Agents Providing Personal Customer Experience Offering Empathy

Let’s not forget, that not only customers have been dealing with the effects of the pandemic, but agents also had to adjust to new working conditions – while still providing excellent customer service.

How have customer expectations changed during the pandemic?

As the pandemic has impacted all industries with rapid changes within short timeframes, it has been crucial for our contact centre to adapt to these changes as well. This means offering our customers not only greater flexibility in terms of e.g. adjusting their sales orders and deliveries, but also offering a greater level of customer support contributing with valuable insights and ideas to help our customers build upon their business during these trying times.

 

How are you dealing with customers demanding higher level of immediate customer service?

 We are focused on optimising and/or automating any manual and time-consuming tasks, in order to free up time and resources among our customer service agents that we can subsequently re-invest in time spent talking with our customers. Also, we proactively facilitate leadership teams across our value chain in order to identify potentials for leveraging our customers’ ability to find valuable information by optimising existing processes and workflows. These are just a few of many initiatives that we have been facilitating in close collaboration with our colleagues across the value chain to ensure the best possible customer experience.

 

Do you see empathy as the main differentiator in creating the best customer service? How to manage the best personilised approach?

One of the key ways of leveraging the customer service experience from satisfactory to great is having competent and knowledgeable customer service agents consistently going beyond what our customers would normally expect. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, our agents have been very aware of the difficult situation our customers have been in, making sure their concerns are being heard and providing them with valuable support and advice on how to maintain and grow their business during these trying times.

Empathy – at its core – is the ability to put yourself in the position of the customer, fully understanding their situation and providing them with the help and support they need, thus creating a memorable and personal customer experience. An ability that has been especially demanding, as our agents also have been adapting to the restrictions following the pandemic, e.g. working from home instead of the office and collaborating with colleagues virtually. A challenge they have tackled exemplary well, providing valuable input and insights for the future of our hybrid work environment.

 

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Danny Dario Winandy, Head of Customer Sales & Service at Carlsberg, has worked with Contact Centre development and transformation for the past 15 years within both the Telco and FMCG industry in Denmark. He has contributed to changing the perception of Contact Centres as being a cost driver to acting as a value generator for both the business and customers, facilitating transformational journeys positioning Sales & Service functions at the centre of organisations as a key enabler for bridging the gaps across value chain functions.

He sees the digital transformation agenda, deploying customer-centric strategies and unleashing the full potential of data insights as some of the key ingredients to ensure the on-going success of Contact Centre organisations across industries, as well as creating motivational work environments and adapting hybrid work principals following the recent pandemic.

Currently, Danny is facilitating the transformational journey of transitioning the contact centre of Carlsberg Denmark from a typical call centre to a full 360-degree Customer Sales & Service function, acting as a proactive customer ambassador and taking lead on bridging cross-functional gaps across the value chain. All with the purpose of creating exceptional customer experiences, while building a motivational and inspiring work environment.