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Leadership Perspective: Upon Returning to OZ from 10 Weeks in USA
I've been on a business trip in the USA for the last eight weeks, working on some projects and introducing my book to customer response professionals along the way. Wherever I've been I've either needed to be served by people on the phones and over the Internet (here and in Australia) or I've been working with organisations that provide these services to their customers to help them discover new ways of doing it better.
My last extended trip to the States, three years ago, found me completely flummoxed by how difficult it was to get service by phone - LONG wait queues, amazingly complicated IVR messages, poorly outsourced situations and customer response centre staff who were good at answering the phones, but had few ideas of how to solve most problems (except the most common) for their callers.
I'm a reasonable person and am able to press buttons with the best of them, but I returned to OZ thinking I was witnessing an innovative and very effective way to drive customers back into retail outlets. There is, after all, some satisfaction to be gained from glaring at someone across the counter as you're waiting for service or to purchase something you need.
But there is hope. This time in the US I found non face-to-face business pretty well divided into two distinct camps.
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Effective Camp |
Ineffective Camp |
| Thinks of Contact Centre as Profit Centre. Has rediscovered that telephony-based business can make or break them! Are choosing to invest time & dollars to develop & leverage well-executed customer care through well-trained, supported, motivated & rewarded staff & logical, sensible and well-crafted supporting technology. |
Thinks of Contact Centre as Cost Centre.Continues to be focused on & driven by cost cutting, control and short-term results, while constrained by ill-fitting, illogical, over-specified technology. |
The best contact centres are being led to purposefully return to the basics: focusing on how their staff, processes and positioning in the market place are related more to their original business drivers (such as authentically on their customers) than immediate short-term gains. Those who are best at identifying what business they are in, engaging their staff in the organisation's vision and tying their day-to-day activities into the business, are beginning to see the fruit of their dedication and persistence. And, customers are beginning to enjoy the experience, too!
One of the things I've enjoyed about Australians (from 12 years living here) is they are not easily fooled into a "monkey see - monkey do" scenario. But could they be? Already I'm having trouble with my local telephony carrier, who is stripping services to the bone. As part of this strategy they've outsourced large parts of their customer-interaction business to another organisation, where minimally-trained staff answer the call - after an indeterminate time in an IVR maze - and then are unable to handle more than the most common questions.
As the idea of "globalisation" continues to develop like creeping mildew on the bathroom ceiling, Australian contact centre leaders might be tempted to forget the uniqueness of their customers in a stampede to keep apace with the regular non face-to-face business "herd". But the wise ones won't.
Next week Darlene will look at "Values in Leadership"
 Darlene Richard specialises in reviewing and improving telephony-based sales and service channels. She has over 20 years practical experience building, managing and consulting with organisations dependent upon non face-to-face business helping them produce results that are effective, business smart and most of all, people practical.
She's an educator and frequent speaker on relationship marketing and call centre sensibility. Read more about her new book, The Customer Response Management Handbook and order it on-line today. Just click here. | 
