Without a doubt, customers are pleased when a business inquires whether the purchased product and the associated service were satisfactory or if there were problems regarding the purchased product or service, or if the customer might need additional information on this product or service. Communication via telephone is very popular today and also generally affordable for both sides. However, there are problems and risks that need to be brought to mind. Often these “personal discussions” with the consumer are handled by outsourced call centers which create an artificial closeness that is often recognized quickly and dismissed by the customer.

Such an erroneous development, caused by these types of calls, needs to be recognized and corrected.

To communicate in direct contact with the consumer is enormously valuable for sound and successful customer relations and is inevitably tied to a lot of effort, especially if you truly -and in the truest sense of the word- are committed to this dialogue. Nowadays, effort often underlies a performance review which is expressed in numbers which in turn requires that expenditures pay off quickly or they are in danger of being scrapped.

However, the dialogue with the consumer is, economically speaking, an investment in the future. Trust and a connection are supposed to be created on both sides which can be relied on. Such a task can hardly be accomplished or administrated by strangers.

He who wants to be in personal touch with his customers and create an individual relationship must do so personally. The dialogue with the customer has to arise directly from this customer relation and the familiarity tied to it individually. The customer is not going to open up during communication unless he/she has the secure feeling that his conversation partner actually knows him and that he is not only contacted for the ascertainment of market data. He wants to be understood with his personal requests, and he does not want for an automated answering system to find an approximated category for his concerns in order to push several buttons which lead through another catalogue of categories which need to be answered first. If you even get to a “personal dialogue” with a machine and do not fail previously when asked to input several pin codes.

All of these are the sufficiently known criteria of a call center system which is not able to establish a personal relationship to the customer, no matter how efficiently it works.

If a business cannot afford or does not want to afford the relationship to the consumer, this company should do completely without, for a customer who does not feel that his concerns are understood is not going to stay a customer for very long. The service level of a call center is no substitute for the care that was not supplied to customer relations on behalf of the company. This could mean a huge risk.