From underemployed to a key player in the company’s growth

We live in a dichotomy today. While customer service is valued above all by new companies, with vacancies using English terms to boost the self-esteem of the position such as Customer Service Expert, technology is trying everything it can to reduce costs and optimize operations (read: get away from customers). The fact is: the customer is the boss of the company and needs to be listened to.

With the initial idea of developing something that would extract qualitative information from a customer service operation, I decided to test it and take an operation, from start to finish, from a small company that I could handle on my own. The idea of developing something was born in mid-2017. Today I work with 5 customer service operations and I discovered that the problem was much simpler than I had anticipated: people just want to be heard. So I put the initial idea aside and started “listening”.

But in order to listen to people, you need someone who cares, someone who has a surprisingly rare quality these days: empathy. It’s impossible to have someone willing to really listen to someone when their time to go to the bathroom is timed. And it’s impossible for customers to feel heard by a chatbot.

He’ll tell you what he needs, but there won’t be any satisfaction in the process, the satisfaction will only be for the company because it has reduced the cost of a person working for it while at the same time publicizing in press releases how much it cares about the customer. In other words, the equation is unbalanced on both sides.

Empathy has the power to make the customer open up about the company and how they see it, both openly and between the lines. This is how you get qualitative information, not with a “stay on the line to give your opinion”. The software doesn’t matter. For data, the good old spreadsheet works when you have competent people on the front line, the important thing is to use this information to steer the company’s course. Therein lies another X of the question, which is the company’s culture. There’s no point in changing the name and calling it customer service, support expert, customer success and keeping the trainee salary or not changing the working conditions.

It is necessary to change the logic that customer service is underemployment linked to the old call centers, but for this to happen, it is necessary to change the way in which the company values this area. Whether in-house or outsourced, service is key and deserves to be reflected in the payroll.

Marina Vaz
CEO and Founder of Scooto