Shannon O'Connor is passionate about the customer service industry. As Regional Vice President for Verint, O’Connor has seen contact centers of all shapes and sizes but knows the common business challenge—excellent customer service across customer channels. In this podcast interview O’Connor address the bottlenecks in customer service and provides insight into the contact center technologies that will implicate all customer channels. Unearth the reasons why contact centers need to audit their customer processes.
Finding the right balance in the contact center between efficiency and effectiveness is no easy task.
When the customer-agent relationship is redesigned to include a call-back, customer service improve. Customers don’t like to be put on hold. We know that. Through listening to how the customer reacts at the end of the long hold time, the program is redesigned to include a call-back. The customer wants a resolution—providing this resolution in a timely manner without wasting the customer’s time is key to improved service levels.
Is your contact center is still operating on yesterday’s principles? Are you managing by micro leadership or macro leadership? Is your contact center data reactive? That philosophy is driven from leadership down.
Efficiency drives the decisions made in the contact center—but all too often we focus on efficiency and we don’t stop to understand the "why" of what we are doing. The change has to happen at the organizational level. The leadership has to want to become customer-centric. This is a culture issue and requires the support of the organizational leadership.
O’Connor does not feel the contact center technology world is progressing fast enough. However through educating the industry O’Connor believes she can help. Check out her compelling thought leadership in this podcast interview.