First Post

Here goes - keyboard primed - first post. Bit embarrassing that since it's 2008 - but better late than never...

Rather disappointingly, I find myself blogging on similar themes in which I wrote my first ever CCF (well it was called Call Centre Focus then...) colums back in 1993 - the poor public perception of contact centres and the delight in which the media like to kick us. Now, much of this is clearly our fault (no smoke without fire etc etc) and my recent experience with a florist who failed to deliver my mum's Mothering Sunday flowers (no names, no packdrill, but their name is an anagram of floraInter....) tells me we're not perfect. However, we are in kicking season, it would seem, coming off the back of a week of BBC Breakfast coverage (didn't see it myself, never did get the hang of television in the morning) and in anticipation of a Channel 4 Cutting Edge this coming Thursday (Phone Rage) we are rather in the thick of it.

From the conferences I go to and the customers I speak to, I know things are so much better than they were. From my experience as a consumer, contact centres are generally pretty good. So why the constant media kicking?

Well, I suppose there are the obvious reasons. "Great service from call centres" is hardly a headline to get the juices flowing, and journalists do enjoy dealing with a profession held in even less regard as their own. But we also need to understand our role in this as a profession.

Firstly, we don't always get it right. Nobody always gets it right, but we don't get it right pretty spectacularly sometimes. Contact centres exist in every area of our lives, we spend hours every year dealing with them as consumers, and those experiences don't have to be too bad to nark people off.

Secondly, when we do get it right, it's not just that people don't remember the good experiences, they often simply don't even realise they've been dealing with a contact centre! The general public's "clues" that they're dealing with a contact centre are long queues, horrible IVR menus, stilted scripting and "computer says no" type interactions with systems. When we get this right, there should be no IVR menus, no horrible queues, and systems that don't appear to be systems.
So perhaps the problem is that when we're good at what we do, people don't even realise we're their? The goal of service from Victorian times.

I'd better go and do some real work. Watch the Channel 4 prog, and do respond if they're nasty. Tell your mates if you get a service that's good. And tell me what you think of contact centres' portrayal in the media.

Bye for now.