With all the contact centre technology and CRM investment over the last five years, is customer service improving?

Paul White, CEO mplsystems
Without a doubt the customer experience is improving, but you’ve really got to think of the customer experience in two parts. There’s the traditional contact centre functions where people are responding to initial telephone calls or emails. But there’s probably an equally important part of the customer experience that isn’t quite as well-served by technology, and that’s the field sales or service engineers who are actually fulfilling or delivering specific products and services. These guys are just as important a piece of that overall customer experience as the initial contact centre persons themselves.

What challenges do businesses offering field-based services face?
It’s pretty simple really. You’ve got to get the right people to the right job, to the right place at the right time with the right information to complete that process or task that they’re carrying out. How often do you have a great initial call when your problem is being accepted by the contact centre, only to find out that the engineer doesn’t turn up or that he’s turned up with the wrong parts or the wrong piece of equipment to diagnose the fault?

Do mobile field-worker products available today really impact the end-user experience?
Quite often, a lot of the problems with the technology that’s available today is there is a big disconnect actually between the people who are initially responding to the customers through the contact centre environment and the field-based sales and service engineers. Very often there is no direct linkage. There’s no data coming back from the field engineers to say whether they’re en route to a job or whether they’ve arrived on the job, information that can be really useful in empowering the agents to give a really good message to the customers that are calling in originally.

Providing that linkage, the direct linkage between the contact centre that’s dealing with the initial and subsequent points of contact from the customers and the field-based services, and providing the data and the process and the workflow that joins those two elements together, is probably one of the critical things that customers can do to improve their end-to-end customer experience and the delivery of an excellent customer experience.