many businesses, at Colt for example our vision is to be the most customer oriented business in our industry and it’s something we’re working hard towards.
Key to this is how customers interact with us and their impression of the people tasked with responding to and dealing with their queries. The contact centre has always been the first port of call for customers, and teams there are well trained in customer service and how to deal with common queries and issues that they might run into. But now more and more staff across the business are finding themselves in customer facing roles.
Technology has changed the ways in which customers can request information, solve problems and interact with a supplier. Online portals give easy access to billing and account information, chat bots help deal with straightforward requests and AI can be used to help deal with common problems and questions. This helps reduce the volume of simple queries coming into the contact centre, leaving more time and resource to deal with unique requests.
Just as technology has put more control in the customers’ hands, unified communication tools have given contact centre teams access to more information and to more people in the businesses. Now it’s easy to ping someone from the relevant team or even bring them into the call, rather than taking down some details, passing on the person to a different department and never hearing from them again.
That’s why more people are finding themselves in customer conversations, which is having a direct impact on the overall customer experience and how the business is perceived.
At Colt we’re investing in training all staff with customer-facing roles in how best to communicate with our customers and how to manage their requests. We want our customers to feel like they’re dealing with the same organisation, whether they come through to our contact centre, if they speak to someone in the billing department or an engineer in network operations.
A big part of this is that, at Colt, it’s not possible to have someone just pass on your query to another department or person. If you pick up the phone or get an email from a customer, then it’s your job to get an answer for them or to help resolve the problem.
This extra level of care is one of the reasons why our Net Promoter Score is one of the highest in the industry – we know customers appreciate the personal touch and feeling like everyone in the business really cares. If your telco is still relying solely on a contact centre for customer interaction, maybe it’s time for a change?
Christophe Dos Santos, Product Manager at Colt
Colt Technology Services
02 September 2019
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