Skills shortage causes service decline

The industry is facing the challenge of recruiting, training, managing and retaining the right people, driving an urgent need to invest in training both management and staff to maximise performance of the customer contact operations.

"In a best practice organisation, the important thing isn't having coaches and supervisors simply to report what calls agents are doing. What is important is that customer satisfaction levels accurately reflect the agents' performance. And in order to achieve this desired result, contact centre managers need to address this gap or they may find their organisations losing market share as customer satisfaction levels fall," said Mohamed Fouad, COPC Services Manager, Xceed Professional Services.

"Training the managers on industry standards is therefore critical to keep the company profitable. The COPC-2000® CSP Standard is the industry's first, most rigorous and only high performance set of global best practices. Many of the world's leading companies require knowledge of such best practices for their first line management."

Bringing global expertise to the region, Xceed Professional Services, the premier customer contact consultancy in the MENA region, is holding its Registered Coordinator Training course with COPC Inc. (Customer Operations Performance Centre Inc.) in Dubai from June 3rd to 7th at the Burjuman Rotana Suites. The Registered Coordinator Training introduces service organisations to the COPC® Family of Standards, provides insight into operational performance management and the key drivers around revenue, service, cost and quality as well as global best practices and benchmarks. For five days, attendees will receive information on how to provide a consistent customer experience across all channels and stay ahead of competitors. COPC Inc. has trained over 5,000 registered coordinators worldwide, from leading organisations such as Accenture, Canon, General Motors, Lenovo, Starwood Hotels and Volvo.

"The course is not about individuals receiving a certificate," Fouad added. "It is based on practical, real-world examples, and focuses on the key elements executives and managers need to drive business results. All organisations, banks, operators, airlines, hotels, etc, claim to be customer-centric, and all claim having high levels of customer satisfaction. But at the management level, there is a very low awareness of the real metrics required to make such a claim. With COPC Inc., we want to bring these metrics and global standards to the region to help contact centres reduce the time, cost and risk to achieve operational excellence."

Xceed Professional Services and COPC Inc. first brought this course to the Middle East in November 2006. It was then attended by representatives from some of the regional leading service-driven organisations such as Etisalat, which is now going through the COPC® Certification Process.