How can you maintain excellent customer service for a business that relies upon call centers?

As Greg said, do what Zappos does: focus on the call center as a marketing tool and put incentives in place for your employees to delight customers rather than deflect them. Some details on how Zappos measures and incentivizes: http://understanding.uservoice.com/entries/numbers-zappos-looks-at

Most of what's relevant has been covered. Two added thoughts: I have not worked in call centers; I have run some great service organizations. There are simple things to identify (but sometimes hard to execute) is hire well and right, train well and right, and engage well and right. If you think about the 3 Rs of customer service (reliability, responsiveness, and recovery), only the latter generally involve call centers. It's irresponsible to dump stuff on call centers that you should get "right" early - and avoid much of the dissatisfaction that comes from call centers being the dumping grounds for customer's poor service/product experiences.

I have two thoughts to add. First, there is a systems element here too.  The call routing needs to be fast, simple, and accurate, and the staff need the right tools and information to be effective.  Given a call routed right the first time, and a dashboard detailing the customer history & current status, service representatives are positioned from the start to delight the customer.  Secondly, make sure your executive team is listening to calls.  These are the raw materials for a continuous improvement engine that can impact the customer experience directly, often well upstream from the call center.

Call centers can still deliver excellent customer service as long as everyone is alert to the ways that communication can be improved over phone or chat. As was said in other posts, it is important that your call center have a positive work culture set in place that provides incentives to promote high performance. Also, your call center agents should be well trained and have the knowledge to answer any customer question or concern. Also, call center software works to an advantage in this case. It allows for the gathering of information on performance and customer feedback that can provide useful insight. This way your call center can immediately act upon customer sentiment and improve their service. This article is a great resource and describes the many features call centers can utilize from software to improve their performance: http://kovacorp.com/call-center-software-can-improve-customer-service/

When I owned a technical support call centre, the clients that were the most successful at outsourcing to us where those who considered the call centre vendor to be an integral part of the company products and services.  They were the clients who made sure that the call centre was not the last to know of marketing initiatives or changes to pricing and policy.   The call centre itself has to instil pride in its agents, give them the right tools to do the job, treat them with respect and empower them to make some decisions rather than make them powerless. Give them some job satisfaction in other words!   I find that in my consulting work with in-house call centres and outsourced call centres the problems are all the same.  Usually the agents have not been given the tools, the training, the authority or the information to be able do the job right.    There is often a real blind spot in corporate understanding of how to make the front line customer communication channel work successfully.

First you need to understand two things: One, that call and contact exist to serve their customers, though not all organizations do this well, and Two, every customer has an experience when dealing with a company or a call center, but they are not always the desired customer experience.Good customer service is an alchemy or People, Process, technology and Methodology. It doesn't happen by accident it happens by design when an organization chooses to differentiate themselves from their competition based on service.Companies that wish to deliver good service develop and document the customer experience they wish to deliver, they identify the skills and competencies their agents or staff will need to support this customer experience, they design and develop training to ensure that all staff understand the expected customer experience and have the skills, product and technical knowledge to deliver the experience. They design processes that support the customer experience. These are not always the most efficient processes but they support the commitment the company has and is making to their customers regard the service they should expect. The appropriate technology is identified and deployed to support the customer interactions. This is less about what is the latest whiz bang technology and more about how the technology can serve and support the customer experience. Lastly, the company will develop a methodology around what they measure and why. There is a boatload of metrics and KPI's that you can generate fro any call or contact center, but if your focus is on the customer experience then your metrics will align with this objective. You will therefore measure Customer Experience, Customer Effort, Customer Satisfaction, Employee Satisfaction, and some traditional contact center metrics such as first contact resolution (FCR) and employee centered metrics such as turnover and churnover as well as 'speed to competency'.Good service is not an accident it is the result of a well planned and executed strategy that is based on a culture or delivering the customer experience at least as good as  your customers expect.My last point on delivering good customer service is that perhaps surprisingly it can actually cost less than delivering poor service and be better for your business. Solving a problem or inquiry on the first contact saves the cost of future contacts, happy customers buy more, happy customers share their experience with other, building word of mouth, few dissatisfied customer will mean fewer negative shares and reduce brand and retention erosion. Delivering good Customer Service through your call or contact center is a business decision, from my perspective any organization that chooses to deliver poor or sub-par service has made the wrong decision.

My experience - and answer - is identical to the one Greg described so well, so I'm just going to add one thing: At the third-party call centre I worked at, the phrase "bums in seats" was actually used. 'Bums' has two meanings, of course, and that was a deliberate use of the word. On the other hand, that call centre paid minimum wage - the same wage you'd earn if you worked at a fast food joint or a convenience store - despite the fact our agents were doing technical support. So there were times when the butts we had in the seats really did belong to bums. Those folks didn't give a damn about customer service, and that's not unexpected because we weren't paying them enough to care, in my view.

Customers expect a quick resolution for their issue and give businesses a good chance to do so. However, if the issue remains unresolved after a few calls, he or she finally decides to cancel the services, and switch to a competitor. Until this point, call centers make no differentiation between a disgruntled customer and others. When an actual cancellation request surfaces, the customer is then routed to the save desk. This team tries to ‘win’ the customer back by offering special discounts and deals, which is often a very expensive way to retain customers.Applying http://voziq.com/solutions/?utm_source=EIN&utm_medium=pr&utm_campaign=Multi-KPI-launch to mining contact center interactions uncovers new opportunities to approach customer retention effectively.http://voziq.com/solutions/?utm_source=EIN&utm_medium=pr&utm_campaign=Multi-KPI-launch ingest all your existing and new data, runs it through advanced text data analytics stack and delivers quick ROI – all from the existing data!

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your question, but call centers can accomplish all of the customer service needs you need for your business. As long as your call center employees are on the same page as you and an in-house team when it comes to knowledge and company image. Most points you've made can be objected.1:1 Contact - Great call centers can correspond all tickets so the customer deals with the same agent throughout the whole process.Solving the problem to customer's satisfaction - As long as your call center is well-trained on this ins and outs of your business, this shouldn't be a problem.Creating a customized solution - As long as you give your team the freedom to take necessary measures to provide "excellent customer service", then this is also a non-issue.Our call center http://supportyourapp.com has been able to scale up at the same pace as our Silicon Valley clients (some with 20 million+ customers)It's really all about how your call center team is being managed.