Improving Customer Service Requires Looking Beyond the Screen

How important is it to provide contact center representatives with a 360-degree view of the customer, and what types of systems enable that? What metrics are the most important in helping banks track the productivity and effectiveness of their call center staffs? How is social media changing banks' contact center activities, and ultimately, what is the role of the call center in the 21st century multichannel financial institution? --Peggy Bresnick Kendler

It's critical to know your customers, and you need to look at the holistic picture. It's not just what you can see on the screen in front of you; you need to get a sense of customer behaviors and pull the feedback in from the customers to find out how to better service them.

We leverage social media and utilize that as we would any other channel to provide service to our customers. Part of our overall service model is that our contact centers are always open so customers can always reach out to us when they need us and when it works for them. Social media is just another extension of that -- ensuring that we are being responsive and interacting with customers in the ways that they want to interact.

TD Bank's Twitter page is gathering momentum, and we are looking at how we might expand this and improve our ability not only to service customers but to provide other options, as well. Social media is how our future customers will engage and interact, so we need to be looking at that ourselves -- we need to be responsive in whichever avenue our customers choose to go.

We are able to measure everything within our contact center environment with technology that enables us to track contacts literally down to the second. One of the most important metrics is our ability to measure first-call resolution. We also use traditional metrics such as average handle time and productivity metrics that enable us to look at trends and forecast volumes to ensure that we're staffing effectively against volumes.

Celia Moncholi is SVP of U.S. phone channel for TD Bank (Toronto).