Merrill Lynch Call Centers Recognized for Customer Service Satisfaction

By Susan J. Campbell

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

Customers of Merrill Lynch seem to be extremely satisfied with the service that they receive when contacting the call center. The firm has been recognized for call center operation customer satisfaction excellence for a third consecutive year by the J.D. Power and Associates Certified Call Center Program.

The company views this distinction as an acknowledgment of its strong commitment in its retirement call center operation to providing an outstanding customer service experience.

With locations in Pennington, N.J. and Jacksonville, Fla., the Merrill Lynch Retirement Contact Centers handle more than 25 million client contacts per year. To receive certification, the call center operations successfully passed a detailed audit of their recruiting, training, employee incentives, management roles and responsibilities and quality assurance capabilities.



To complete it evaluation, J.D. Power and Associates conducted a random survey of Merrill Lynch Retirement Contact Center customers who had recently contacted one of its call centers.

“Customer interactions with a call center can have a profound and lasting impact on overall customer satisfaction and loyalty,” said Jonathan Brookner, director of the telecommunications practice at J.D. Power and Associates, in a statement. “Customers expressed very high levels of satisfaction with the courtesy, knowledge, concern and fund information made available by Merrill Lynch’s call center representatives. Merrill Lynch's customer service representatives are clearly a key asset to the overall success of the call center organization.”

Top performance is also required to achieve certification status. A call center must perform within the top 20 percent of customer service, a ranking that is based on benchmarks established in J.D. Power and Associate’s cross-industry customer satisfaction research.

The criteria for this ranking include evaluation of: courtesy; knowledge; concern for the customer; usefulness of the information provided; convenience of operating hours; ease of reaching a representative; and timely resolution.

According to Michael Falcon, managing director and head of the Merrill Lynch Retirement Group, the company aspires to consistently deliver superior client service through all contact channels. The Merrill Lynch Retirement Group is proud to be recognized by J.D. Power and Associates for Call Center Customer Satisfaction Excellence.

J.D. Power and Associates launched the Call Center Certification Program in 2004 to evaluate overall customer satisfaction with call centers and to help call centers throughout various industries to increase their efficiency and effectiveness by establishing best practices for handling service calls.

Those organizations operating in the call center space have a lot to live up to in terms of expected customer service and when recognized by J.D. Power and Associates because of customer feedback, that is a significant testimony to the performance of the Merrill Lynch call centers.

Merrill Lynch has also appeared to recognize the importance of their call center agents to the success of their operations. This is an essential factor that many centers can’t seem to grasp and thus fall short in focusing on the value of their human assets and overall performance suffers. These individuals are the key to successful service deliverables and customers are the main benefactors.

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Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMC and has also written for eastbiz.com. To see more of her articles, please visit Susan J. Campbell’s columnist page.