For Wireless Provider, Happy CSRs Mean Improved Customer Service

In a non-descript building in suburban Tampa, Florida, resides the nexus of Verizon Wireless’s customer experience.

It’s the experience that occurs after the new wireless customer has left the retail showroom, after the first bill has arrived, when a question arises or when it’s time for an upgrade and a live operator must get involved.

Verizon Wireless call centers belie the traditional image of row after row of non-descript workspaces.

It’s an experience handled by one of some 1,200 live operators (CSRs, or customer service representatives, as they’re called) at this six-story building just off a bustling throughway. The wireless carrier’s Florida Customer Service Center handles calls from across the state. The center is one of 24 nationwide, but it’s anything but typical.

And though it’s a call center, don’t come in thinking you’ll see row after row of stereotypical phone banks.

Sure, there are cubicles four across and 20 deep down long office corridors. But many of the workspaces are personalized – as if they were in any traditional office. There are photographs of families, posters on the walls, and stuffed animals and knickknacks that more than hint that this is not some customer service rack.

A personal approach to the workspace seemingly creates a personal approach to customer service, as encouraged by Verizon President and Vice Chairman Dennis Strigl. “If you touch it, or it touches you,” recites Chuck Hamby, Verizon’s Florida public relations manager, “you own it.”

Encouraging such “ownership” in a time of corporate austerity, belt-tightening and cranky customers can be a lot to ask. But embrace the employee, and they’ll embrace their tasks. That belief seems to touch every corner of this building. In the cafeteria, the aroma is of a rich aural cacophony of smells and flavors that belie a food service institution. The atmosphere is relaxed. An employee is reading the day’s newspaper. Another is viewing a telephone handset screen. Televisions mounted high carry the day’s news.

This doesn’t seem to be “break time,” in any traditional, escapist sense. It’s time for lunch. Or time for a workout in the on-site gym – which attracts users from the call center, or from company’s Florida headquarters in nearby Temple Terrace.

When employees call in with sick kids, back-up care is dispatched at $3 an hour – cheaper to the employee than a sitting service, and certainly cheaper to the company than having a seasoned employee sitting at home. And employees onsite, doing their jobs – content in the knowledge that their children are cared for at least in part by their employer – make for a better customer service experience, Hamby says.

“We’re going to keep them happy,” he says. “This is the genesis of the customer experience.”

And it seems the experience has done well for the company, its customers and its people.