The Invisible Customer

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Brian Clegg

The call centre and the Internet are changing the face of customer contact - but at what price? Customer service quality has never been more at risk. The company that can deal efficiently with its invisible customers and still provide great customer service, though, has an unrivalled opportunity for success.

The Invisible Customer examines the whole range of service opportunities generated by new technologies and shows how to make the most of them. Packed with examples, quotes and action points, the book is about providing people with the products and services they are looking for, in a way they will appreciate - customer satisfaction.

Based on practical experience, this comprehensive book advises on how to make customer service count in environments where staff are often transitory and under-motivated, and where contact time is at a premium. An innovative, hands-on guide to a neglected but vitally important area of customer relations.

The Invisible Customer is essential reading for managers, but it also provides an invaluable tool for front-line call centre and Internet-based service staff.

Extract

Good customer service is an essential requirement to differentiate your company from the competition, yet new technology has opened a gaping void between customer expectations and service delivery. The inexorable move to call centres and Internet-based services takes place alongside growing complaints about the lack of friendliness of these new customer interfaces.

Once upon a time all the technology jokes were about video recorders. How you needed a doctorate just to program them - though of course your seven-year-old seemed to be able to do it. Now touch-tone interactive voice response systems are on the receiving end of trouble-with-technology gags. Everyone has a story about how they have spent half an hour punching through telephone menus until their index finger is numb, only to be told to ring a different number. The fact is that customer service through these vehicles is at best poor and at worst non-existent.

This is a field full of hardware and software vendors, trying to sell you the latest product to make your call centre work more effectively, or to link your ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning system) to your front office and BI (Business Intelligence) functionality to provide UBA (Universal Business Applications). These people just love acronyms. The technology is important, and it does feature in this book, but in the end neither the book nor customer service is about technology. It is about people – about providing another human being with the products and services they are looking for, in a way that they will appreciate.

This book gives you a chance to make a difference. It is essential reading for managers, but it also provides an invaluable tool for front line call centre and Internet-based service staff. It might not be practical for everyone to attend a three day customer service course, but begrudging the time to read a book does not make sense. After all, do you want to be part of the company that gets a grip on giving the invisible customer great service, or one of the also-rans? Remember that in this business traditional timescales can be collapsed to a remarkable extent. There might not be much time left.

Throughout the book examples and quotes are used. About half of these are from the IT industry, simply because IT businesses are often more heavily into Web support than most, and because many of the examples I came across had an IT context. The lessons, however apply equally to any business dealing with remote customers.

The need

In a 2000 report by management consultants Shelley Taylor & Associates, many large retailers were slammed for providing poor online service. They found that many items ordered from the retailers' Web sites went missing, were difficult to return or included hidden extra costs. Everyone has their own horror stories if being mishandled on the phone or the Internet. There is no room for complacency.