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Treating customers as individuals in the call center

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers EXPERT RESPONSE FROM: Don Peppers and Martha Rogers

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QUESTION POSED ON: 04 June 2008
As a call center manager, what can I do to put the right information in the hands of call center agents so they can increase customer profitability?

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EXPERT RESPONSE
A great example of a company that's doing this very well is USAA Worldwide Insurance. Although there are other companies that do things very similar to this and do a very good job of it, the reason we think it is important to use USAA Insurance as an example is because USAA has a mantra at the company to simply treat a customer the way you'd want to be treated if you were a customer. So there is never the fear that they'd annoy people by offering them something irrelevant because they are "offering the same thing to everybody today." Instead, what USAA does is their system actually decides what the next question is they'd like to ask the customer. It then waits until that particular customer calls in, which they will do from time to time, and when they do what pops up on the screen for whomever answers the phone is what USAA calls a "smart dialog suggestion," and that is actually the next thing that they want to know from that particular customer. It's not the same question being asked of everyone that month. And in that way they're able to serve their customers better, they're able to use their customer's time better, and they are able to treat customers the way they would want to be treated.

Hear more in Creating Customer Value, a SearchCRM.com monthly podcast series with Peppers and Rogers.


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