What are the most important components that make a successful contact center of the 21st Century?

We were recently asked this question by Call Center Life, a magazine serving the Turkish call center industry and wanted to share this content here….

Question -What are the most important components that make a successful contact center of the 21st Century?
Colin Taylor – A holistic view of the contact center is essential for a center to be successful and effective. Marshall McLuhan famously said more than fifty years ago that the medium is the message.

For the 21st century message is the customer: finding them, serving them and keeping them. Mass customization, personalization and the democratic management of information by the internet has provided consumers today with more information, than has even been available before. Not just the price of a product or service, but reviews from other customers, nutritional information, carbon footprints, lawsuits and the CEO’s salary.

Companies and centers cannot build walls and barriers between them and their customers any longer. Every wall; every “No you can’t do that” is another small rip in the fabric of customer loyalty. We must embrace the openness, transparency and leverage this to satisfy 100% of the customer we set out to satisfy. I didn’t say we have to satisfy 100% of our customers, because this isn’t realistic, economically viable and likely not even possible. We must be ruthless in identifying who we want as customer and who we can satisfy, an not allow ourselves to fail, by trying to be all things to all people.