The Ascent Group, Inc.

What Makes An Industry Leading Call Center?

A select few companies consistently deliver high-quality customer service, while topping the charts in customer satisfaction. The Ascent Group, publishers of Customer Service Quarterly, Call Center E-Journal, and Service Delivery Advantage interviewed the executives and managers of these companies to discover their roadmaps for outstanding contact center operations and award-winning “best practices”.

• State Farm Insurance
• Lexus
• Yellow Corporation
• Dell Computer
• Southwest Airlines
• Continental Airlines
• First Direct
• The Ritz-Carlton
• Tesco
• USAA
• Harrah's Entertainment
• EarthLink
• PPL Electric Utilities
• FedEx

We picked these companies based on their exemplary customer satisfaction, as defined by their rankings in the American Customer Satisfaction Index or as measured by other third-parties such as J.D. Power and Associates. Our aim was to learn more about the contact center practices and “winning strategies” that lead to high customer satisfaction.

Our industry-leading companies provided close to 200 “winning strategies” and “best practices” that are thoroughly documented in our report, Call Center Strategies of Industry Leaders.

One interesting trend is that nearly half of our industry leaders answer incoming calls with "live agents" not IVRs or auto-attendants. In fact, several companies mentioned that they purposely avoided IVR technology in favor of live agents. The remaining 57 percent either use the IVR only as a routing tool to deliver the caller to the appropriate agent group or have developed the IVR as a self-service option for callers, handling anywhere from 10 percent to close to 70 percent of incoming call volume.

Appropriate deployment of customer-facing technology is a key determinant of customer satisfaction. Our industry leaders have either chosen to avoid IVR technology, deploy it as an overflow tool, or have worked very hard to design customer-friendly self-service IVR options that meet their customers needs.

Characteristics of Industry Leaders

While our target companies demonstrated various “winning strategies”, there were some underlying traits that were common to all. We’ve tried to summarize the most prevalent traits for your review.

1. Corporate Culture or Vision

Perhaps the biggest undertone from our research was the presence of a strong corporate culture or company vision within our industry leaders.

As an example, Tesco, as part of its organization renewal in the ’90s, created a company-wide vision that centers on a core set of beliefs—The Values. About a dozen values define how the company will work with its employees, including “treating people with respect,” “listening more than dictating,” and “treating people as you’d like to be treated,” and so on.

“The Values are high on everyone’s agenda. As part of the performance management process, we as managers have to demonstrate good tangible examples of living the Values. Living the Values is driven from the top and lived from the top as well,” says Ian Russell, head of Customer Service for Tesco. Mechanisms have been designed into the performance management approach to reward employees for “living the Values.” For instance, if a managers sees an employee who has accomplished something more than they’d expected, the employee can be given a “Values award”—just a way of recognizing good behavior and not necessarily a monetary reward. “This makes it easier for us to be consistent throughout the company,” says Russell.

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