SATSE: Part 4: Putting it All Together

This part of the book is all about rounding out the customer experience and the operational capability to create an efficient, effective centre that consistently delivers a great service? How would you recognise such a centre? What would you look for? Check five items from the following list:

1. low staff absence rate


2. HR too busy doing exit interviews to look at the absence rate


3. team areas dressed to support their products / roles


4. acres of desks, each identical and none personalised


5. staff using intranets, wikis, custom systems to access, gather and distribute new information


6. advisors competing to see who has the most Post-It notes around their monitors


7. notice boards covered in recent photos from team activities


8. notice boards covered in rules and regulations


9. coaches and trainers delivering training with high quality materials in a smart, comfortable room, separate from the calling floor


10. advisors checking facts from photocopied materials at their desks

Anyone who selected any of the even numbered options, go to the bottom of the class. Those who selected only odd numbered options, well, that was obvious wasn't it? The thing is it's easy to spot a bad centre but it's actually much harder than stated above to spot a great centre. There is a quote about happy families and sad families - happy families all resemble themselves but unhappy families are miserable for all their own separate reasons. This is like contact centres - good ones resemble each other but bad ones are bad for a hundred different reasons.

One thing you should have picked up from the above list is there's no 'f' in team. Often the problem in bad contact centres is there's no effing team. Being in a team does not mean you belong to a team. Good managers understand this distinction (as it's huge) but poor managers think "you're in my team, act like it and don't let the other team members down". Yes, I understand, but No! Absolutely No.

So, once the team's in place, what else needs to come together. Well only 136 other things!

Chapter 12: The Keys to the Kingdom: Personalisation, Innovation and Excellence

Right, the centre is running well - technology is stable and serving the business processes well, staff absence and attrition are low, transaction volumes are within predicted levels and so service levels are consistently hit. What next? How do you really deliver a fantastic service to customers? It's about where organisations can realistically achieve competitive advantage. In previous ages (as long ago as 1987) competitive advantage could be achieved and sustained through superior distribution, geographic monopolies, single access to sources of production, etc. Largely, these are now gone for most businesses. Unless you own the only banana plantation on an island of people addicted to bananas, that have no nutritional substitutes and where the importation of bananas is prohibited, otherwise it is very likely that the modern world has brought competition, and bunches of it.

Outsourced manufacturing and distribution, easy sourcing from low cost locations, selling not tied to areas close to branches, digitisation of assets, etc, it's now much harder for one business to monopolise a market and in many markets the barriers to entry have been removed. Many companies that sell products, we might call them manufacturers, don't actually own any of the assets responsible for production. They just own the IP, the brand and the distribution channel. These factors have changed economics markedly. Never mind regulation and consumer power. In this environment, there are two main routes you can take - efficiency - become the lowest cost producer and survive on lower margins than your competitors through more efficient operation or take route two: adding value. It is possible to be a low cost producer and add value but it's not possible to be the lowest cost producer and also add value (as you've taken out all extra resource that can be the source of that value to achieve option one).

Adding value can be done in three key ways: Personalisation, Innovation and Excellence.

Chapter 13: Integrated Marketing Communications

There are many people who argue that by creating enough opportunities to see, customers will get the idea and flock to your product. That is one view and it has some value, however, in my opinion, in today's hyper competitive marketplace, repeating yourself is not enough. It's like the old joke of British people on holiday on "The Continent" if the locals don't understand your English, talk louder. Just as no-one goes to "The Continent" anymore, no-one who works in customer communications should credibly propose simply repeating what you just said. Customisation is key and it needs to hang together across channels. Consumers sample a product or service in so many ways, across channels, TV on a mobile device, video from a website, social networking sites, etc. With these communications options, even plain old email is starting look long in the tooth, never mind direct mail or inserts. The simple fact is consumers expect to be able to experience a brand in multiple contexts and if the communications are not integrated, the user can so easily experience something better. Contact centres have a critical role in IMC - allowing dialogue to build across channels and being a key source of new information to be leveraged across others.

• Campaign management across channels


• Creating a sense of flow across channels


• Database Management

Chapter 14: Advanced Customer Management

Ever see Gattaca, the 1997 film starring Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman and Jude Law? It's about genetic programming and a society filled with Valids (those with selected DNA and born/created in-vitro) and In-Valids (those without the good DNA and born naturally). The film tests our view on ethics and how far genetics should be used. It's purposfully exagerated in the role of genetics to create optimal human beings. By the way, the name of the film, GATTACA is a a code sequence of DNA using the four letters representing the four DNA nucleotoid bases. So what? Well, Gattaca, though distopian in outlook, crafts a world of excellence through engineering and creates a uniformity in the Valids that is unsettling.

Fortunately, the world we (currently) live in does not engineer human beings to this extent and we have the wonderful variety and richness of current society. Bright, foolish, solvent, broke, permissive, troubled, caring, lecherous, inspired, needy, greedy, weedy, whatever. The great unwashed. Us. In all our vivid separateness.

Sadly for marketing and communications professionals it is not possible to create one product, package it in one way, offer it through one location and price it at a single level and hope to cover the wide masses. Perhaps once there was a world where one type of phone was sufficient for everyone, where TV finished at about midnight on all channels (that's all three channels), where a shampoo existed in one format for a decade without sprouting twenty brand extensions, where shops closed on Wednesday afternoon, where cars didn't have ipod connectors (or CD players, or remote central locking, or websites to promote them, or GPS locators for emergency services, or air conditioning, or their own TV channel - 884 on Sky for the Audi Channel, by the way). Where is this place? Where is this consumer desert? Well, it's right here, circa. 1982. That's right, 1982, not 1882. The diversity that surrounds us and penetrates our lives with more involving and interrupting media options than any previous generation is a recent event. Very recent.

We can easily forget that what we see around us with ads appearing in computer games, millions of people generating avatars in SecondLife, video blogging, tiny chips attached to products like razor blade packs to record their journey through factory, distribution to store and onwards through check out, RSS feeds, DVRs, On Demand Television, is a very, very recent development. Marketing tools have evolved but some date back to pre-history (1982). It's just not credible to market a product or service as per the eighties (though it would be nice to bring back the lemon tank top that I wore to my first job interview in the Eighties, thinking I looked every bit the Beau Brummel).

Marketing and communications today have to deal with more diversity (both in terms of SKUs and distribtion) than ever before. How do we evolve our customer handling to take care of this diversity? How do we make sense of the masses of data that can now be generated from marketing? How do we manage a dialogue with a customer that starts "I'm calling about the letter you sent that directed me to the website where I saw the offer that mentioned the product that I ordered and picked up in store and I'm calling you about because it's not what I saw". Eh? This section will try to create a workout for our customer handling techniques to cope with the demands of life in 2007.

• Anticipating Needs


• Progressive Disclosure of Information - JIT data

Chapter 15: Outsourcing, insourcing, resourcing, offshoring. What?

• The case for outsourcing


• Reasons for outsourcing: resources, skills, independence, someone else to blame


• Scope of outsourcing


• When would you insource and how does that work?


• Resourcing an outsourcer - like Honda, making them feel part of the extended enterprise


• What to offshore? By product, by task or by customer segment?


• Auditing potential offshore sites


• The langwage barrier


• Clutural fit


• Managing offshorers

Chapter 16: Contact Centre Support Organisations

In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) provides a great contact centre solution called NHS Direct. This is a 24x7 operation to act as an initial port of call for non-emergency health queries - should I worry about this three inch growth on my arm? Probably. The service is provide across a network of small centres across the country and is staffed by medical professionals who are able to do remote diagnosis and suggest an escalation (and pre-alert the health care facility that you are inbound or reserve an appointment in hospital with a particular physician at a nominated time) or suggest an OTC drug course or perhaps a referral to a GP (family doctor) in the near future. It's a useful peace of mind service and saves off work doctors getting endless calls about head colds. Furthermore stuff that is troublesome but not worrying for a patient might set the alarms going for a health professional and swift escalation can be actioned.

This is a great example of a contact centre providing good outcomes that cannot directly be measured by call stats.

What about help for contact centre professionals? What is the equivilent service for people running centres, large or small? Well there is no one service - Contact Centre 24 does not currently exist, however there is a wide range of organisations out there who can provide help. In large organisations, several questions can be answered elsewhere in the enterprise but for small and medium sized businesses, where do you go for help?

Some organisations such as the CCA (Customer Contact Association, formerly the Call Centre Association, a much more honest name) present as a one-stop shop for help ... for members. But there are many, many others that merit consideration. A great deal of information is available on the web, want to find out what ITIL V3 says about customer management services? Check the web first.

Industry associations are a good place to start - The Direct Marketing Association has a wide range of information on customer contact management and also usefully covers regulation and compliance in dealing with personal data.

Business associations like the Chamber of Commerce or Federation of Small Business offer newsletters, online forums, seminars and legal advice lines - access to which can be particularly useful in a contact centre environment - many people, many opportunities for staffing issues, therefore many opportunities for employment law to trip you up. What's the proper consultation process for laying off a team? What do I do different if I have to make two out four trainers redundant compared to if I make all four redundant. Hopefully this is not a situation you have to face but trust me, a visit to your local employment tribunal is not how you want to spend two days of your life. I have and it was painful (for both parties).

If you operate in an area that covers regulated activities, such as financial services, the regulator, the FSA in the UK, will have precise requirements on who can do what to customer data and who can advise versus order-take. Compliance here is a serious matter and requires specialist advice.

If you operate a centre that covers, for example, childcare, you may have to vet staff through a service such as Disclosure Scotland, or an equivilent service and they can provide advice on recruitment plans.

If you need legal advice, separate from that provided by an industry association, look for a commercial firm that has specialist partners in Employment Law, IP/Technology Law, Privacy and Information Security Law, etc. These are the areas that most commonly come up, aside from regular business matters such as Contract Law or Property Law, etc. Some legal firms provide valuable information free of charge. Stop. What, a lawyer not charging £192 per hour in six-minute time slots? Surely not. Well, http://www.out-law.com/ is a fantastic resource provided by legal firm Pinsent Masons. They run seminars and provide online advice and resources for steering a course through legal issues surrounding IP, IT and Ecommerce. Oh, did you hear the one about lawyers - "what to do you call ten thousand lawyers nailed to the bottom of the ocean ... ?

Most marketing associations have some interest in the world of contact centres as communicaitons are central to both. Some like the Institute of Direct Marketing have more of an interest than others and they offer particularly good advice through seminars, publications, newsletters, etc on how to best manage customer communications. They also provide huge amounts of training, much of which impacts contact centres. As a fellow of the Institute I should declare an interest, but aside from my support of the Institute, I feel sure that an independent view would concur. Please visit www.theidm.com for more details.

Providers to the contact centre industry can also be a useful source of information, though the majority of their advice is geared to how to get the best out of their equipment or software, though, if you have their equipment or software, that's probably what you want of your supplier. Orgaisations such as IBM, Avaya, Accenture, to name but five, have great detail on their web sites covering current products and services, industry trends and opportunities for business improvement. OK, I know there were only three companies in the previous list, not five, but hey, got to check that you're still reading - this section contains loads of useful stuff!

Copyright 2007, Robert A Innes