Customer Experience with Call Center Companies
Introduction
Many call center companies are trying to enter the customer experience space and offer CX-related services because of the many overlaps between the two fields (customer service and customer experience). However, the level they have offered hasn’t matched what CX practitioners would expect — either because they treat customer experience non-holistically, or because the intent wasn’t truly to deliver valuable services but to use the field’s name for marketing purposes. “Customer experience” sells well thanks to the spotlight it has received recently, and unfortunately the term is misused by many parties and industries.
The Core Distinction (Customer Service Is Not Customer Experience)
Let’s start by agreeing there is a vast difference between the two fields, despite the many overlaps. The eye does not sit above the brow [Arabic idiom — each thing has its proper place]. Disciplines cannot be conflated even when they intersect. Can we say marketing is the same as sales? In this article, I covered the fundamental differences between customer service and customer experience. The point is not to diminish either one — both are respected fields with their experts. A company that doesn’t care for its customers and serve them through a dedicated team cannot rise to delivering an outstanding experience.
A side story: I remember the day a customer care team leader asked me to change her team’s titles from Customer Care Specialist to Customer Experience Specialist. I declined after explaining that doing so would be unfair to them, and unfair to anyone who later hires them assuming they have CX expertise. It’s not just a matter of titles.
My Experience as a Customer with Call Center Companies
The call center companies’ “customers” I mean in this article are the businesses that procure the service — companies that hire a provider to operate a call center for them. The individuals who normally contact these centers are the end beneficiaries of the service provided through them. That side may deserve its own article later, because the individual side is more linked to the practices of the company that engages the service provider.
So at the outset, let’s agree the primary customer of call center operators is the business (B2B), and the secondary customer is the individuals who call those centers. The core question I want to discuss in this article is: do call center operators deliver customer experience to their business clients? Or just a service? As long as their offerings are no different from their competitors’, what they deliver remains a service, not an experience.
In my article on Managing Customer Experience in B2B, I discussed the fundamental differences between managing CX for individuals versus businesses. For the rest of this article, I’ll speak from my personal experience and the experiences of some colleagues and friends with various call center companies (without naming or hinting at any company) — as an invitation to all call centers to reflect on the discussion and ask themselves: are we really delivering experience or just service? I’ll walk through the main stages of the customer’s journey with these companies.
The Service Request Stage
Call center companies receive many RFPs from companies thinking about setting up a dedicated center to serve their customers. Many of these clients don’t have sufficient knowledge of the service or whether they really need it. If they don’t reach out to several call center companies, their knowledge gap may be exploited and they may receive astronomical price proposals. This knowledge gap is an opportunity to deliver a great customer experience — by assessing the company’s current state and its real need to establish a dedicated center based on data and facts. Professional integrity could even extend to helping the company prepare an RFP that includes all the requirements they’ll need based on their current state — and, on top of that, providing the client with a list of similar service providers (competitors) so the client can decide where to send the RFP. Is this scenario better, or the sales-greed scenario that tries to learn the client’s budget and then engineer an RFP on the client’s behalf that lets them win the project — far removed from the client’s real needs, viewing the client as just a lucrative deal?
It’s worth noting that some service providers go to great lengths to win business with the sole aim of putting the client’s logo in their portfolio. They may submit very low prices to win the project, but that often reflects negatively on quality and on project staff later. I’ll go deeper into employee experience before the end of the article.
It’s important at this stage, if a company asks for your advice or an RFP response, not to attack competitors with hurtful descriptions. I’ve noticed this is common in the industry. Anyone who attacks competitors loses their credibility with me immediately. Wish everyone well and let the experience be the customer’s best proof. It’s also important that transparency be high and that prices not vary wildly between vendors (both have nearly the same requirements). Imagine, for example, that the provider’s website includes an online calculator where you select the number of agents, supervisors, and whether you want them to speak Arabic only or Arabic and English — with the price updating as each option or feature is selected. That gives any site visitor an upfront assurance about the company’s honesty and credibility.
A final note in this stage on price proposals: brevity is best. Don’t send your clients an RFP response of over 100 pages and expect them to read it — knowing more than 80% of the content is filler that adds no value. Understand your client’s need, their level of knowledge in the field, whether they like details or not, and tailor the proposal accordingly. Instead of including a detailed company history since inception, include some sample reports the client will receive or dashboards they’ll access to monitor team performance. The proposal is a touchpoint that affects your customer’s experience positively or negatively. Give it some care and stop using the same template for every client (one size doesn’t fit all).
The Onboarding Stage
The launch preparation stage includes many tasks: selecting and hiring the team that will face customers and training them on the personal, knowledge, and technical (tools) sides, and qualifying them to interact with customers. There’s a major challenge here for the client company — especially if it’s establishing a customer service center for the first time — namely, their level of knowledge on complaint handling, complaint classification, how to handle each type, and how to report to senior leadership. Here, too, is a great opportunity for call center companies to deliver an outstanding experience to their clients by educating them on selecting employees, helping them understand their industry and the nature of their services and products, and how, for example, to build a knowledge base that includes all the details a customer service agent might need to do the job well. They can also help them choose the most suitable system that meets their needs: instead of pushing them to buy a costly CRM, they can advise them on a simple ticketing system that will cost almost nothing in comparison (the goal is to advise the client on a system that meets their need — no more, no less). They can then train the client on its use, on extracting reports, and on how to share and present them to senior leadership.
The Operations Stage
Call center companies must focus, at the start of actual operations, on the project’s trajectory and on the problems facing the agents serving customers. They play the role of the main link between the project team and the client (the business that requested the service) to take corrective actions early in the project. Call center companies must also send periodic reports on service levels and the quality of agent performance, and grant them direct access either to live calls or to recordings — even sharing specific recordings that may interest them in making certain decisions. Often you’ll find client companies chasing the call center operator for reports — that’s very wrong. Operators must be proactive in such areas and not wait for the client to request explanations or reports that are rightfully theirs without having to ask. They should call this out in the earliest stages (in the service request stage).
Returning to the client’s level of understanding of complaint-handling techniques, policies, and procedures, I ask loudly: do call center companies really advise clients and guide them on best practices? Or do they only flex muscles in the proposal, tempt the client with their prior work with industry peers (competitors), and boast collective expertise across many industries over many years — without applying any of that to serve and benefit this new client? What’s the point of all this bravado if the client doesn’t benefit from these experiences and doesn’t receive guidance on better practices that might save them money or make the end-user (their customer) experience better?
Service providers can also help shape their clients’ complaint-handling strategies. For example, if they don’t have a defined process to analyze complaints and identify root causes, the provider advises and educates them on how to do this — even if doing so conflicts with the provider’s interests (for instance, less need for additional staff on the project = lower revenue).
Does the service provider alert clients to any potential risk — for example, when a new type of complaint suddenly emerges around a specific event that could be averted if the client is informed early? Do they wait for the snowball to grow and sweep up everything in its path, or do they proactively reach out to the client early so they can address it earlier and at much lower cost?
I close this stage with technology: does the company actively offer clients solutions on transforming the center from a call center into a contact center with multiple channels rather than phone-only? And does it then help them find an end-to-end solution that brings all service channels under one umbrella — the shift from multi-channel to omni-channel?
The Post-Sales Stage
Here we enter a stage that is highly sensitive yet often neglected by many service providers. After securing the deal (end of the honeymoon!), this is what happens to many clients, unfortunately. It’s very important to have an account manager who follows up with stakeholders at the client and contacts them regularly, visiting them at least once per quarter to assess the service level and to confirm whether services meet the client’s needs and expectations. After returning to the office, they coordinate with colleagues to solve any issue the client is facing. This is to refute the saying “the carpenter’s door is broken” [the carpenter has no door of his own] — meaning that a company that deals with thousands of people daily, taking their complaints and supporting them, fails to do the same with its main clients (the businesses that procure the service) and fails to record details about them in its CRM. Note that we’re not talking about one party at the client; the relationship manager must have a clear picture of all stakeholders. For example: the needs and expectations of a procurement head differ entirely from those of a customer service head or a CX head, and each will view what call center companies deliver differently. And what about the CEO… and so on.
What About Employee Experience?
I’m talking here about the employees working at the call center operators. Do these companies, the ones contracting them, care about their (work environment) experience? Does that affect how they interact with end users? Absolutely. I have visited some call center workplaces, and the conditions were catastrophic in every sense: overcrowding was extreme; the smell — pardon me — was poor due to bad ventilation; noise pollution was very high, and the company hadn’t used any sound-insulating materials. Don’t you think that negatively affects project staff and end users? Move on to the tools: computers, headsets, and headset quality (some low-quality headsets are very harmful to the ears with prolonged use). Then look at enablers — permissions and the knowledge required to do the job well. Do call center operators fight for that? Do they reach out to client companies and ask them to make work easier for the employee, empower them with certain authorities, or build a knowledge base for them to access information faster and more effectively? Or is the employee just a number in their records who can be replaced and dispensed with at any moment? Work environment details can be raised with the client from the very first stage (service request) — operators don’t need to wait for clients to bring it up. It’s the operator’s duty to flag these matters even if the client lacks the desire or knowledge to recognize the importance and impact of employee experience on the service delivered to the end user. Worse than all the above is the contractual side with employees and the manipulation around bonuses and increases they’re promised and don’t receive, the lack of compensation for overtime, and in many cases deductions from their (already weak) salaries on the pretext of low quality and bad practices. Then someone comes along and says it’s natural in this kind of industry that attrition (resignations) is high — but rarely do we find anyone asking questions that address this problem and investigate the root causes of the constant resignations.
Want to Make a Difference?
Real change isn’t about changing your company’s name, or changing some employees’ titles by adding “customer experience” to them. That changes nothing on the ground; on the contrary, it raises expectations and increases disappointments among your clients. Even if it gives you some short-term sales (because it’s a flashy, sales-friendly phrase), it will tarnish your reputation in the long term. In the Arabic proverb: “He who claims what is not within him is exposed by the tests of life.” In the hadith: “He who pretends to have what he was not given is like one who wears the two garments of falsehood” [Bukhari & Muslim].
You need to take the matter seriously and build a team focused on managing CX for clients. But I caution that the starting point isn’t the team — it’s the company’s strategy and vision around the impact it wants to make on the experience of its clients. Creating various units covering all the main CX pillars — for example, experience measurement, experience design, cultural transformation, continuous improvement — without a strategy and roadmap behind them may bear no fruit and generate big costs the company doesn’t need.
In Closing
This is just a drop in the ocean, and the topic is vast. I may not have covered every stage with sufficient depth, but the article would become long and dull and I don’t want to weigh too heavily on the reader. I hope this article has been useful to practitioners (our cousins) in customer service and offered some practical advice that helps them make a difference and view customer experience from a different angle. Now, after reading this article — whether you procure these services or provide them — I’ll repeat the question: do call center operators deliver customer experience to their business clients, or just a service?
Related concepts: Voice of Customer (VoC), Customer Journey Mapping, Closed-Loop Feedback.
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