Establishing Trust in a Contact Centre environment.

With the ever increasing usage of electronic funds transfer, and the resultant disappearance of paper cheques, the world’s long-standing number 1 lie – The cheque is in the mail –  has lost relevance.

And the new contender for this dubious honour is -- Your call is important to us – typically pre-recorded after the words -- Please continue to hold.

After the second or third rotation of what is far from the reassurance intended, the incoming caller is left with no alternative but to assume their time is of zero importance to the contact centre of their product or service supplier , or prospective supplier.

Performance management of contact centre personnel is a great example of the truism :-

   Not everything that can be measured matters, and not everything that matters can be measured.

Contact centre management have a confusing array of statistical analysis of their performance – time to answer, time on call, time between calls, caller tolerance, call abandonment rate.  In fact call abandonment rate is often regarded as the primary KPI for contact centre performance.   Service level objectives are all about efficiency –  “X per cent of all calls answered in Y seconds”.

Where is the consideration of effectiveness?  And most importantly, where is the analysis of % achievement of the caller’s objectives?

Perhaps Rutherford D Rogers could foresee the future of contact centres when he said many years ago “we’re drowning in information and starving for knowledge.”

Before there is any chance of meeting an objective of establishing, maintaining or enhancing the trust of the incoming caller, this objective must be nominated as an objective.  Only then can statistics on the effectiveness of new business written, or existing business retained by contact centre operatives assume their correct prominence in performance assessment.

With all businesses other than monopolies, but particularly with banks, financial services providers and insurance companies, the incoming caller must first feel an acceptable level of Trust in the person they are speaking to ( and the perception of a high level of seller orientation  is the quickest killer of trust ) , before there is any interest in what the contact centre representative has to say, or the solution they propose.

That’s the way it is with all consumers – “I don’t care about what you have to say until I know that I trust you!”