Often in writing about contact centres I pause to think how measured everything is. There are percentage targets for every type of interaction – first call resolution, abandonment rates, the seconds it takes to answer calls; the list goes on and on. So it’s quite refreshing when you hear a speaker say that the most important thing of all is to get the customer to like you.
At the TUANZ Contact Centre lunch in Auckland yesterday, Michael Stock, BBC contact centre manager and board member of the Customer Contact Association in the UK, told the audience that it’s all about getting the customer to like you and to believe in your message.
But as with any good professional contact centre speaker he too had a statistic – in his case it was the magic number was 3.4. His research showed that if you optimised the service you delivered both to the customer and to your staff then you would increase the value that your centre has to the business by 3.4 times.
Another interesting ‘take home’ was that the BBC caters to 30 million households in the UK and 180 million worldwide and they receive one million complaints a year. But the number of people who actually attend the events run by the BBC (i.e. the studio audiences and park extravaganzas where the broadcast is put up on a big screen) is a staggering 10 million.
And while TUANZ didn’t quite achieve those numbers at the luncheon yesterday we did have a full house and it was great to see everyone enjoying themselves. Stock told me that it was one of the nicest events he’d spoken at - so I guess that must mean he likes us!