Empathy and the contact centre

Harding & Yorke conducted research and found that for every percentage point increase in customer empathy there was a 17 point increase in earnings for the average organisation. This finding is the reason why contact centres should not be automated to the point that they take people out of the equation. So many of the customer experiences provided today by contact centres damage rather than strengthen empathy. And this has a direct impact on customer loyalty.

It will come as no great surprise that the vast majority of automated answering systems do nothing to build empathy. The same goes for most company’s on-hold messages. How about that old chestnut: “Due to unusually high call volumes all our advisors are busy at the moment, but please hold as your call is important to us”. Yeah, right - so unusual in fact that they have created a recorded message in anticipation of the extraordinary event.

The reality is the organisation figures that your time is less important than optimising their manning levels so that they allow the hold-time to build up almost to the point that the average customer will hang up. No wonder then that customers generally find IVR’s and hold messages a significant source of frustration. Evidence of this came recently when ‘how to get past the IVR system’ codes went up on the Net and received mass media coverage.

If your brand strategy is such that it is important for you to differentiate on the basis of your customer experience then you need to look at every element of your contact centre as an opportunity to create customer empathy rather than an opportunity to slash costs. Research has shown that for some organizations whose customer model involves large volumes of business, and therefore customer interaction, through the contact centre – some insurance companies, for example – up to 90% of the customer’s perception of the brand is created by their experience when they deal with your contact centre.

One organisation found that if customers laughed during a call, their Net Promoter Score (a measure of satisfaction) went up by eight points on average. Now, I am not suggesting for a moment that your agents should be cracking jokes, but I am suggesting that creating a real connection with a customer is a powerful way of creating a customer experience that differentiates your brand and, in so doing, drives revenue. I think it is much harder to get that level of connection when the agents are hired hands and feel no connection to your brand themselves.

My prediction is that as organisations start focussing back on their top line rather than on cost reduction, we shall see more contact centres moving back on-shore and making greater use of well trained agents who are tasked with creating an emotional connection with their most valuable customers.