Call centers are an investment, not a cost

If you would like to build a customer relationship built on empathy and trust it would be a good idea to consider how you treat your call center. Is it an investment into the relationships with your clients or do you see it as a cost that needs to be cut and optimized?

Have you ever wondered where call centers came from? In the 1960s, virtually all businesses were selling goods and products, so call centers were the only tool for them to build any kind of relationship with their customers. And the customer relationship was important, because it was the only thing that gave a chance that when it came time to buy the next washing powder, replace the fridge or repair the car, the customer would consider a given brand at all. The lack of spontaneous brand recall meant, in essence, zero chance of repeat purchase.

I once heard a story about a chain of car repair shops in the US where every customer would always be served by a teller named Helen. You called about a tyre replacement and Helen recommended the best option for you. You called about a repair, again Helen made an appointment for you. The sense of personal service grew, and as a result, loyalty and a desire to return grew as well. The unconventional idea behind this particular service was that all female consultants working at this particular shop would introduce themselves as Helen. This gave an illusion of having a dedicated consultant, and this illusion was so strongly underpinned by a good customer data collection system that it was easy to be fooled. There are more examples like this, and they occurred because, until the late 1990s, call centers were regarded as an investment in building customer relationships rather than a cost.

Since the early 2000s, more and more companies, instead of offering goods and products, started offering services. Services are characterized by the fact that they last over time and that they have virtual elements combined with physical ones. Consequently, the role of call centers as ‘builders’ of customer relationships ceased to matter as much as in the previous dacades. Over time, they began to be seen as a cost rather than an investment, and costs, after all, need to be cut. And so we find ourselves in a place where often students earning a living at university get jobs as call center consultants, where they are instructed that their role is to close every call in three minutes and preferably upsell something in the meantime. And so, instead of building a relationship with customers, call centers have become specialized in how to persuade the customer to buy something and, if that fails, to dispose of them in such a way that they either serve themselves or don’t bother at all —because everything is covered in the terms and conditions, right? And the terms and conditions are written, firstly, from the perspective of the company and not the customer and, secondly, they are so long and complicated that nobody reads them anyway. So when someone hears that ‘it says in the terms and conditions’ it sets off a chain reaction that I don’t think any company aware of the value of customer experience would want to set off.

Why? Every customer has an idea of what a particular service or interaction with a company should look like. This idea includes a picture of the ideal interaction but also an interaction that the customer will find still acceptable. This can be imagined as a point scale, where 5 is the handling of the matter as imagined by the customer and 1 is the minimum acceptable way to conduct such an interaction. When something goes wrong, the customer’s perception falls below level 1. Usually, such a situation is associated with irritation, anger, stress and other negative emotions, which evolutionary set off the ‘fight-freeze-flight’ response in each of us. It is also associated with a sense of disappointment, because it was supposed to be so nice…

The annoyed customer picks up the phone and calls the call center, hoping that there is still a chance to resolve the situation in a mutually acceptable way. There they hear that they have not read the terms and conditions and that everything was written there. This causes them deep disappointment, anger and resentment for a second time. Thus, within a short period of time, the company has let the customer down twice. The perception of the quality of the company and the experience it offers drops even lower triggering another evolutionary reaction — threat avoidance. Such customers become, on the one hand, passive customers, i.e. reluctant to buy more services or products and, if they are bound by a contract, they often leave at the end of it. But this is not the worst yet.

A disappointed customer has a need to share their disappointment with others. In a study carried out a few years ago, we found that, just as positive stories about an interaction with a brand and its offerings are told to an average of six people, usually immediate family and friends, negative stories are told to an average of 11 people from further and closer circles of acquaintances. What’s more, positive stories have a kind of ‘expiry date’ ending after a year (on average), while negative stories live for at least a decade. This is another evolutionary habit — if something is ‘harmful’ (and the feeling of stress is perceived as harmful), as many people as possible should be warned of this harm and the situation itself avoided for as long as possible.

Does this mean that you should give way to your customers in everything? Of course not. But there are a few practices that will help alleviate the feeling that a negative interaction with you is causing. First and foremost, it is worth apologizing for what has happened. It doesn’t matter whether the fault is on your side or the customer’s, an apology will take away much of the stress and anger. It is also worth promising that you will do everything in your power to resolve the problem. In this case, even if at the end of the day your final response is negative, you will have built up a sense in the customer that you at least tried to help. And finally, it is worth asking yourself whether the cost of handling the complaint outweighs the value of the complaint itself. Some time ago, we made exactly such a calculation with one of my clients and the result was that a sum was immediately put in place up to which all complaints are acknowledged without any thought being given to their validity. Of course, there were fears that clients would realize this and take advantage of it, but nothing like that happened. What did happen instead was that after such a situation, customers felt positively surprised and definitely more inclined to loyalty and call center employees again felt responsible for building customer relationships rather than destroying them.

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Aga Szóstek, PhD is an experience designer with over 19 years of practice in both academic and business world. She is an author of “The Umami Strategy: stand out by mixing business with experience design”, and “Leadership by Design: the essential guide to transforming you as a leader”, a creator of tools supporting designers in the ideation process: Seed Cards and the co-host in the Catching The Next Wave podcast.