Long gone are the annoying piped music and the equally annoying long waits on the phone. Thanks to ebusiness and the need for increased customer service, the call centre has grown up.
Unfortunately, the modern call centre still has plenty of troubles to keep its managers awake at night - how do you cope with contact channels other than the phone? How can you guarantee that the system that you buy is not obsolete in two years?
The biggest challenge is learning to use the technology available to provide quality customer service all the time, and swiftly. There's clear evidence that customers are becoming less tolerant of bad service. Seventy-eight per cent of customers said they would go to another company if a single transaction was handled badly, according to The Henley Centre Teleculture 2000 survey.
While measuring how many calls you can handle an hour, or how many times a phone rings before you pick it up is an effective way to evaluate performance and customer service, this method belongs to first generation call centres - where the phone is the only contact point.
Now, call centres handle information from phone, email, and other sources, offering an experience that aims to make customers loyal to the brand rather than cut the cost of the specific customer service function.
"People who are trying to save money are barking up the wrong tree," says David Mackenzie, principal consultant at CT Consulting and technology advisor to the Call Centre Management Association. "Nowadays the emphasis is on customer retention."
This shift in thinking is all part of the evolution of the call centre - traditionally geared to handling telephone enquiries and often considered as a low-cost customer service channel - into contact centres.
Such a facility is primed to deal with multiple contact channels and can report instantly how well it is performing - which in the case of email enquiries is not very encouraging.
One-third of companies contacted by email through a website failed to respond, according to the latest Online Shopping Report from Which? Online. The other companies surveyed produced late or unclear computer-generated answers.
More worrying is that customer service using the email channel has degenerated rather than improved. Forty-six per cent of 125 online retailers gave a late or inadequate reply to an email query in a December 1999 survey by Jupiter Research. In the same test a year earlier, the failure rate was only 38 per cent.
"Of all the things handled badly, email is top of the list," says Mackenzie. "It's a blind spot. In lots of businesses the receptionist handles the email, and that's gone from 10 to 10,000 a day."
An opportunity to shine
For brick and mortar companies which handle the contact centre evolution well, there is potential to beat off the dotcom - research shows they are having problems supporting their customers in all sectors.
Only one per cent of online retailers have a live support channel, and that is costing them $1.6bn worldwide in lost sales, according to researcher Datamonitor.
"Plenty of the dotcoms have set up a way to trade on the internet, but what's missing from their business is customer interaction," says Mackenzie. "And it is difficult for them to introduce it. Businesses that are getting this right are filtering the hard-won lessons from the contact centre back to the rest of the business," he adds.
Customers aren't the only people that need to be happy and loyal - companies should be looking to attain this with the staff that run the call or contact centre.
Scoot.com, the online small business listing service, is trying to inject a dotcom atmosphere into its call centre, while also giving staff the opportunity to move to jobs elsewhere in the company (see case study, below). Scoot is one of three companies that spoke to Computing about its call/contact centre strategy, and how technology is helping it achieve new goals.
Customers need the feelgood factor
Company cahoot
Project Set up contact centre for new bank
Start date June 2000
Finish date Continuing
Problems Finding internet-aware agents
Successes 24-hour service and better working environment for staff
Being popular on your first day is not always a good thing - just ask cahoot, the online banking arm of Abbey National. On its first day of trading, masses of users overloaded the cahoot web servers so badly that only around 30 could register successfully. Bad news for the call centre.
"It's an internet bank, not a phone bank. That means we provide a support channel, not a banking channel," says Phil Alcock, who set up the call centre.
"Our target customer is at least as comfortable sending a mail as using the phone. The phone will be the channel that cahoot customers use when they can't get an answer any other way." The call centre is supposed to be the last resort, with all day-to-day banking enquiries and business transactions being carried out online.
Cahoot's 24-hour 230-person operation is an example of the next generation of contact centres: this goes beyond technology - it's also about management and ownership.
"It's run in partnership with cahoot," explains Alcock, vice president of Fiserv Europe, a US-based specialist in running call centres for the financial sector.
"They provide a 10-person management team, and we provide the resources that the business needs - the premises, the technology infrastructure, and the people. Traditional outsourcing is a step too far for many organisations - there's a problem about how they can control the quality you provide."
Service levels on Fiserv's five-year contract are measured using traditional metrics such as waiting time and number of calls handled per hour. If those service levels aren't met, cahoot pays Fiserv less - exactly how much less the company isn't saying.
Measuring customers' feelgood factor is not simply a question of numbers.
"When was the last time you called a contact centre and felt good at the end of the call?" Alcock says. "They do not deliver a brand-enhancing experience. That's what we have to do."
Fiserv believes the answer is to continually question account holders on their experience. There are also secret shoppers who call the agents to monitor the service.
A brighter image
Being one of these call centre agents is probably not on the career wish-list of many people, but cahoot and Fiserv are attempting to change the image of working in a call centre.
Fiserv has attempted to recruit a younger, more educated, internet-aware crowd, and has equipped them with an office that looks more like a hangout for dedicated dotcom types than a telecommunications shed.
"It's a very impressive building physically - you really feel that you are part of an internet bank. We have TV screens overhead instead of the traditional call centre displays. And we have an internet cafe," says Alcock.
There is a price to pay for quality staff, however, as cahoot had to fork out between 10 per cent and 15 per cent over normal market rates to get them.
Staff are mandated to take hourly breaks, during which time they are free to go to the cafe or use the bank of Playstations the company has installed. The real motivation is not only to give them a break, but to make them aware of the interests and problems of the customers.
"One of the problems in traditional call centres is that the agents have no experience in using the internet," says Alcock.
Web traffic floods in for Scoot
Company Scoot.com
Project Establish new service in five-year-old contact centre
Start date Now
Finish date September 2000
Problems Adjusting to new application and business model
Successes Able to offer multiple channels to customer
Things are a bit back to front at Scoot.com. Instead of the call centre being part of the business, the business is a function of the call centre. It's not as confusing as it sounds - honest.
Scoot.com is a contact listing service for small businesses in the UK. As with most call centres, the majority of traffic is inbound, but the continuing rollout of a new business model and application is changing all that. Outbound traffic will soon be equally important, with telesales operators using the call centre to drum up new business.
The aim is to turn the 2.7 million companies listed for free on Scoot into subscribers, at £200 per year.
With a target of a million paid subscribers in Europe by 2003, Scoot has a tough telesales job ahead. To achieve that, it has completely rewritten its call centre applications, and transferred them from internal servers into an externally hosted system.
"Scoot's version 2 will change the way our call centre works," says Ed Ewing, the company's IT and operations director in the UK. "Now we have content acquirers and telesales calls going on as well. We've seen a shift from landlines to mobile, but we have also seen the emergence of a significant amount of traffic on the web."
At the moment, Scoot.com receives half its inbound traffic on the web. Of the rest, comes through mobile phones, the other half through landlines. That works out at 16 million requests for information in 1999, and 11 million so far in 2000.
At the core of the new system is Scoot Exchange - a central database that customers can query, and subscribers can publish to. If customers contact the Telford-based call centre, they are connected straight through to the business.
Scoot's version 2 will attempt to deepen the amount of information held on each subscribing company, so users will be able to make more detailed, personalised requests when searching for hotels and companies.
There were two key challenges in the project:
- How to extend the company's systems so it could hold this amount of data and present it effectively for customers and call centre agents alike.
- How to develop its staff so that they would be able to cope with the change in the business model.
Giving the customers access
Scoot's existing Windows NT and SQL Server-based bespoke application had to be axed. In its place, IBM will host an application written in XML and delivered over leased lines to a browser-based interface.
This means that the same application is used on Scoot's website and in the call centre. "We say, author once, publish everywhere - so whether our customers use the phone, Wap, digital TV or the internet, they are getting the same details," says Catherine Hill, the firm's marketing director.
It also gives Scoot more scope to expand its services, or its routes to the customer, while providing an equivalent service. Call centre staff can also switch from handling inbound calls to making outbound sales calls, as both are generated by a single application.
With so much of the business culture driven by the workings of the call centre, Scoot is also trying to hang on to its agents for as long as possible - more than half of the company's 700-strong workforce is based in the call centre.
According to Ewing, the company's staff turnover is below the industry average, with monthly losses only hitting single figures. "This allows for a good career development process, because the people are the starting point, not the technology," he adds. "People join us as a Scoot agent, but those who are good role models become coaching agents, buddying up with the new people to teach them."
Staff satisfaction may be easy to measure, but customers are more complex. Measuring customer satisfaction certainly can't be done with one process for both inbound and outbound calling, so Scoot has set up two different quality measurements for its users and small business subscribers.
If it is to meet its sales challenge, these service levels will need to remain intact while Scoot also deals with the impact of the new business model and applications, plus a merger with small ads newspaper Loot.
Council opts for real-time reporting
Project Internal call centre for Birmingham City Council's IT department
Start date 1998
Finish date Ongoing - the model for a web-enabled public call centre is next phase
Problems Ensuring performance levels are maintained
Successes Providing real-time performance reports
If Birmingham City Council messes up its customer service, there's no place to hide. As a local authority, it must be seen to report openly the performance results of its call centre - good or bad.
The council's IT team has quite an incentive to get things right first time - which probably explains why it is using its own staff as a testing ground.
"With new government initiatives, the support function is getting much more important," says the council's IT services manager Bob Carter, who is in charge of an internal helpdesk that will be used as a model for a city-wide call centre for the council's services.
Last year's figures of 40,000 calls from 2500 users in 100 locations will soon be surpassed when the same infrastructure is used to field millions of calls a year.
The biggest challenge facing Carter and his team is service levels. Under the government's Best Value initiative, the efficiency at which the call centre works has to be measured and reported openly and in detail. If those measurements aren't available or if they show that the council is performing below the required service levels, then the entire service may be outsourced.
To keep track of performance, the council installed Sunrise Enterprise, a customer service application built on a SQL server, around 18 months ago.
There were two reasons why Sunrise landed the job. The first: reporting. "It monitors our performance automatically and it will alert us if we slip outside the terms of our service level agreement," says Carter. "We are enhancing the software so that we can leave a customer satisfaction form on the screen afterwards, and we will then automatically collect that customer satisfaction information as well."
The commitment to making this information available has also been a radical culture change in the council offices, with 100 members of the IT department going on six-month customer service training.
Using the web to publish customer service figures is the next step, by giving up-to-the-minute access to anyone in the council.
The second clincher for Sunrise was its neural network technology, which allows natural language searching. This technology will hopefully boost the number of problems solved on first call to 80 per cent.
Using the neural technology will mean that fewer solutions are duplicated, says Carter, because the knowledge base will 'know' what you are looking for.
Like Scoot, the same application will service both web and phone customers, hopefully with equal effectiveness. Efficiency is the driver - getting better performance without dipping under mandated service levels.
See also:
All Telecoms
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