LISTENING TO YOUR CALL CENTER by W H Inmon

LISTENING TO YOUR CALL CENTER

BY W H Inmon

The other day I was talking to management of a corporation. We were discussing how corporations can hear the voice of their customer.

In a year long ago, the merchant would know everyone who came into the merchant’s shop. The merchant would have lived in the town a long time. The merchant’s children would have been on the same sports teams as the townspeople. The merchant attended the same church or synagogue as the customers who came into the shop. The merchant attended 4th of July celebrations and Christmas and weddings and funerals with the townspeople. The merchant knew practically every person entering the door by their first name.

So, it was easy to anticipate what was on the mind of the customer in that day long ago.

But times have changed. In today’s world cities are bigger. The population of the cities is more transient. There are more shops to choose from. It simply isn’t possible to have a longstanding personal relationship with every person entering the shop. But that doesn’t mean that hearing the voice of the customer isn’t important. In fact, in many ways it is even more important in today’s world than it ever was before.

Exactly what do you hear when you hear the voice of the customer? You hear everything –

  Complaints

  Suggestions

  Questions about installations

  Pricing suggestions

  And plenty more.

Where then is a good place to start in order to hear the voice of your customer? A good pace to start is the ubiquitous call center – the corporate 800 number which almost all large corporations have.

In today’s world executives know how many calls a day that they get and how long those calls are. But they know precious little else about the conversations that occur in the call center. At best they may examine a small sampling of the phone calls that have transpired. Wouldn’t it be nice to know what ALL the calls said? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a neatly organized data base with all the information about the call center phone calls?

Well now you can have such a data base. If you would like to find out more about how you can start to listen to the voice of the customer in your call center, take a look at Bill Inmon’s You Tube video.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3svvG-HIac

You are going to be pleasantly surprised because now it is possible to start to hear the voice of your customer.

Bill Inmon’s latest books are HEARING THE VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER, Technics Publications and TURNING TEXT INTO GOLD, Technics Publications. In addition, Bill has the book DATA ARCHITECTURE: SECOND EDITION, Elsevier Publications out as well. Bill’s company – Forest Rim Technology – has technology that reads text and turns that text into a standard data base. Bill is based in Denver, Colorado.