Contact centres
Quote of the month
“The main objectives of the contact unit are to free commercial time for the branch and to streamline and optimize interaction with clients”
Paolo Lisci, Contact Unit Manager at Banca Intesa Sanpaolo, Italy
Overall issues
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The people
Banks depend on people – so they need to strike a careful balance between operational excellence and a personal touch. Employees must be trained and motivated to achieve good results, and must learn how to handle complaints and aggressive behaviour. - The services
Originally, contact centres were developed as a customer service tool. However, banks soon realised that they could also be used to sell solutions (both reactively and proactively) in parallel with the branch. - The technology
Banks must make optimum use of new technology (such as IVR and speech recognition) if they want to achieve high levels of customer satisfaction cost-effectively.
Lessons from the most recent conference
"Customer Contact Centres", Amsterdam, 4-5 December 2008 (www.efma.com/ccc2008)
Best speaker:
Huseyin Güngör, Chief Customer Officer of Emotionalloyalty Consultancy, Netherlands
Best presentations:
- “Cross channel management”
Boris Wachters, Director direct sales, RVS Insurance Company, Netherlands
- "How to transform a call centre into a sales centre”
Ahmad Abdo, Head contact centre, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, UAE
- “Transforganize your services”
Hanny Philipse, Chief executive officer, Philipse Business School, Netherlands
