"Your call is important to us" - prove it:* part one

By Jennifer Kirkby, consulting editor

Back in 1999, CRM equalled call centre: wall to wall stands at every CRM exhibition exuded the relationship benefits of the channel. But in reality, call centres have not equalled better relationships and dealing with modern ‘contact centres’ is high on the list of stressful experiences. This month we look at the state of contact centres evolution and how they can adapt to deliver that much vaunted relationship promise of eight years ago.

A little history

Call centres came to prominence in the late 1990s driven by:

• The huge success of various telephone businesses such as First Direct and Direct Line, as financial services de-regulated and direct businesses offered quick market entry for competitive advantage.
• The rise of telemarketing, as a sales, fulfilment and research channel.
• The growing use of customer care help desks as the value of customer retention became apparent.

All of these were enabled by the lowering of telephone costs following privatisation and the growth in telephone and database technology.

In this atmosphere, the watchwords for the channel became 'quicker' and 'cheaper'; it was adopted by a number of departments for different uses, and then consolidated into call centres for efficiency, using either inbound or outbound technology. And then came IVR. The stage was thus set for the raft of relationship ruining practices that were promulgated as ‘best practice’ - eg queuing, no call back facility, under empowered faceless staff.

Outsourcing

Quicker, cheaper call monitoring KPIs soon became ubiquitous and benchmarks the measure of success. Staff attrition rocketed. Up rolled the outsourcers offering economies of scale; frequently large organisations such as utilities with spare call centre capacity. Organisations lept at this opportunity to outsource costly broken processes, rather than fix them, and put supplier under stringent cost reducing SLAs to solve the problem.

Few clients seemed to mind that this also meant outsourcing precious customer relationships. Some enlightened outsourcers did realise the importance of customers and offered relationship enhancing practices for both staff and customers – but margins, procurement departments and SLAs rode roughshod over such ideas. Today, around 14 percent of the 6,000 contact centres in the UK are outsourced.

Offshoring

At the start of the new century cost-cutting continued to blaze a trail. Outsourcers seeking better margins turned their eye on offshore locations such as India, attracted by a cheap but educated workforce who spoke English. Few minded the cultural problems that upset relationships, and inhouse contact centres followed the outsourced.

The poor downtrodden customer railed against the move, but customer satisfaction was frequently overlooked in the face of operational quality statistics. The idea of offshore only started to unravel when it was realised that the extra costs of travel, management, technology and complaint handling outweighed the benefits. Quietly, the roamers started to return home, whilst others like NatWest made a UK based centre part of their proposition.

In a recent Dimension Data Global Contact Centre benchmark study, over half the respondents said offshore was not the way to lower costs, whilst scares about data protection and the admittance by HSBC that offshore is their channel of choice for lower value customer has given consumer bodies a field day.

All this seems rather gloomy, but contact centres are here to stay and grow. So what are the core issues that contact centres should be concerned with?

Part two, core issues for contact centres, click here.

*Taken from an advertisement for Aspect Contact Centre Solutions.