The contact centre conundrum
30-Aug-2007
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By Neil Davey, editor
There's no pleasing some people. As if the Great British public didn't have any fury left to vent at contact centres, a new survey suggests that UK consumers have a bee in their bonnet with automated services.
Yes, just when you thought you had resolved your call centre conundrum by replacing your staff with a fancy machine, research reveals that 80 percent of Brits are frustrated with call centre telephone technology.
The study, by Experian, highlights that consumers believe technologies are "impersonal" and "inflexible" and are designed to get them off the phone as quickly as possible. It would appear that such efforts to overhaul the contact centre do not have the desired effect, with most respondents reporting the technology offered no improvement over existing customer service levels.
And whilst 62 percent of customers can successfully resolve issues upon first contact with web-based enquiries, a mere 38 percent can deal with their problem the first time they call via telephone. Ironically, however, it is the phone to which most customers will turn to first.
Despite other contact channels available to them, 89 percent will reach for the phone first of all.
It's a major headache for firms, particularly as the importance of customer contact cannot be underestimated. Genesys recently undertook a study into customer service and call centres and the findings emphasise how they are critical drivers into both customer profitability and customer satisfaction.
75 percent of consumers stated that they would give more business to a company based on a great contact centre experience, whilst half of the consumers interviewed said that the last time they stopped doing business with a company was partly or wholly due to a poor customer service experience.
Businesses tried it all: internal contact centres, outsourced contact centres - whether offshore, nearshore or homeshore - taking the human element out of the equation via interactive voice response systems, etc etc. Yet somehow contact centres continue to be a thorn in the side of the consumer.
For this reason, MyCustomer.com is dedicating September to that most incendiary of issues, the contact centre. You can expect us to look at all the key areas of interest in the sector in the coming weeks.
We will examine the issues surrounding contact centre outsourcing, from the internal vs external debate to contractual considerations. We will study staff training and recruitment within the call centre, addressing the crippling staff attrition problems that afflict the industry.
And of course we'll also be discussing the offshoring phenomenon, debating what parts of the customer lifecycle can and should be offshored and highlighting popular alternatives such as nearshoring and homeshoring.
We'll also be taking a trip through the history of the sector - looking at the past to understand the present. From its humble beginnings in the airline industry to the point where the rot started to set in as it became a focus for cost control, we'll be putting the spotlight on just how the contact centre sector has attracted such a bad reputation.
The good news, however, is that the field looks to be turning the corner. With a shift away from cost control, a growing number of companies are revitalising their contact centres and transforming them into efficient profit centres.
But to start things off we bring you a twin introduction to the topic courtesy of Jennifer Kirkby's '"Your call is important to us" - prove it' and Stuart Lauchlan's 'For your (in)convenience'.
It's about time the industry shook off its bad name - and this month we'll be demonstrating how it can do just that as it rings in the changes.
- "Your call is important to us" - prove it - by Jennifer Kirkby
- For your (in)convenience - by Stuart Lauchlan
This month's stories:
Costs or assets?
A brief history of contact centres: from costs to value
Contact centre as an asset: the new breed
"Don’t take that tone of voice with me!"
Offshoring
Changing shorelines in the call centre sector
Do customers think calls are too east of centre?
Staff training and recruitment
Coming up roses: getting the most from your call centre staff
Lives on hold: call centre staff answer back
Service providers
To outsource or not to outsource: is that even the question?
The changing face of the call centre outsourcing sector
MyCustomer.com 30-Aug-2007
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Contact Centers: Continual Source of Corporate Angst
(interlace fingers, stretch with palms outward, crack knuckles, wiggle fingers and aim at keyboard...)
In two and a half decades of contact/call center consulting, I've yet to find ANY corporation that truly understand just what the business goals are for the contact center. Just where does this painful and expensive entity fit in to the over-all business enterprise in a corporation? That's actually the starting point, and the one missed universally.
Airline reservation centers -- some of the earliest enormous contact centers in the egis of the critters -- secured new revenue. Thus, they were and still are, a sales entity. Direct mail catalog order centers fall into the same: they are used to secure new revenue. Thus began the "profit center" model for call/contact centers.
Purely customer service centers in corporations are thinly disguised old "complaint departments." Their purpose is to retain already secured revenue. Billing inquiry centers fall into this same category.Long before we had these kinds of centers, we had "information centers," such as the telecomm and utility companies maintained. Businesses unwisely categorized these as part of operations, and the centers tended to blow out operations budgets to migraine proportions. Erroneous efforts were made to shoe-horn such into the "profit center" model. This was akin to Cinderella's step-sister trying to cram into the glass slipper.
In fact, back when the Earth's crust was still cooling and we only had analog telephones, we had four basic categories of call centers: telesales/collections (revenue procurement), telemarketing (no revenue secured, product/service information to customers), information centers, and customer service (post-sales point of product/service assistance). The legacy of all contact centers grows from these. With the egis of toll-free calling, we saw the growth of such centers explode in the '80's. Enabling technologies were focused on telecomm equipment combined with business strategies in the operations analysis arena.
The 90's gave rise to the "IT can cure it all!" mentality. Tom Siebel waved his "scalable, extensible, enhanceable" product amidst the Vantive and Clarify offerings, and CRM was born as the penultimate call center pain solution...which we all know in hind-sight, it wasn't. It was an expensive piece of the puzzle, but not the wrap-it-all-up solution.
So what's with the enduring issue of contact centers? My own first question, as a call/contact center consultant, to executives is: what business goal does your contact center achieve (or attempt to achieve) for your corporation? Universally, those executives cannot explicitly answer that question. There's the start to the problems. Far too often I hear: "deliver Best Practices customer service." That says zilch. It doesn't answer the question. With such lack of comprehension, it's no small wonder contact centers are viewed as gaping budgetary holes in the water and enormous sources of managerial angst.