Chapter Outlines
Service at the Sharp End: Making Contact Centres Work
Or, how to survive in a world of change with too little budget, too many staff, too much complex technology, tight deadlines and revised briefs.
About
Rob Innes has worked in contact centres, marketing and technology for 20 years. In that time he has made and taken calls, selected staff, briefed teams, run training programmes, changed processes, implemented computer systems, devised integration methods, prepared analysis and metrics and developed business cases for large contact centre projects. In that time, Rob has worked with clients in Financial Services, Telecommunications, Hospitality, Education, Government, Consumer Goods and Automotive. Rob has helped developed consumer and business to business projects covering acquisition, service, retention and reactivation. In this time, Rob is honest enough to own up to quite a few mistakes, includng a couple of absolute howlers but has learned an enormous amount about what it takes to deliver fantastic service to customers day after day after day. Having worked with Vodafone, Citibank, Ford and HM Government, Rob has built many successful contact centre projects and is keen to pass on his experience.
This book is about sharing tips and techniques, advising on what works and what doesn't, seeing past the obvious to the unexpected sources of value and risk in contact centres, demystifying technology and highlighting practical steps that can be taken to lift an average contact centre to a great contact centre and to lift poor service delivery to fantastic service delivery. Things like:
- Which metrics are most important for improving service levels?
- How to manage change that impacts on staff
- How to retain good staff
- How to recruit staff for specialist roles
- How to give individual customers a personalised service without over-burdening your IT department or tying your advisors in knots
- How to keep the buzz going, day in, day out
- How to reduce the number of hand-offs between teams and increase the number of calls dealt with at first point of contact (first call resolution)
This is above all, a can-do book and is focused on taking what really works, what actually works at the sharp end - the busy contact centre - and making it happen in the most engaging and effective manner. Fundamentally, the contact centre cannot operate in isolation from the business. Consequently, this books looks not just at the ways to improve contact centre operations, but how to best organise the entire business to create the best possible links with the contact centre - embedding the contact centre right at the heart of customer strategy.
On the website there are downloadable forms and checklists, tools and tips mentioned in this book that you can take and straightaway make a difference to your centre.
This book is aimed at both contact centre professionals and business professionals who support a contact centre or who devise the campaigns and projects that run through contact centres. It will also be useful to professionals who are involved in IT, service delivery, customer marketing or sales. It will also be useful to people looking to advance a career in contact centres.
Rob lives in Edinburgh, UK with his wife, daughter and rabbit.
Introduction
Right from the word go I want to lay my cards on the table. I like call centres. Call centres are a force for good in allowing masses of customers to efficiently interact with various parts of the enterprise. The modern call centre, or contact centre, to be more accurate since email and other types of traffic are handled there are here to help and largely they do a great job. There are always options to improve, challenges to be overcome, new regulations to incorporate but to a large extent, call centres have successfully moved millions of transactions from poorly resourced branch offices to large well resourced regional centres. Perhaps waiting in a call queue is less than perfect, but it beats standing in a queue outside a branch in the rain.
Part 1: Conversations with Customers
If salespeople are the eyes of an organisation, the contact centre is certainly the ears. It's often the first place to appreciate a change in consumer sentiment, perhaps due to competitor promotions or difficulties in your service provision. Advisors in the contact centre talk to a large proportion of customers each day and are very well placed to learn what is working and what isn't. Similarly, since lots of customers are calling, it's a great opportunity to reinforce the brand values of the organisation, through the efforts of your advisors.
Chapter 1: Making Contact Centres Listen to Customers
Listening to customers is one of the key roles of contact centres. But is the organisation listening? Too often information available to advisors in contact centre stays in the contact centre. This could be about delivery problems, availability problems, pricing challenges, competitor activity, in fact all aspects of your customer engagement from your branches to your website will generate calls which are opportunities to learn. Often the organisation has analytics capability to capture this knowledge and distribute around the business and from them, increasingly sensible decisions can be taken about products and services, pricing and promotion, delivery and servicing and remarketing and recommendation. However, this happens haphazzardly and this book is about how to improve the use of valuable information gained through contact centres.
Chapter 2: People. People Everywhere
With interactive web activity, self-service IVRs, supplier extranets and the like, it's easy to imagine that the demand for contact centre staff is falling. Actually the opposite is the case. Employment in the sector continues to grow and the first thing you notice in a contact centre is not the technology, it's the people. They are a fantastic resource that create the amazing buzz of contact centres. Managing large amounts of people, especially large amounts of young people can be challenging. This writer has experienced amazing behaviour, at one extreme an empowered advisor leaving the contact centre, drawing personal money from an ATM, driving to an airport and giving the money to a distressed customer who had called regarding a lost ATM card, before getting onto a flight. At the other extreme, advisors selling drugs to each other in company time, using the company intranet. From the good to the bad, people are everywhere in contact centres and the successful management of this resource means the difference between great performance (and great service) and indifferent performance (and poor service).
Chapter 3: Delivering on Promises
Remember Johnny Rotten? John Joseph Lydon, lead singer of the Sex Pistols, and later Public Image Limited. Of course you remember Johnny Rotten. One thing you may not know, Mr Lydon closed the last ever Sex Pistols concert, in San Francisco with the phrase, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" Quite sublime. What a great phrase, and links neatly to the reaction many people must have when service goes bad. Thankfully, contact centres are generally pretty reliable and service failure does not actually occur that often. Sometimes outcomes as defined by the contact centre manager may be different to that defined by customers. For example, if a customer asks a bank for a larger overdraft but credit rules cause the request to be knocked back, that can't be the fault of the contact centre. Don't shoot the messenger. But the customer wants to do just that. This is an asymmetric view of the same data and is probably irreconcilable.
Contact centres are very much part of the connected enterprise and integration with other divisions is essential to effective service delivery. Often promises made in the contact centre are delivered elsewhere. Advisors need to have confidence that a promise made is a promise delivered. How do you make this happen? What are the short and long term problems if this connection fails?
Part 2: Customer Experience Management
Regardless of the purpose of a contact centre project, be it selling subscriptions, helping patients to diagnose an illness and potentially escalate to hospital, increasing credit card balance or checking if a vehicle is ready to collect after a service, the customer experience is paramount. A poor experience for the customer usually results in poor outcomes for the organisation. Poor outcomes can be longer call durations, lower sales, more complaints, higher levels of re-calls, whatever. It's often a vicious circle - poor service delivery leads to inefficiency which leads to lost calls & recalls which leads to more load which leads to even lower service. This leads to frustration for both customers and advisors. On the other hand, if the experience is good, outcomes tend to follow. This improves the experience for customers and advisors and the metrics just keep getting better. How do you ensure your centre does more of the latter and less of the former?
Chapter 4: Serving for Success
All contact centres provide a service. It may not always be smooth, but service is at the heart of all operations. Success in service delivery means different things to different people. For example, in the case study that follows, success for a Redundancy Helpline is not about "average handle times", "first call resolution" or other efficiency based metrics, it's about high level customer outcomes - number of customers re-employed within 90 days. In that kind of environment the government agency sponsoring the activity is more interested in the contact centre's contribution to higher goals and success depends on the extent to which the contact centre meets those goals. For another application, say in a busy travel agency or holiday company, at certain times of the year, there will be large peaks in call traffic and managing the scare resource (advisor time) is paramount - delivering the very best advice as efficiently as possible. A key metric here might be what percentage of customers can be persuaded to "self-care" on an extranet during busy times without impacting average order values, for example. Success, therefore, is a factor of your situation and this chapter will look at practical steps that can be taken for success, however you measure it.
Chapter 5: Content Personalisation
Sometimes it can be hard to just keep things running smoothly (see chapter eight for the challenges of Keeping the Show on the Road) but in today's marketplace, personalisation is one of the keys to service differetiation (along with service excellence and innovation). Serving out the same experience to each customer is simply not good enough any more. Customers are different. Each one has differing needs of your business (and contact centre) and represent different levels of value to your brand. Treating everyone the same is a poor marketing decision and a poor commercial decision. Without knowing in advance what will cause individual customers will call, how do you personalise the service? If ten customers are waiting in a queue, who should you serve first? The answers to these questions can be surprising and customer insight can allow quicker service delivery whilst improving customisation.
Chapter 6: Segmentation and Targeting
In God we trust, all others bring data, W. Edwards Deming
A key facet of any direct marketing strategy is segmenting customers into discrete groups that can be separately identified. For example, in a mobile phone company, one group might be contract consumers who spend more than £100 per month, or pre-pay customers who send more than 400 texts per month and have more than 12 people in their calling circle (number of discrete people they call regularly). You can attribute customers to groups (or segments) simply, by taking one dimension of customer data say, average monthly spend and ranking from low to high, then, split into ten groups, either by volume or value (deciles) to give ten segments that can be tracked and measured. Perhaps a more useful (but more complex) tool is clustering to identify a series of variables (spend, length of tenure, location, age, acquisition source, for example) and determine customers who are alike across a basket of different attributes. Whichever method is chosen (and we will discuss segmentation in more detail later) it gives a basis for starting to target different groups of customers with different offers or routing different customers into different service streams.
Chapter 7: Is There a Relationship at the Heart of CRM?
One of the great delusions in marketing, in fact probably the absolute greatest delusion in corporate communications, is Customer Relationship Marketing. CRM has been used to justify all kinds of nonsense in the past and to delude marketing managers across the world that they have a "relationship" with their customers. Bollocks. Unless you run a corner shop in a small rural village and you know every customer by name, you don't have a relationship with customers, you have a series of transactions. Customers just don't think of a series of transactions as a relationship. A relationship is two-way mutually giving - mother to daughter, friend to friend, but what we have with brands is one-way service delivery. For a very small number of brands, think Nike or Playstation, for instance, some consumers may value the brand association as something special and worthy and valuable and cool. If Harley Davidson can create an image for a community of customers that is powerful enough for these people to revere the brand and even carry the brand logo onto items of clothing that didn't originally carry the brand, or even tattoo the brand onto themselves, they have achieved a status to their community that few brands can match. Anyone seen a customer proudly showing an MBNA tattoo or sewing a Persil logo onto a favourite t-shirt? No, thought not. CRM needs to be handled very carefully and the advice of this author is to remove the troublesome work "relationship" and label the task honestly for what it is, Customer Management.
With Relationship out of the way, we can start to discuss honestly some of the weird facts around managing customers - your most loyal customers are likely to be either the lowest spending, or spend an equal or higher amount with a category competitor. Later in this chapter we will look at how achieving your service objectives can be efficiently accomplished whilst providing a great service to the majority of customers. Note, the last sentance particularly does not say "all" customers. I will return to this later.
For not-for-profit contact centres, CRM was always a strange word to use (although the components - databases, analytics, communications management, customer modeling, and others have real value) as their outcomes are measured in very different terms to commercial contact centres. Health care authorities, for instance use a concept of Quality Adjusted Life Years, which essentially is a way of allocating scarce resources (money for hospital beds, drugs, surgical interventions, extended term care, etc) to cases that are most deserving with certain minimum limits on provision. Or take charities, where fundraising is important and aspects of a commercial approach will be present - you want to raise as much money for the minimum outlay - however, the dynamics might be different, for instance if your centre is staffed with volunteers.
This chapter is not about me railing against CRM vendors, far from it, CRM applications and technology can be tremendously helpful in delivering great service. This chapter is about what really works in a live environment and how customers just don't view their transactions as a relationship. And as contact centre or marketing processionals, neither should we.
Consider your personal dealings with your bank. Is that a relationship? It's certainly not like a relationship with a friend or family member. Try this test: Dear Bank, I have banked with you for four years and never gone over my overdraft limit, now I've lost my job and I'm sure I'll get a new one in two months or so, please lend me £10,000 to cover my expenses till then. What response will your loyalty get you? No way, that's the response you'll get and fool if you think you'll get anything else! The bank's not here to support you, to protect you, they exist purely and simply to profit from you whilst they deliver a service. They are not interested in taking a risk on you getting a job. And why would they! For sure banks can improve their customer handling and realise that they are merely shops for money, but they are still shops - you wouldn't go to Tesco and ask for two months of groceries and I'll pay you back when I get a job. Similarly, don't expect that from your bank. Your "loyalty" in the past is not a factor in their decision making. The sooner we all realise this, the better. Banks absolutely correctly will lay out the terms under which they wish to do business - we may not like it, but hey, deal with it. Just, don't call it a relationship.
Part 3: Keeping the Show on the Road
When the lights go out in a contact centre it can be very bad news for the entire organisation. For example, imagine a Live TV Fundraiser, what happens to donations if the contact centre systems fall over? Advisors being left to tell customers "Sorry, our systems are down, can you call back" is hardly satisfactory. What if you can't even get through to an advisor? Contact centres are so fiendishly complex that failure can happen at many points - telephone lines, database systems, commercial power supply, back-office systems, building security systems, etc. etc. Many of these items can be duplicated or beefed up for resilience, so for example, you can run your database on a cluster of servers so if one server fails, the cluster remains viable and service continues. Similarly, the telephone lines (more likely digital fibre links) can be duplicated to take separate routes into a building, from different "points of presence" on the supplier network and be configured for network level resilience. For small contact centres, the services available for redundancy and continuity are more sophisticated than you might expect and don't have to cost the earth. The key to Keeping the Show on the Road is good planning. This section expands on "planning" to key steps to take to ensure that the customer experience is consistently good.
Chapter 8: Technology
Here's an example of why technology is great. I'm writing this, May 30th 2007 and I get a rollover on my RSS feed panel from Google Desktop that catches my eye. It's a note from Bloomberg - "Wayward California Whales May Have Ret...". I'm intrigued. At the time of writing this was published some 27 minutes previously. So I click through and right there is this fantastic story of a 45-foot humpback whale and her 25-foot calf who have drifted 70 miles off course on their spring migration to Alaska. On the US Pacific coast, heading north, the whales got as far as San Francisco, decided to turn 90 degrees right and enter San Francisco bay and head up the Sacramento river to the Port of Sacramento. I'm not making this up, (see http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aGxLoaddlZoM&refer=us) but it gets better. I quote directly from the article:
"By May 20, they had reached a dead end at the Port of Sacramento, northeast of San Francisco. They turned downriver, then spent more than a week stalled in the fresh water. Their unwillingness to head back to the Pacific frustrated rescuers, who tried to drive the whales homeward.
Scientists fired on the whales with water cannons, played sound recordings of an Orca feeding on a whale and even car- alarm noise to try to force them toward the ocean. Eventually, the whales headed downriver on their own."
So far, so good, but what's this got to do with technology? Well the article continues:
"During the rescue effort, more than 2,600 suggestions from the public poured into a special e-mail account set up by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
One e-mail suggested using helicopters to harass the animals downriver, while another proposed building a fake whale with an outboard motor to lead them to the Pacific. A Navy dolphin squad might be able to guide the whales home, according to one e-mail. And a psychic asked to read the whales' minds."
"Building a fake whale with an outboard motor". You can't make this stuff up. Bernadette Fees, a deputy director with the California Department of Fish and Game said "There have been some real interesting folks who've contacted us." Oh yes indeed Bernadette. My point is, whales go off track, a government agency gets 2,600 emails with suggestions, it's picked up by Bloomberg and I'm reading it 27 minutes after publication, one-third of the way round the globe. Never has there been a time in history when so much was available to so many, for such little effort. Want to see photos of bush fires in California, want to see funny TV ads archived on YouTube, want to make free telephone calls around the globe, ... well, somehow we have engineered a connected world that allows all of this and more. And we don't even bat an eye. It's like, oh yeah, I was on the New York Times website last night reading about ... Amazing what we can access and amazing that we are not stunned by it all. It's not like we've been doing it for 20 years!
So, technology is all around us and most of it, and this is the really clever bit, is slipping into the background - releasing the benefits but hiding the features - just letting us get on with communicating.
In contact centres, an unbelievable amount of technology goes is in play moving voice and data around the centre, screen-popping information from advisor to supervisor in milli-seconds to save us from repeating ourselves. The instant screen pop, moving a screen worth of customer data from advisor to advisor as a call is put on hold and transferred, used to be really clunky. Now it's a click of a mouse. Adviors starting in call centres don't go "WOW, Did you see that!!!!", they just get on with it as one more unremarkable thing the technology can do that helps them get on with their job.
Without technology, contact centres do not exist. It is a technically very advanced environment and providers innovate and upgrade relentlessly. After people, technology is the second largest cost in contact centre and at the establishment of the contact centre, aside from building the contact centre structure, you likley will spend more on technology than anything else.
Technology in contact centres, because of the capability, is necessarily complex. With complexity comes confusion and expense. It is the land of TLAs - Three Letter Acronyms, for example, ACD, CTI, PBX, WTF, what? I made up the last one, but how many people can tell? This section is dedicated to unpeeling onion layers - getting to what is important about technology with the complexity getting in the way.
Chapter 9: Project Management
It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future - Yogi Berra
Many times in contact centres, particularly at the start of a new project, the most common project management methodology seems to be JFDI. Not a term from Star Wars lore, but a pithy statement of just getting the job done (use your imagination). Sadly, JFDI whilst useful if you need to get the lifeboats launced, is sub-optimal and leads to great wastage.
Planning in a contact centre might involve many people - marketing proposition teams, retail or field staff, team leaders, technologists, external partners, trainers, etc etc. Something of that magnitude requires more than a to-do list and a winning smile - real discipline is needed, from establishing clear project objectives to being rigerous in setting timescales to proper testing. Skimp at the planning stage and the risks go sharply up. One of my favourite quotes about project management is "I'd rather fail three months into a two year project rather than fail three years into a two year project".
Chapter 10: Living with Risk
doesn't do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations if you live near him - J.R.R. Tolkien
Risk Free doesn't exist. There is always risk. No project in a contact centre is without risk but most risks can be anticipated for, mitigated and used for learning. In that regard, risk can actually be a positive. But what realistically can you do if the power fails? The key to dealing with this risk is to have thought about it before you need to actually deal with it. That's the key to risk management - running through scenarios, creating mechanisms to identify risks (particularly early warning measures), defining communication links for different risk occurences, risk mitigation and recovery and planning best defence for an allowable cost.
It is important to factor in an allowable cost as budget is a scarce resource and allocation of resources in an environment of scarcity always involves compromise. It is no bad thing to understand the difference between coping with 12 hour power outage for £1M or coping with 72 hour power outage for £100M. Your circumstances will determine your investment in risk mitigation & recovery resources.
Successful risk recovery depends absolutely on planning, so that's where we start. Firstly, what kinds of risks might a contact centre face? The risks fall into three categories:
- Commercial - is the plan / process economically viable
- Operational - is the plan / process efficient
- Technical - is the plan / process do-able
For Commercial risks, we are looking at the economic viability, will the planned cost savings be achieved, will the cash flow support the investment, will this create costs elsewhere in the business, is this risk/reward arrangement reasonable?/p>
For Operational risks we are looking at efficiency factors - can we support 24/7 operation, how will service delivery be impacted by a postal strike, how can we maintain service levels with higher staff absence, can we train all advisors before the new release of the new product catalogue?
For Technical risk the underlying capability of machines and processes is being questioned, can we support 200 more users, can access control cope with more home workers without impacting system performance, can a server upgrade happen in core hours, what happens if a router fails?
The David Tortolano Zwanzig Schilling Trick
Quite a few years ago myself and three friends went to a small Austrian ski resort called Neiderau. One member of the party, David Tortolano distinguished himself in two ways: Firstly, eating more bananas than the rest of the party combined, in fact, two or three times as many bananas as the rest of the party and secondly, for a little bit of flirting with a waitress over dinner. It happended like this: At the end of our evening meal, our waitress arrived with the bill and we started counting out our cash. David aggregated the cash and counted out the amount due. He then added into the pile a 20 Schilling note (this was many years prior to the introduction of the Euro) as a kind of tip. I say kind of as it was really a device to have some fun. As he passed the money to the waitress he managed, through sleight of hand to make the 20 Schilling note disappear and then reappear as he ran it through his fingers. Quick as a flash the money is there, then it's not. And then with a winning smile, and if anyone ever had a winning smile, David Tortolano had a belter of a winning smile, teased the young woman to figure out which hand the note was in. Now at this point, the next step is critical. Does the young woman accept the tease and make a guess? The restuarant is pretty quiet so there is no pressure from other tables. She has time. The rest of us, David's cousins Mark and Dana and myself are sat motionless, silent but excited with anticipation. The tension has to be released soon, and it is, as the young woman takes the money minus tip, gives David a withering look and smartly about-turns, leaving David to open his right hand (as I recall) to reveal the note but only to the waitress's back as she cuts through the tables to the bar. David looks shocked. We laugh. Crashed and burned.
And that's the thing with uncertainty, it could have gone the other way. She could have smiled, perhaps guessed where the money was, but she didn't. What could David have done differently to secure a different outcome? Well there may be many ideas, for example, 'don't be making fun of me when I'm working you tourist-pig' might be some advice to try? The thing is, we can never know what it would take for that outcome to be reversed, because you can never live the other line - once a choice has been made, you don't get to see how it would have been if the choice had been different. Sure David can try the Zwanzig Schilling Trick again, on other people, on other nights, and the outcome may be the same or different (rejection and misery or acceptance and fun). But critically, the original event can never be replayed. This is a risk dilema, because there are many opportunities for learning and for improving the chances for future outcomes, but as David will tell you, you can't have time back.
Organisational learning is a process that uses rejections to better inform future decisions. You just have to hope the the learning opportunities don't kill you. It's all very well for a channel swimmer to learn that the distance turns out to be too far for them and get pulled out into the boat crewed by the swimmer's support staff, but what if there's no boat? You've learned something, but it's kind of comming too late to be useful. Fly in your Chardonnay, to say the least. That's way we plan. That's why organisations invest time and effort in scenario planning.
Chapter 11: Running a Contact Centre in 137 Easy Steps
This is all about the practical, nitty-gritty detail of running a contact centre, from developing training materials relevant to the process, important points for team briefings, what to listen for when you're listening to calls, developing systems for advisors, how to interpret contact centre metrics, etc.
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:
- low staff absence rate
- HR too busy doing exit interviews to look at the absence rate
- team areas dressed to support their products / roles
- acres of desks, each identical and none personalised
- staff using intranets, wikis, custom systems to access, gather and distribute new information
- advisors competing to see who has the most Post-It notes around their monitors
- notice boards covered in recent photos from team activities
- notice boards covered in rules and regulations
- coaches and trainers delivering training with high quality materials in a smart, comfortable room, separate from the calling floor
- 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.
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.
Chapter 15: Outsourcing, insourcing, resourcing, offshoring. What?
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 "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!
Part 5: Future Directions
"Who the hell knows?"
So said Edie Falco, who plays Carmella Sorprano in the TV The Sopranos. With refreshing honesty, let's be honest, celebrity comment is not known for the truth, Falco told Reuters in April 07: "Who the hell knows?" answering a question about what happens next after the demise of The Sopranos which ran for six series. As with careers, so with marketing, communications and technology. Woody Allan has a great expression and a personal favourite of mine: "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans for the future."
So if it's all so difficult, why bother wondering? Terrible things might await us in the future. Prognosticate at your peril. Well, peril does not scare me, in fact, I embrace peril, I yearn for peril. And so, fixing a safety helmet to my head and proudly displaying my boy scout badges on my chest, I plunge into the future. To examine the trends and bring forth a view (and many may challenge it) of how service delivery will evolve over the next few years. For the sake of keeping this relevant I'm taking an evolutionary approach rather than a revolutionary approach to the future, so no flying cars in this book, but even evolving what we have today may well seem pretty revolutionary.
Before looking forward, I want to look briefly back. Can you remember the first time you heard the word 'blog' or the word 'podcast'? Couple of years ago? Perhaps a small, small number of you can go back four years, but that's the point. Four years. We have photobloggers and videobloggers, mainstream TV programmes like BBC Breakfast doing a daily breakfast podcast. For the vast majority of us it didn't exist four years ago. It's a true phenomenon. A publishing milestone. A great, great moment in history - thought, type, publish. Not 'thought, type, look for a publisher, get fed up, give two fingers to the establishment, return to work in the call centre'. No, think, type, publish. Now. And millions of people are doing it. If that can happen in four or so years, what can happen in the next four, never mind the next forty. Flying cars anyone?
Chapter 17: Service Technology Options
Chapter 18: Modeling & Customisation
I like golf. Playing it and watching on TV. Doubtless many others do too. I also like skiing, but not watching it on TV. I'm sure many others do too. What about enjoying golf, watching golf, enjoying skiing, visiting cities, photo-blogging, keeping rabbits, reading The Onion, The Economist and The First Post, visiting America and Italy and trying to make the perfect salsa. Starts to reduce the number of people like me from millions to, possibly just a few. We're all like this, there's lots we have in common with people but we are also very individual. For a call centre, this presents a problem, how to you best represent yourself to people with widely differing perspectives and interests?
Well, generally a contact centre is not setup to handle calls from skiing, golf watching, rabbit keeping, Economise reading photo-bloggers. Contact Centres are typically arranged around simple transactions, like a home broadband help desk, a charity donation line, a utility payment centre, etc. For this reason, contact centres tend to avoid individualisation and concentrate on very simple segmentation of customers, usually on one dimension, for example, value. So, "select" customer (those that spend at the highest level) get one level of service and the great unwashed get another (inferior) level of service. This is easy to enable, simple to communicate and operationally, easy to manage, however is a short-sighted approach, if not actually fully wrong-headed.
These days a boadband provider is rarely just a broadband provider (likely they provide phone service and perhaps mobile communications too), a charity is rarely about just fundraising (issue promotion and member get member, spring to mind) and utilities are rarely just utilities (infrastructureless organisations offering gas, electric and other services such as extended boiler warranty, home care, etc). This is the era of the multi-faceted brand, of service extenstion and massive cross sell. So, is the same tone of voice to all consumers still looking like such a good idea?
Of course, going too far the other way leads to operational inneficiency, you can't have a team setup just to offer a great service to golf-loving, Economist reading, rabbit-keeping photo-bloggers, just in case one should call. You might wait a long time. Still, there is value in looking at improved segmentation and tailoring service and offers more closely to the real issues people care about. For example, as hard as EDF Energy try, I really can't get excited about Gas and Electricty offers that involve Nectar points (the combined loyalty scheme with diverse members such as Sainsbury's, BP, etc) however, perhaps if they spoke to me about something that I am interested in, relating their meat and two veg product to something that I care about, might that make a difference?
Segmentation works in two ways. For service and for targeting
- Managing data across channels
- Profiling schemes, MOSAIC, etc
- Heat Maps
- RCV, CLTV, Scarcity Allocation Models
- Managing massive customisation
Chapter 19: New Distribution Models
- Asset Digitisation
- Centralising or Dispersal of Assets?
- UGC/Web2.0/Social Networking - What does it mean for Contact Centres?
- RSS feeds and podcasts & blogs - What happens when advisors self-publish?
Copyright 2007, Robert A Innes
posted by Rob Innes @ 4:49 PM
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