Contact center agents are company’s most important brand ambassadors

MANILA, Philippines - The importance of the contact center’s function as brand ambassador has been overlooked by management for years. But this is about to change as more and more companies are realizing that the battle to win – and maintain the customers is fought by contact center agents every day.

“We recognize the trend and appreciate the acknowledgment of the significant role of the contact center,” said Holger Reisinger, Jabra vice president of Marketing, Products and Alliances. “We believe that contact center agents are major contributors in safeguarding brand perception and by making this value-add tangible will clearly demonstrate their role as brand ambassadors alongside Marketing.”

Laura Bassett, director of Marketing and Customer Experience at Avaya, a global leader in business communications, and Sarah Stealey Reed, content director at International Customer Manager Institute (ICMI), both say they see a shift toward the contact centers becoming much more of a customer experience and knowledge center, playing an important role as “brand guardian”.

“When customers finally contact the contact center it is because they literally have reached the end of the line. So, that interaction with the agent needs to be fantastic or this might very well be the last time you will ever hear from that customer again,” Reed says.

Companies are no longer being defined by their products, but by the way that customers experience them. And now that the customers have so many options of brands and products to choose from that experience is vital. “That is why call center agents are becoming much more like brand ambassadors,” Reed concludes.

A recent white paper commissioned by Microsoft Corp. and released by research firm IDC likewise highlighted that current and future jobs require more than just technical skills, but also knowledge and cognitive skills.

This makes capital investments on improving agents’ interpersonal skills and domain knowledge crucial, as professionally skilled and experienced agents are now valuable assets for companies.

For many companies,  lean and cost reduction have been key words during the financial crisis, and there has been a great focus on how each contact center agent can minimize the customer handling time.

But according to Bassett this can be risky business as this might save the company cost initially but may leave the customer with unresolved issues after having been through customer service. This could mean that your company may have saved on handling time but may leave customer with all that extra work, creating a very poor customer experience of your brand.

 â€œWhat customers want right now is to be helped as fast and effectively as possible. So the agent needs to be effective, efficient and proficient about it – it is not about how long it takes the customer service agent afterwards, but about helping the customer as soon as possible,” Reed says.

Bassett said that businesses must never forget that the way your customer service agents handle your customers’ issues basically communicates whether you care about your customers or not.

And those customers will not hesitate to tell other customers publicly what they think about your customer service, which is why an increasing amount of critical communication on social media steams from customers sharing bad customer service stories on Facebook and Twitter.