7 Habits treejpgA white paper from e-Gain intriguingly titled “7 Habits of Effective Contact Centers” caught my eye. I found this article insightful, timeless and full of good reminders worthy or repurposing.

Borrowing a theme from Steven Covey, the following suggestions are offered:

Habit 1: Be proactive – embrace change and harness the power of new technologies. Instead of just reacting to what is urgent and requires immediate fire-fighting, setting aside a couple of hours each week to evaluate the overall operations of your business might prove a better use of your time and resources. Be aware of new customer demands and business trends. Evaluate them and, if they seem important, fit them into your road map.

Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind – lead off with mission statements, goals, road maps and metrics. What is your organization’s mission? Do the goals of your center match the company’s business goals for the next 12 to 24? Create a road map. Build a long-term plan before investing in any new tool, application or initiative. A road map ensures that every purchase fits into the larger picture and gets you where you want to be with clearer direction.

Habit 3: Put first things first – let true priorities drive initiatives. To deliver excellent customer service as a contact center, you must first qualitatively define “excellent service” from the perspective of your customer, not yours, not your organizations. Then, let that drive your priorities to create that excellent customer experience you and yoru customers are after.

Habit 4: Think win/win – what’s good for your customer is good for you, too. Contact centers often see themselves as the first line of defense against the assault of the customer hordes on the company for service. It’s easy to fall into this mode if the focus is fixed on efficiency goals. Instead of a customer call being thought of as an expense, view customer calls as unique opportunities to delight your customer. It’s also a great opportunity to advise the customer about solutions and upsell!

Research shows that when a customer who has a problem with a product contacts the business and has their problem solved well, they are likely to be far more loyal to the business than someone who had no problems with the product ever. Make sure you are talking to your customers AND learning from them through both their good and not so good experiences. Surveys and feedback tools should be part of every initiative.

Habit 5: Seek first to understand, then to be understood – know your customer. Know your people.  Consider a typical contact center operation. There’s constant pressure to cope with ever-increasing volumes of customer contacts. In this environment, instead of listening carefully to what our customers are telling us, we can get caught up in our own charts and graphs and analysis, short circuiting the customer experience with a hyper focus on statistics.  Company culture or not, customer service suffers when a center is at the mercy of their statistics. We can spend a lot of time convincing ourselves that we are doing a great job but servicing your staff well lends itself to your staff serving your customers well. Listening to customers helps understand how to help them better.  A great resource to tune into the voice of your customer, in face one of the best, is your representatives.  They listen to your customers every day so spend some time listening to them.

Habit 6: Synergize – bring it all together. A clear purpose, shared goals and customer-oriented metrics distinguish world-class contact centers. Make sure your solutions work seamlessly.

AND Habit 7…

Consider the cost of keeping a reoccurring complainer, Sprint did…:

Sprint Fires Customers

Wireless phone service provider Sprint shocked consumers and industry observers alike by sending contract termination letters to about 1,000 of its customers. In a time when getting out of a cell phone contract can cost hundreds of dollars, this might not seem like such a bad thing. But the customers who were “fired” were people who were the provider’s biggest complainers. “These customers were calling to a degree that we felt was excessive,” Sprint’s Roni Singleton told Reuters. The 1,000-1,200 customers accounted for 40,000 calls per month, according to Sprint.