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I’ve just come back from a two day CMP
conference on the Aurora on the subject of contact
centres. We were moored in the mists off Guernsey,
unable to escape the subject. However, this
had some benefits. One was renewing acquaintance
with two of the gurus of telemarketing –
Simon Roncoroni and Mike Havard - that I’ve
known for nearly twenty years, since the days
we worked together on big telemarketing and
database marketing projects for BT. It was so
nice to spend more than the usual hurried 5
minutes at the end of a conference with them.
Another bonus was making new friends –
with the assurance that e-mail will help us
keep in touch despite our busy lives.
The content of the conference
was unsurprising. One strong theme was the determinants
of success in contact centre management –
where success meant happy customers, happy staff,
happy managers and happy shareholders. The main
answer seemed to be management focusing strongly
on the people aspects and used performance measures
for contact centre agents which related to whether
customers got what they wanted (e.g. first time
resolution rather than length of call). Two
strongly negative themes were also present.
One was that the strong cost pressures which
led to offshore outsourcing tended to produce
unhappy customers and poor marketing results,
so while cost per call fell, customer loyalty
and value per customer both fell. The second
was that undiscriminating use of outbound (usually
cold) calling – often associated with the
cheap call costs resulting from offshoring –
was driving up the numbers of consumers opting
out through the Telephone Preference Services
One topic that occasionally
surfaced threatened most of those on the boat.
This was whether the Internet posed a long term
threat to the still growing numbers employed
in contact centres in the UK – around 1
in 50 of the working population. I’m impressed
with the rapid growth of 100% Web-based businesses
and businesses that rely strongly on the Web
in areas such as travel, financial services
and merchandise mail order (particularly for
information-based products such as books and
CDs, but increasingly in areas such as electrical
appliances, clothing and indeed almost any consumer
product), and also with the growth in the use
of the Web for allowing customers to serve themselves
with advertising and information as they begin
complex buying cycles (e.g. automotive, property).
In these areas, the role of the contact centre
seems to be increasingly focused on two areas.
One is on handling the diminishing number of
customers to whom the Web is unavailable. The
other is on interactions where queries and clarifications
are for the time being hard to handle on the
web – sometimes where customers are out
and about on their mobiles and want to continue
with a purchase or enquiry but just don’t
have access to the Web – although here
continuing developments in mobile telephony
will make it easier for even the customers who
are least expert and perhaps least well –equipped
to access the Web anywhere.
However, there are still many
interactions where customers want to talk to
someone for example, complex transactions, queries
from inexperienced customers, acute problems.
For the time being, the costs of so doing have
led to unwilling customers being forced through
complex menus of passwords, account identification
and other keystrokes before they get to talk
to the “right person”. The anger felt
by customers, and in some cases their high rate
of abandonment and sometimes subsequent attrition,
is giving companies pause for thought. Some
have been able to educate their customers that
a combination of improved Web access, slightly
longer times to answer and a guarantee that
they will be answered by a real person is preferable
to complex telephonic menus.
Others are using increasingly
sophisticated voice recognition and synthesis
technology, so that the “person” who
answers your call so quickly is not really a
person. Where this is deployed successfully,
usually in combination with clever procedures
for “real” intervention if the dialogue
goes wrong”, the performance improvements
and cost reductions are dramatic. It is indeed
proving a “middle way” between real
people and the Web. I look forward to this being
a more common part of our customer experience,
provided that companies are overt about it.
After all, we know when we are using the Web
that we are “talking to a computer”
and it doesn’t discourage most of us from
making quite complex transactions, often involving
trust. I’d like to see more companies encouraging
us to “talk to their computers”, perhaps
even educating us to do it, as most Web sites
educate us as to how to get the best from them,
through frequently asked question sections and
other help functions. As a confirmed user of
Internet telephony, I’d also like to see
some suppliers offering me the option to talk
to their computers through my laptop while I
get on with other business.
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