A Tale of Two Companies

Announcing how seriously you take Quality of Service on your corporate website is a good way of establishing how customers can expect to be treated. Or is it? Perhaps you just set an expectation that cannot be matched in reality. If customers had low expectations and you delivered poor service, that might be easier than promising high and delivering low. Take this contrasting account of recent customer service interactions with two UK online organisations: www.picstop.co.uk and www.simply.com (or www.namesco.co.uk as Simply is also known).

Firstly the good. Picstop is an online retailer of consumer electronic products such as memory cards, MP3 players and the like. They offer a good range and excellent prices. The service in my experience has always been excellent. Recently I signed up for their newsletter and provided a Blueyonder email address (Blueyonder in the UK is the broadband product from Telewest, a nationwide cable company). Blueyonder offer a hosted email service which is great for those of us who travel and may want to access our email accounts from different devices.

When I received my first newsletter the email did not display, but rather showed the HTML code (written as XHTML transitional, to be exact). This code copied to a text file and accessed through Internet Explorer or Firefox displays fine, but accessed via the hosted Telewest service, it does not display – probably something to do with old technology used in the Blueyonder site that does not handle XHTML. I know that Blueyonder are testing a new version so eventually this “problem” will go away. However, to get right back to the service story, I emailed support at Picstop to alert them to the non-display of their email. Unexpectedly I quickly received a personalised response thanking me for notifying them and indicating that they would work on the problem. I thought nothing more about it.

About a fortnight later another Picstop email arrived. Again, the email did not display, but very soon after I received a second, personalised email asking me if I had be able to read the most recent newsletter as they had done some recoding. I was impressed by this level of follow-up, as would anyone. I informed them that it did not display and they replied that further work would be done and hopefully they would get it right. This level of service to cater for a tiny minority of their customers (I estimate less than 1% of their customers would be using the same configuration as me. Still could be a large number, but not a significant percentage) is impressive. I believe this shows a deep interest in the feedback of individual customers and a willingness to develop the organisation according to that feedback. This is a rare quality – actually living the mass produced corporate slogan – “we listen to our customers”. It’s rarely true but it sounds good. In this case, with Picstop, it is true. Hats off to them.

To preserve the global balance of service delivery – for every service there must be an equal and opposite service, to borrow from Newton and the recent Mint TV adverts. So, to balance the positive experience of Picstop, we have the very opposite from Simply.

Simply are a domain registration and hosting provider. They also provide a hosted email service, again, very useful for those of us frequently on the move. Over the past two weeks, Simply have had technical problems with their hosting environment and email access has on two separate occasions been unavailable for extended periods of time (for example, over five hours during the core business day). This is clearly a woeful performance for an organisation that is in the hosting business. A lesson in how to turn a drama into a crisis is what followed.

With no access to my email, customers and suppliers are unable to reach me and I am forced to revert to my home email service (Blueyonder) to communication with clients. As a business professional advising clients about online activities, this does not present the best image. My business has suffered a minor reputational risk due to our dependence on a hosting company. Previously a strong advocate of hosting solutions, this highlights how vulnerable we all are when data centres are unprepared for technology failings. Something related to power supply to a server in a cluster caused this service interruption. How could this be? A cluster? The whole point of a cluster is that it is unbreakable. That’s the first problem. Secondly, why would you expose a service to a PSU with a single point of failure?

However, technology does fail, we should be mindful of this and thankful that it does not happen more often. The part that sticks in my throat is the utter lack of care Simply showed towards me as a customer. Poor information on it’s website, no response to emails and no apology for the outage. On behalf of clients, I have 50+ domains administered by Simply. It seems that even that level of business does not gain a response to an email. Time to find a new hosting company.

Copyright 2006 Robert A Innes

10 Features you Really Need in your CRM System

Some CRM systems are sold on their feature-rich environment, however, there are, it could be argued, only ten core features that are really needed.

I would rather fail three months into a two year project than three years into a two year project - Scott Ambler

These are:

1. ability to record all customer interaction data that is important to your requirements.


2. ability to select, filter, aggregate, extract, report and distribute information important to your requirements. This could be:
   
   
   
   • customer selections
   
   
   • suppression lists
   
   
   • mailing lists
   
   
   • campaigns and their customers
   
   
   • credit stop list
   
   
   • real-time access
   
   
   • granular historical data
   
   
   • live linkage to external data sources
   
   
   
   And perhaps with the following features:
   
   
   
   • simple counts
   
   
   • cross-tabs
   
   
   • multiple level grouping
   
   
   • out of range events – exception reporting
   
   
   • sampling – one in n, etc
   
   
   • multi-dimensional analysis
   
   
   • statistical analysis
   
   
   • time trend analysis
   
   
   • enveloping and routing
   
   
   
   And in the following styles:
   
   
   
   • conditional highlighting
   
   
   • rich graphical layouts
   
   
   • simple lists
   
   
   • dashboards
   
   
   
   


3. ability to efficiently and effectively conduct your business relationships with your customers


4. ability to track communications effectiveness over time


5. ability to describe and model customer attributes contributing to positive or negative trading / service behaviour and form multiple discrete customer groups for analysis, targeting and value scoring


6. ability to tailor marketing communications, servicing communications and customer service handling to the different needs and opportunities of discrete groups of customers


7. Ability to customise customer engagements to the needs and opportunities of each individual. Note this is different to the point above


8. ability to integrate and coordinate multi-channel communications, especially, telephone, web, mobile and self-service


9. ability to measure internal performance over time
   
   
   
   • response times
   
   
   • customer satisfaction
   
   
   • learning time / training effectiveness
   
   
   • one call resolutions
   
   
   • average handling time
   
   
   • staff satisfaction / attrition
   
   
   • dependent process performance – commitments made by service provider (advisor / self-service process) delivered by other departments / organisations, e.g. mail room, sales force, etc.
   
   
   
   


10. ability to exchange data with other organisational systems and processes with integrity and without delay

Other options that may be required:

• Service management / Case Management / Ticket tracking?


• Sales Force Automation


• Business Intelligence / Business Analytics

Copyright 2006 Robert A Innes

3 Things NOT to Worry About in a Call Centre

To say that a call centre is a complex environment is like saying the ocean is deep. The complexity comes from the intersection of technology, marketing, processes and lots and lots of people. Despite the complexity, good tools and practices exist to effectively manage call centre resources and deliver a great service.

Anyone who uses the word 'workshop' outside the context of light engineering is a TWAT - Alexei Sayle

As a manager in a call centre, dedicated to quality, the need to improve service delivery and reduce cost to serve, can sometimes seem impossibly difficult to achieve.

1. The moment

This is rule #1 for call centres managers - Grace Under Pressure, "If you can keep your head whilst all around ...", etc.

Trust me, there a lot of crunch moments in a call centre manager's day. IT systems unavailable, high sickness levels, changing requirements, delays in applications development, personnel "issues" between staff or between teams. Everything from racial abuse to failures in key operating systems. Hopefully they don't happen very often, but employ sufficient numbers of people and run a sufficiently complex environement and these and the like will occur often enough to keep you on your toes. The key for a good manager is not to get sucked into the details. No-one will appreciate you diving into the IT room to scream: "When will the xxyyzz system be back online"? You can be sure that your floor managers have already had that conversation. Ensure that the IT team have the resources to fix the problem and that the floor managers can effect some sort of workaround, if possible. That's your role. Once the challenge has passed, what can be learned? Was it a freak incident or were was it predictable? Can it be avoided in the future? This is your next role.

2. Client demands

By client, I mean internal reporting client for in-house call centres or senior client contact for outsourcers.

Clients have to be managed and that can't be done if you are on the back foot. Get your SLA in line and then you can push back and manage the client. If you can't manage upwards then life will be tough for the long term. Most of your clients will push simply because they can, not because they are evil (honest). It is in the nature of heavily linked organisations that delays get passed down the chain to the call centre but the live date never seems to change!

The key is to get to SLA compliance and stick there. The route is dependent on where you are starting from - a bit vague, but there you go. I have no visibility of your delivery issues. If you need to buy time then flag that with your client (better if you don't have to) but in any event, do whatever it takes to get off the back foot. Then, identify the risks to slipping behind on the SLA - what can you put in place to give early warning on risks and then mitigate risks? (See separate article on managing risk). That will lead to operational stability. From there, you can build and develop. Increase service width, increase task depth - take more from the organisation or client to increase the value-add (and visibility - a two-sided sword).

3. Customer Complaints

Yes, that's right. You can't worry about them. If you do you will sucked into a world of administration and needless dialogue. Some customers cannot be satisfied with your service proposition. Accept it and get on with delivering the best you can for the majority of your customers for whom your service proposition works.

This does not mean: ignore the fact that customers complain. That is something entirely different (and entirely negative). What I mean is deal with complaints in aggregate, not individually. Focus on root causes not flashpoints. This is what separates good managers from those learning the job. Quick recap: customer complaint handling for beginners:

1. recognise the complaint - not all complaints are prefixed by "I want to complain"


2. categorise the complaint - have we seen it before, do we have a proceedure for it, can we stop it escalating into something really ugly?


3. gather information - act through information not suspicion


4. acknowlege the complaint - act honestly and with all due care and respect


5. deploy fix - above all, get it right


6. customer buyin - get acknowledgement from the customer that this is the route to follow - NB it may be all you can do, but not satisfy the customer


7. learn from it - can proceedures / training / customer documentation, etc. be improved?


8. add to MI - make sure the incident is recorded for later analysis

Your role is not to oversee every step but to make sure that processes and resources are in place to ensure that your managers can effectively deal with complaints without getting sucked into an extended dialogue with Mr Angry.

Copyright 2006 Robert A Innes

3 Things to Worry About in a Call Centre

A day spent in a call centre is a day filled with diversity. There is always something going on - not always positive. The simple fact is: you can't micro manage a call centre - you can't listen to every call!

It's hard for me to get used to these changing times. I can remember when the air was clean and the sex was dirty - George Burns

Put simply, you can't deliver the same level of service to every customer every time. Whilst that may be a disappointment it is reality and you have to get past it. For example, it would be great to answer all incoming calls within 5 seconds, however the cost to serve skyrockets, whereas a very good service level of 80% answered within 20 seconds can be delivered at a reasonable cost to serve. Similarly, it would be nice to pass every caller directly to a waiting advisor however this again raises the cost to serve to uneconomic levels. Most organisations use some form of self-service technology to reduce the burden of call handling and deliver a reasonable service at a fair cost to serve.

So, if you shouldn't be worrying about giving the best to everyone (because you can't), what should you be worrying about? Here are three things that you should worry about:

1. High absence levels

High absence is unlikely to be down to illness. Something is sick, for sure, but it's not the advisors. They are exhibiting behaviour that reflects their view of the organisation and/or the role. High absence is expensive - it messes with staff schedules, increases recruitment and training costs, upsets service delivery metrics and ultimately delivers a poor service to your customers. This is not an easy problem to solve but it can be turned around. Generally, high absence rates occurs due to boredom with the job, poor rewards, aggressive management style, poor systems and processes, unhappy (and therefore strained) customers. It may be one or a number of these that exist. You will never eliminate challenges from the advisor role, however there is a level where it gets too much. For example, if one in fifty calls from customers is a complaint, that's harldy likely to turn anyone off their job, however, if it's one if five, watch out. In short, high absence is an indicator that something else is sick and needs to be fixed!

2. Poor Management Information

Without accurate information, a call centre cannot operate effectively. Poor information impacts staff schedules, process development plans, customer service and investment decisions. MI in a call centre needs to be granular - the ability to look far down into the detail (more granular) and the abilty to aggregate up to summary views (less granular). For example, a team manager needs to know detailed information about the performance of their team. This needs to be real-time (or close to real-time) with historic comparison. A floor manager is less interested in the activities of any one advisor and more interested in the ongoing achievement of Service Level Agreement (SLA) metrics - i.e. are we meeting our committment to answer 80%+ inbound calls in 20 seconds or less. If we are behind SLA, what are we doing about it, if we are ahead of SLA, why and how can we repeat the enhanced performance. A manager is more likely to look at peaks and troughs throughout the working week to assess scheduling and load balancing. Individual perforamance in a team may lead to a training need and again, at different levels, different degrees of information are required. The team manager needs to know detail about their team, whereas the floor manager is more concerned with floor-level scheduling issues and when can training be arranged with Learning & Development at a time that least badly impacts SLA performance. A manager is likely to look not at individual training needs, but at root causes - has the product changed, do we need to improve training, do we have systems issues, etc. Different levels have different needs.

MI needs to be accurate (obviously), sufficiently detailed for the job in hand (too much information can be as much of a problem as too little), easy to access and distribute and finally easy to comprehend and act on.

3. Bullying, Forcing Change and Threatening Behaviour

It is right and proper to encourage staff to change and develop in their roles as business requirements evolve, but handled badly and you can lose hard-won goodwill in small number of days. It takes considerably longer to build it back up again.

In a competitive, incentivised, hierarchical environment, sometimes the desire to improve can be pushed too hard and appear to some as unnecessarily forceful. Those that resist can be picked on and marginalised in their teams. Needless to say this serves the team not one bit. Of course, it's similarly harmful to customer service. These negative behaviours come about mainly through staff not having a voice - being the last rung on the ladder, on the front line having to enact polices set by someone who has never taken a call from a customer. Are we surprised that some people react against that? Would you?

The negative aspects of change in a competitive environment can be greatly lessened through dialogue. I know only too well how frantic call centres can be and the desire to JFDI can take over when the excrement lands on the air circulator. However, this mostly compounds problems and a clearer way forward is to stand back, consider the problem and engage in dialogue. Fundamentally, no-one comes to work to do a bad job - everyone gets pleasure out of achieving positive results, you just need to create an environment where this can happen more often than not. This means dialogue - actively listening to advisors views and feelings and incorporating, where appropriate, their input into the new programme. Don't skimp on training either. And give people the tools to do the job. With this positive cycle of activity, change can be better managed and negative behaviours greatly reduced. If the team is settled, managers will be less likely to resort to negative management techniques to address the friction within their team.

A final note on negative management behaviour: bullying is not to be tolerated. Not at all. Never. If you start that flowing round your call centre you quickly lose any form of control. Needless to say, any abuse of a sexual, racial, etc. manner should be dealt with firmly and openly. Do not be afraid to remove abusers from your organisation - they will bring you down.

Copyright 2006 Robert A Innes