BLOG: The Professional Listener!

Finally contact centre staff are getting the recognition they deserve! Reading recent research by Siemens, I was delighted that they too acknowledge that there is a new breed of contact centre operative – the neatly defined “Professional Listener” characterised as skilled, loyal and career orientated.

Yet the old perceptions of contact centre staff still persist. If you say you work in a contact centre you’re still likely to be labelled as unskilled, unmotivated or disloyal. Such views are at best outdated and at worst a complete insult to all those people who work tirelessly to provide excellent customer service. With contact centres now offering customer communication channels across Email, Phone and Internet, agents need an increasing array of skills to meet these evolving needs.

It should be recognised that excellent career opportunities now exist within the industry, with many companies offering excellent training programmes and career progression. If you want evidence of this, you need only look to the current executive team at The Listening Company – five out of the eight having started their careers as agents. Furthermore, if you want to learn about modern customer service and sales techniques what better environment to learn your trade?

by Neville Upton, Jul 29 2008, 10:05 AM