Brands can develop a closer relationship with consumers by outsourcing customer care than by doing it themselves, according to Chris Jacobs, CEO of 121 Outsource, one of the oldest independently owned outsource contact centres in South Africa.
“It sounds paradoxical, but it makes a lot of sense,” says Jacobs, who works closely with promotional agency CallingtheCape to mentor and guide other entrepreneurs. “In the fast-moving consumer goods industry producers are typically at one or two removes from their end users – their actual customers are distributors and retailers. So we find that their customer relationship management (CRM) systems are almost always designed to track retailers and their sales, not consumers – and that can make it very hard to spot problems with a brand until it’s very late.”
Even when producers do implement their own consumer care programmes, says Jacobs, they almost always lack the technology and expertise to do so effectively. “It’s just not their core business. Most of the time people put in an interactive voice response system, then have a handful of contact centre workers answering calls – during office hours only – taking down caller details and promising a response that may or may not come. That is not an experience that makes customers feel special.”
By contrast, says Jacobs, an outsourced contact centre that specialises in customer care and brand management will place far greater emphasis on ensuring that problems are resolved first time, and that no call ends before a customer is happy. “When I call to report a problem or ask a question about a product, I want first of all to talk to somebody who will listen to me, and secondly for that person to actually make something happen. I don’t want to hear that they will call me back, or that I need to be speaking to a different department, or that I should put a damaged product in the post and send it back.”
“Our first priority is to protect the integrity of the brands we serve,” says Jacobs, whose company manages customer care for around 120 brands in the food and beverage industry, as well as loyalty programmes. “So we’re open after hours, we collect damaged or faulty products from the customer’s home and we try to make the customer smile before they end their conversation with us. We offer that magic moment when we have the first contact with the distraught customer. It gives the customer confidence in the brand and sends many positive signals.”
“When we started with one of our clients we found that 100% of calls were complaints,” says Jacobs. “Now 40% are customers who want to ask questions or communicate with the brand in some way. This brand has actively promoted the idea of communication to its customers – they are promising conversation, and we fulfil that promise for them.”
Jacobs says customer contact centres are also massively under-rated as a source of business intelligence. “We actively capture, monitor and mine data about what is going with each brand, and present our clients with regular reports,” says Jacobs. “We can see which stores are getting most complaints or compliments and when that changes, and we’re often the first to know when there is a problem with product quality in a particular batch. Taking customer feedback seriously means it’s much easier to spot problems, and fix them, before they show up in the quarterly financial results.”
The benefits to the bottom line are clear, says Jacobs. “If you show the consumer that the brand actually cares about them, you build loyalty and increase sales and market penetration. Customer care is not something any brand can afford to neglect.”
