It’s safe to say ‘sensitivity to what other people are feeling’ is the superpower of customer service professionals. Not many of us are wired to deal with all sorts of people, encounter and solve problems, but they do it with a smile.
As we celebrate this year’s Customer Service Week, we sought to understand what it takes to create good experiences every day from Catherine Tulina Kafumbe who has been in the customer service industry all her career. Here is her story!
I am Catherine Tulina Kafumbe, a customer experience professional - a field I have explored and journeyed for the last 15 years and currently working with SafeBoda as the VP of Support. I love nurturing young talent and bringing out the best in people. I believe that understanding your customers brings greater success for all businesses.
I have been fortunate enough to engage customers since the earlier days in my career when I was a Customer Service Consultant at Airtel. I then moved on to get certified as a customer handling skills trainer of trainers. Two years down the road, I became the Call Centre Manager for Airtel Uganda and later specialized in quality and training management with IBM Uganda.
A beautiful challenge came my way to set up and manage Smile Communications as the Customer Care Manager, a role I enjoyed for 5 years until I took on a totally different but exciting challenge as the Managing Director for RTS Autoview! While there, Fuzu reached out and interested me in a role at SafeBoda as the Head of Support, and 11 months later, I became the VP of Support at Safeboda! All this came two years after signing up on Fuzu, but it was worth the wait.
I love the culture of community and inclusivity at SafeBoda. The business values are great ethos that the leadership team lives and breathes. I’d say Safeboda is the best place to work because of the humility of the Co-founders and the genuine and humbling interest in their staff. Not to mention that the business vision is one that you must see through to life!
The COVID-19 pandemic brought a totally different twist to how things are done. For me as a contact center leader, it meant shifting a room with 90 staff plus systems into a remote support center in no time. This called for a lot of agility from the business and thinking on your feet.
Great customer experiences are created through interactions and how people feel about them. You therefore need to ace 3 critical areas which tie into the customer’s experience:
-
People: Always build a happy and customer-centric team that is culturally bent on creating positive moments at all touchpoints. You can’t ignore the leadership that goes into building great teams!
-
Technology: We must continue to listen to the voice of the customer to understand their ultimate need from us and therefore engineer our tech developments towards helping our customers succeed with us.
-
Processes: Contact centers are normally buzzing with so much at the same time. Therefore, it’s important to create customer-winning processes to allow for consistency in the level of experiences we offer. Allowing for an agile environment allows us to quickly shift with the customer trends and needs.
All businesses remain relevant if the customer says so! With this, customer success teams being in constant interaction with the customer have a critical role to ensure that the voice of the customer is focal in every business decision and change that is made. This way we ensure that the customer succeeds and we in turn succeed. That’s the power of service!