Bangkok--21 Sep--Total Quality PR
Turn your call centre into a corporate asset: Engage customers by engaging agents, urges Genesys
Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc., an Alcatel company (Paris: CGEP.PA, NYSE: ALA), today released survey findings indicating that leading contact centres in Thailand recognise that they need to focus on what is both their highest cost and their most valuable asset: agents.
At “Unleash The Power of Your Contact Centre,” a call centre event held in Bangkok today, senior decision-makers from Thailand and international companies discussed contact centre trends and developments and shared experiences, noting that effective customer service strategies were the key to increasing competitiveness, market share and brand awareness in the fast-growing Thailand economy.
In the highly competitive business space, building and managing customer relationships becomes a key differentiating factor. The strategic role of customer service in businesses has transformed the role of the contact centre from that of a cost centre into a key source of revenue generation and long-term customer loyalty.
This is in line with findings from the Asia-Pacific Consumer Survey commissioned by Genesys this August. The survey revealed that the key determinant of customer loyalty is the quality of customer experience. Positive customer experience was the single greatest influence in customer engagement by call centre agents. The survey found that 71 percent of customers would do business with a company based on a great call centre experience, while 67 percent of respondents had stopped doing business with a company due to poor customer service.
The survey also revealed that 56 percent of customers would feel less loyal towards the company when the company pushes them to self-service systems instead of a live agent, while 28 percent would complain to friends and family and 16 percent would simply stop doing business with that company.
“As the first point of contact with the customer, agents continue to be the face of most companies and it’s the experience they deliver to customers that has the most impact on customer loyalty,” said James Brooks, senior vice president, Asia Pacific, Genesys. “At Genesys, we believe customer engagement begins with agent engagement, and turning customers into positive ‘word of mouth’ advocates and brand champions requires an emotional connection with companies that is delivered by agents.”
The effective engagement of customers increases the strategic value of the contact centre as a corporate asset, transforming the contact centre from a cost centre to a revenue stream for the organisation. Contact centre solutions such as Genesys’ standards-based software can be harnessed to improve agent performance and productivity and enhance the customer experience, through better service and in turn generating more sales.
While remuneration is important to agents, it is not necessarily their biggest driver of motivation. Seventy-five percent of agents are most motivated by factors that engender a sense of personal satisfaction and achievement in their daily work, although only 52 percent of agents report experiencing this. The biggest agent motivator is feeling or being told that they have helped a customer, while a majority of their job stress relates to customer frustration and the inability to serve customers well.
One of the keys to maximising agent productivity is to manage the balance between service levels and costs, and many contact centre managers are achieving this by engaging agents to make outbound calls when inbound call volumes are low. Companies that have had the best success with this are the 27 percent working with dynamically integrated inbound and outbound systems. One type of outbound call is the value-add or courtesy call, where companies make proactive outbound calls to customers to provide them with useful information or to evaluate their satisfaction with the company. In an era where telemarketing is becoming less effective, these outbound calls have a significant positive impact on both customers and agents, and 89 percent of consumers said their opinion of a company would improve if they received a courtesy call, while 39 percent of agents say these calls would make their job more satisfying.
About Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc.
Genesys, an Alcatel company, is 100 percent focused on software for contact centres. Leading companies in the Global 2000 and Fortune 1000 use Genesys to deliver interactions that drive better business. With 3000 customers in 80 countries, Genesys directs more than 100 million customer interactions every day. Genesys allows enterprises to achieve key business objectives by tying together customer interactions, people, and customer information in both traditional telephony and IP environments. Sophisticated routing and reporting across voice, e-mail, documents and Web interactions, coupled with integrated self-service, ensure that customers are quickly connected to the right resource - the first time. Genesys solutions stop customer frustration and allow enterprises to deliver superior customer satisfaction and improved business results. For more information visit us at www.genesyslab.com .
About Alcatel
Alcatel provides communications solutions to telecommunication carriers, Internet service providers and enterprises for delivery of voice, data and video applications to their customers or employees. Alcatel brings its leading position in fixed and mobile broadband networks, applications and services, to help its partners and customers build a user-centric broadband world. With sales of EURO 12.3 billion and 56,000 employees in 2004, Alcatel operates in more than 130 countries. For more information, visit Alcatel on the Internet: http://www.alcatel.com .
For more information as well as pictures, please do not hesitate to contact:
Tom Van Blarcom / Ruthaiwan Tanwongwan
Total Quality PR (Thailand) Co., Ltd.
Tel: 0-2260-5820 Ext. 114
Fax: 0-2260-5847-8
Mobile: 08-6633-8171
Email: [email protected]