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Dennis Schottler.
The wolf of call centre Obtrusive sales staff, bad service, lousy tricks – after years of fabricating plenty of nonsense on the phone, call centre service providers rate as ‘dingy companies’ in Germany. The image of ‘battery farms’ with hundreds of employees in a single room, reading the exact same conversation guidelines, does the rest: no one wants to be a call centre agent anymore. TEXT: VOIXEN GMBH, TRANSLATION: NANE STEINHOFF I PHOTOS: VOIXEN GMBH
Furthermore, German companies find it especially difficult to offer innovative services. Data protection has a special significance in Germany and employee organisations tenaciously resist any innovation. Amazon Web Service, Google, WhatsApp and so on are taboos in conservative, German companies. Digitalisation is more of an issue of fear, rather than a chance. At the same time, the telephone is classified as a communications channel of yesterday. Today, children communicate in an asynchronous way and across several channels simultaneously. Dennis Schottler, a 48-year-old entrepreneur from Berlin, has declared war on the demise of call centres. His theses are as follows: First of all, until 2025, call centre agents will not work on the pay level of har50 | Issue 54 | September 2017
vesters or newspaper and pizza deliverers, but rather receive salaries that doctors or airbus pilots are currently used to. Furthermore, the dialogue from person to person will become the relevant service indicator and thus the most important distinguishing factor, or the competitive advantage, for companies. Last but not least, in the future, product and brand owners will apply to the call centre service providers as customers – and not the other way around. The key to professional customer dialogue on the phone is: quality. Dennis Schottler summarises the base for this in his PEPEPvision: “Patience, empathy, passion, commitment, poise – people that have ‘PEPEP’ will be indispensable in customer service and support in the future. Those who bring these strengths to the job, while enjoying
working on the phone, will belong to the decision-makers and significant decision influencers in the companies.” For this, Dennis Schottler currently searches the best call centre service providers, agents, and especially customers who appreciate great service on the phone and who have the courage to rebel against entrenched, old-school service patterns. Customer service ‘Made in Germany’ shall become more than a slogan in the future: a brand that is trusted throughout the world and that sets the standards. www.voixen.de