customer-focused is not the same as caving in
Staedion on outages, trust, and what a contact centre needs in order to work at all.
Jacqueline van der Boor-Angevaare is customer service manager at Staedion; Sander van Wissen was project manager for the switch. In CorporatieGids Magazine they explain what was going on.
it started with outages
The old telephony platform went down fairly regularly. That does not just hit the technology: a tenant who cannot get through will try again, and again. According to Van Wissen the problem was not only the outage itself, but that nobody believed any more that it would get better.
Once that belief was gone, the decision came quickly: a different platform.
what was in the requirements
Not a wish list with dozens of features, but a short list of hard requirements:
- all first and second line telephony on the platform
- integrations with the applications that were already there
- users trained quickly, not weeks of courses
- 99.8 per cent telephone availability during office hours
That last one is the requirement it was really about. At a housing association availability is not a technical parameter; it is whether someone gets you on the line when the heating fails.
how they measure it
Staedion tracks three things: how tenants rate the service, with eight out of ten as the standard; how quickly people are called back, within three working days; and how many calls are answered straight away, with 95 per cent as the target.
That last figure had dropped below eighty. Since the switch it is back at the standard, and the tenant rating has followed it up. Colleagues describe the platform as more reliable and easier to use than what they had.
and the title, then
Being customer-focused at Staedion does not mean the tenant is always right. Van der Boor-Angevaare explains that a call is ended when someone keeps swearing at colleagues. If that same person calls back calmly, they get helped. Being focused on the customer is not the same as caving in to them. In Dutch that lands as a rhyme, klantgericht against klantgezwicht, which is where the title comes from.
