Today's hot business catchphrase is customer loyalty. Obtaining and ensuring it sustains sales and revenues, and also generates these from other customers through word-of-mouth and increasingly text-in-online advertising with peer, friends, and family. The need to have customer loyalty is one key reason why contact centers have not been as closed as quickly and their staff rosters decimated as badly as they might have been in this downturn. Firms are finally believing the advice from industry experts and vendors that delivering poorer service through lengthening queues and shortening calls can drive some customers-and their scarce dollars-away.

The route to customer loyalty, professionals and suppliers say, is through improving first contact resolution (FCR) via investing in agent training, analytics and in CRM, EFM (enterprise feedback management) solutions, performance management tools, and presence/ unified communications. The more satisfying the customers' experiences are when they reach out to firms such as via their contact centers the greater their loyalty to them is the operating theory.

Yet is this formula: better customer service=customer loyalty=sales valid? Are contact centers and their parent or client organizations perhaps spending too much time and limited resources in trying to make this solution work?

There is plenty of evidence that questions the relevance of service quality, and loyalty, to revenues. Do we choose an item from a particular seller because they have great contact center-delivered service even if the price is high and the features are not exactly what we want? Or do we choose a comparable good that has a lower price, and has more functionality from a company that makes us endure long hold times or bounces us around from agent to agent?

Also, think of why we pick and stay with those particular vendors? Is it because they are excellent firms or are they the lesser of multiple evils or...