Article Written By: katieb
Recently, companies are finding it hard to compete with the sheer competency of BPO customer service solutions, and as time goes by we are seeing increasingly how leverage of outsourcing in this area which can allow for companies to utilize highly skilled customer service and customer care strategies to further the business model. Though there are many variations on the form this truism takes, it always equates to the same thing; that being, in an ideal scenario, our customers are freely allowed treatment which recognizes the fact that they are the lynchpin around which every business is erected. But there are ways we can understand and carry out the implications of this maxim to good effect, rather than simply mouthing it as empty policy. How so? The concepts of customer care and customer services are nothing new, but perhaps with the developments of such areas of business we have begun to think rather conventionally. We can easily illustrate this.One of several ways a business acquires an edge over its competitors is through taking an empathic approach towards customer interaction. In plain English? Simply that it is possible to weigh up how a customer will react to elements of one's service by asking this question: Would I deal with this business if I were the customer? This may seem obvious, but nevertheless there are businesses whose processes expect things of their customers (waiting in call queues, answering questionnaires) which they themselves would not be prepared to do.If we take CRM theory to its logical conclusion, it claims to give us concrete figures on discount rate, retention cost, and relative profit margins. CRM theory therefore tells us that customers are in no way the royal card, but are perhaps a kind of venal court official who has to be bought at a price from the treasury. The customer is now an abstract figure, little more than an equation, and when you begin seeing your customers as mathematical equations it s time to remind yourself that mathematical constructs don t go shopping or open service accounts. Customers are not figures, but they are surprisingly alert to when they feel they are being regarded merely as one. Moral? Take care not to take the science beyond what it describes. Don Peppers once wrote the almost proverbial words 'customers have memories. They will remember you, whether you remember them or not,' and though we have discussed the problems of CRM, by no means should we cast it aside. We need to understand the impact our good or bad service has, and to understand how to read the implications of this impact. One difficulty lies in openly investigating areas such as churn rate: though we may not want to face it, it is usually easy to identify when excessive churn is resulting from customer dissatisfaction, especially after modification has been made to the customer experience.How providers who offer BPO Services are going about this increased level must be subject for another article, but what is clear is this: the only way towards furthering any business strategy lies with the ability to acknowledge just how crucial the customer experience really is.
This Article Has Been Published on Mon, 1 Feb 2010 and Read 219 Times