Nicole Urlings, manager of the Efteling contact center (ECC) since 2009, looks back on a rich experience in customer contact. 23 years ago she started at Cable Television Eindhoven, which was later taken over by UPC. “Over the past twenty years, you can see that companies have come to understand the importance of customer service more. Customer service has changed from a group that has to answer the phone to a department with strong interfaces with sales and marketing. But all in all, it's a bit disappointing when you look at the willingness to invest in customer service. In many organizations, awareness could still be improved - think of the concern where awareness about customer contact is only just beginning to emerge, while utilities have been optimizing for a long time. A lot still needs to be done, especially in the SME sector.”

IT sometimes wary of the cloud

“Many changes in customer contact have to do with IT. Think of reservation systems that are outdated and need to be renewed. Companies often opt for an intermediate solution because complete replacement is seen as too expensive. It strikes me again and again that IT departments are still hesitant about cloud applications. In the past I saw a similar attitude towards VoIP. Cloud applications are inevitable, cloud offers the opportunity to get multiple solutions in one platform. On the other hand, it is understandable: IT departments have to support the entire organization and often most attention is paid to enterprise IT, such as ERP. Within almost every company, IT faces the challenge of serving all users and connecting all kinds of systems. A lot of attention is also paid to security.”

Seek connection to IT

Urlings sees it as her role to 'bring along' IT and involve it in new plans in good time. “It helps a lot if you visit IT every week and open yourself up to the issues that are going on and look at how you could help IT from customer service. This also applies to a department such as HR – for example, joining an organization-wide project in the field of knowledge management in good time, because that is often already an important part of the contact center. Furthermore, part of the solution is that you pre-sort in time, so that IT has the chance to delve into a solution. It comes down to looking for connection: you will be more successful with IT projects in customer contact if, in addition to various IT people, you also involve the end user from day one.

Exchange knowledge and ideas

Urlings itself also keeps abreast of the latest developments. To this end, she sets up exchanges herself between her department and the contact centers of other companies, about four to five times a year. “These can be site visits at comparable companies or organizations from a completely different sector. One of my last visits was to DSM – you learn a lot there about systems, quality and management style, for example. Or think of H&M in Maastricht, big in online customer contact.”

Urlings, who will talk about, among other things, at the Content Guru event on October 11 the relationship between IT and contact center, will leave De Efteling on 1 January 2017 and will then opt for self-employment as an advisor. “It's time to do something different. I want to focus on development projects in customer contact – if something needs to be built – and on interim assignments.”

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