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Balancing the Interests of Shareholders, Analysts, and Customers Businesses, particularly those in countries such as Australia, US, UK, and Singapore continue to be under fierce pressure from shareholders and analysts to find ways to reduce expense and increase profits but do so without sacrificing the brand or quality of service to customers. The good news is that there are more options than ever to address this challenge.
Directors of corporations around the world face enormous pressure from capital markets to lower their operating costs. These executives of publicly traded companies report their performance on a quarterly basis to shareholders and financial analysts. Despite its opportunity to highlight the positives of the stewardship of the company in the last quarter it also enables analysts is to ask questions and indirectly to put pressure on executives.
Analysts rate whether a company is doing well or not and report to their clients and often to the public. Lately, analysts are starting to ask more and more about outsourcing a companies non-core activities; this means that a company that does not outsource some of its work offshore may find its stock price punished and its equity value diminished.
Furthermore, analysts are starting to ask difficult questions about how the company is handling its current customer service issues. With competition never abating, how quickly and how responsively companies interact with their customers will determine its capacity for repeat sales. It is no secret that there is a chronic skills shortage in first world countries and an understaffed or incorrectly resourced customer facing units can significantly affect the public perception of a company, the loyalty of its customers, and the willingness of it customers to make additional purchases of products and services.
As the primary or even secondary touch point for a business, a contact center can make or break a customer's perception of a business. Being put into incessant queues, being transferred to an incorrect area, trying to get someone who does not comprehend to fix their problem or being tied up in loops of pre recorded interrogation that end nowhere is not only frustrating but can be mind numbingly aggravating and deadly to the business as quite often the customer will get frustrated and won’t be back. And, as we know, are likely to tell their friends about the experience as well.
The human touch is essential in the process of engaging and enlisting people, whether it is to provide a person with specific information or to close a sale. The demand contact could be initiated from an advertisement in print, radio, or television; direct marketing campaigns; or specific program promotions, all geared at getting the customer to act and react. The challenge today is how businesses can manage such programs when the programs create a burst in demand that must be satisfied without incurring the large expense of trying to manage to the peak traffic or ramping up only for a specific window of time and then ramping down again. For most businesses and for most processes, this is simply an untenable situation and it results in using an unsatisfactory and often unsuccessful response mechanism such as making customers wait or forcing them to use voice response technologies, voice mail systems, or sending mail or email – hardly the way to close the deal or to capture the end customer.
Nevertheless, there is a sea change blowing through companies. Attitudes are changing: now the focus is on the quality and value of service. The first waves of customer contact centers were designed to drive costs out of the business, to answer calls fast and move on. They were designed to migrate expensive customer contact away from expensive face-to-face and branch contact to the less expensive and more ‘efficient’ telephone contact. Organizations are now realizing that customer contact is everything. Customers are not only valuable to a business they are a strategic asset. Because without them there is no business! They are easy to lose and it is tough and costly to win them back.
Some businesses are turning old call-center certainties up side down, trying to spend more time with their customers rather than less. Today, customer contact centers generate up to 25 percent of total new revenues for some credit card companies and up to 60 percent for some telcos. Since customer contact centers handle more than 30 percent of all customer interactions for top banks in North America, efforts to cross-sell during inbound service calls could increase annual sales of new products by an amount equivalent to 10 percent of the retail sales generated by a bank's entire branch network. If done right every five inbound service agents can generate new-product sales equivalent to the sales of one mature bank branch.
It sounds great in theory, however the only problem is there is a labor shortage and so there is no one to do the work. Back to those shareholders and analysts, the solution seems to be in tapping into highly educated and motivated workforces in places like the Philippines.
Increasingly businesses are turning to outsourcers in countries like Philippines, Malaysia, and India to get services at a significant savings to what it costs to do the work inside the business or to have it done by an outsourcer in the same country. However, studies are demonstrating that while many businesses originally go for the price, they are staying on for the quality. Although this depends in large part on the quality of the overseas outsourcer, the best of them are delivering customer service and quality at a level that is unmatched in comparisons to in-house operations or local outsourcers. The result? An improvement of expenses to serve the shareholders interest combined with a higher quality of service and increased customer satisfaction.
-- James Haensly
(James Haensly is the Vice President and co-founder of FooBooOnLine.com. James has more than 20 years experience working with enterprises and service providers to deliver business and communications solutions to help them increase revenue and profitability and reduce expense.)
The content on this site is Copyright © 2005 by FooBooOnLine.com & Contributors. These articles may be used for publication in magazines and newsletters with prior permission from the authors. Please contact Martin Conboy at info@foobooonline.com for further information |
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