Call centres: Setting new standards

Meeting minimum standards

How to alleviate this problem is one of the biggest issues facing the domestic call centre environment. With brands' reputations at stake, they are under pressure to find ways of meeting clients' and customers' minimum standards - and yet striking this delicate balance seems to be getting harder.

"The biggest problem in this sector is that standards measurement isn't joined up," says John Orsmond, director at call centre Data Vantage. "Clients demand the 'pick-up within 10 seconds' rule because they pay for volume. Yet they ignore the fact they don't have the right systems to know how to deal with that call once it's been answered."

His view is informed by research from Data Vantage in which it telephoned 10 per cent of the 6.5 million people who make at least 10 calls to call centres each week, the most comprehensive poll of its kind. It revealed that while the clients thought only 26 per cent of callers left with below average satisfaction and 62 per cent enjoyed average satisfaction, in reality the figures were the reverse, with only 30 per cent satisfied on average, while 58 per cent had below average satisfaction. "Because clients set their metrics on what they 'think' satisfies customers there is a massive undetected level of dissatisfaction," he says. "We believe it costs clients more than £100m in lost opportunities every year."

While it is the job of the call centre to manage satisfaction, many say the causes of a poor call don't lie at their feet. "Banks have separate departments for dealing with insurance, loans, pensions and other services, and yet call centre agents are expected to take all of these," argues Isabel Montesdeoca, marketing director at call centre provider Aspect. It works with the likes of HSBC and began by redefining the bank's own internal procedures to make calls more effective. "Without remedying this, it's no wonder satisfaction levels are poor, and they won't improve unless clients' own business processes change too."

It's a view David Jermyn, contact centre manager of DataForce, shares. "Calls from irate customers who say their orders haven't turned up is a delivery issue that has nothing to do with us. That's why you can get repeated calls from the same customer, producing low first-time resolution statistics and yet clients will still say first-time resolution should be 100 per cent."

On hold

But what are the things that call centres do that annoy callers? According to a Mori poll of 1,775 adults this July, leaving people waiting came top at 40 per cent, followed by having too many complicated options (25 per cent), not being able to talk to a person (18 per cent), automation (17 per cent) and being passed around (16 per cent).

This list typifies the problems clients and call centre providers face. It's volume that has caused call waiting and created the need for options and automation. Talking to a real person may be ideal, but as staff represents 50-80 per cent of call centre costs, providers are under pressure to get the right split between agents and machines. And the extent to which automation is adopted is an industry-dividing issue.

"We've predicated our business on humans," argues Phil Westoby, group managing director at NewLogic. "We use IVR but our preferred solution is our Altitude product that will identify callers and route them through to people that have the right skills to take the call. Consumers want to be spoken to, and newer technology like speech recognition may have a place for buying tickets but not for query handling. It's not something we want."

Others say the bullet must be bitten, and consumers will learn to appreciate automation if it truly deals with their call. So says Simon Edwards, director, international marketing at speech technology provider Intervoice. "Our research shows the biggest problem call centres face is managing volume.

Automation has had a bad press because people see it as an iteration of what they've grown to hate rather than something that can be done well." Intervoice's technology is in place at Citibank (Germany) and can deal with queries using voice recognition which is complex enough to identify 16 different ways people say simple words like 'yes' or 'no'. Edwards says the reason automation hasn't satisfied consumers is because it hasn't been matched with the right services.

Automation technology

"There are two elements here," he says. "The amount it is theoretically possible to voice recognise - which can be 40-85 per cent of calls - and the proportion of people that will drop out of an automated call if it gets too complex - which can be 50 per cent." But solve this, he says, and there should be little customer backlash. "If you actually told people that by speaking their account number, they could do everything quickly, few would refuse. It's just getting used to it."

The technology-benefit argument is that customers gain from basic calls being siphoned away to leave more complex ones to be dealt with one-on-one. "Lots of people are using expensive technology poorly," says Jermyn, "when it should be an enabler."

One of DataForce's travel clients had live agents taking all catalogue requests - something which it felt was unnecessary. To change this, callers were first put through IVR to distinguish between those who wanted a catalogue and weren't planning to travel right now, and those who wanted to travel straight away. The latter spoke to live agents immediately, leaving automated data capture for the rest, with no rise in drop-out rate (less than 20 per cent).

MM Group business development director Rachel Robinson says smarter use of technology has to influence the way standards are measured. "If nothing changes, things will only get worse," she says. "And technology has to be installed so that it helps the consumer, not the client. Caller identification is fine, for example, but 30 per cent of people bar their numbers, so you need to have a strategy in place for that." Where MM has insisted on procedural changes, customer satisfaction has increased. "For Sainsbury's To You, all new customers are routed through to a live operator who asks them how the service has been. They are also given authority to offer vouchers and compensation directly. First-call resolution is now more than 90 per cent."

When altered like this, call centres are now saying clients must change the way they set their targets, says Caroline Worboys, managing director at Broad-system. "Speed of answering calls is still there as a metric, but we prefer measurement on the effect of calls." COI is one client she cites as being a convert to this new way of thinking. "Our work with them to encourage people to give up smoking couldn't work with traditional metrics. We were taking calls of a much more complex nature, about people's fears about quitting and their well being. Benchmarking is based on how long people stay nicotine free - a much more meaningful measurement."

And according to some, traditionally accepted norms in handling calls must be continually challenged. "There's still a thought that siphoning less important calls away to IVR and talking to more valued people for longer is good," says Paul Miller, business development manager at Prolog Connect. "However, long calls can also turn people off, and that time spent gaining fake rapport is just as destructive." The finding comes from its recent research paper 'Bridging the Gap', which showed people were more happy when they spoke to people around the same age. In this instance, the length of call wasn't important. "People can identify similar ages to themselves, a more important factor when phoning a call centre," he says.

The effect this has on determining client and customer satisfaction metrics is clear. "Dumping all calls onto a call centre and trying to measure it this way is meaningless," he says. "You may appear to be ticking all the right boxes on the 'speed of answering' or 'number of times you mention the brand' front but you haven't impressed the caller. Age matching may be seen as operating at the margins, but nowadays, the smallest factor makes a difference, and compatibility in calls could be a measure. Response numbers on mail could be printed for different age groups so that callers go straight to someone they empathise with the call centre."

Best solution

Such a simple solution might take the shine off some of the more technological advances that purport to improve the ability of centres to manage calls - such as CRM systems that join up fax, email, letters and previous buying patterns into one place, and jump more important people up the queue.

But the sentiment seems to be about matching the best solution to the job - something that is too easily forgotten.

"Machinery is still used without intelligence," argues Richard Pickering, business development director at voice solutions provider LVM, which installs software into call centres. He argues that intelligent use of software can add value for consumers. "Numark, a chain of chemists, recently advertised on GMTV with a response number. It was a recorded message, but by adding a voice recognition element, people could speak their postcode and find out where the nearest store was to them - something that had real benefit."

Another technology solution gaining popularity is a facility that lets callers come off the queue and input a time - using their phone - when they want to be called back. "People don't like their time being wasted," says Pickering, "but if you can offer a phone back service then everyone is happy."

Such solutions allow callers to pick a time-slot to within 15 minutes when they want to be rung back and agents will be alerted to make sure this happens. Pickering and others say it is elements like this massively increase efficiency for call centres, eradicates queues and ensure repeat (unresolved) calls don't clog up genuine enquiries. It's a win-win situation for all.

Unfortunately, it's the contact centres themselves that need to make this investment, so how ubiquitous these systems will be is an issue.

However, according to Maggie Evans, head of marketing for outsourced contact centre iSky, more need to realise that they can create a competitive edge for themselves. She says: "Call centres can't provide a bottomless pit of live agents waiting to answer 100 per cent of calls in three rings, but many - clients included - are failing to exploit the opportunities presented by the web. Real time online assistance (such as Call Me Now buttons) can easily be used in conjunction with websites, but sadly, too few are recognising this and the websites themselves are also lacking."

What's clear is that as volume to call centres continues to increase, both clients and centres need to be much more open with each other about what it is they want to achieve and measure. "Where there is an excess of volume, the first standards clients drop are quality assurances, recording calls for monitoring and call resolution," says Jermyn. "Cutting corners lets bad practice build up. What's needed is an honest and open policy where everyone agrees that the reason satisfaction is at the level it is comes from all sides, but that there are ways to improve it." And few people could argue against that.

CPM

According to Stephanie Rouse, director of contact centre CPM, monitoring call answer times is still as critical as ever. "It's not just a number plucked from thin air but about developing measurable targets and monitoring systems which evolve in line with current client and customer demands," she says. "We have key performance indicators - like 80 per cent of calls answered within 20 seconds - but these are used to benchmark carelines for example, which is used to assess whether service is improving and what should be the areas focused on to move forward." CPM is currently developing a 'Virtual Private Network' which lets clients' in-house software on customers be accessed. According to Rouse, the benefit is more up-to-date information and better brand consistency. Trials with Britvic have already shown customers receive faster, more accurate call resolution. CPM also benchmarks its own performance. For Kellogg's careline it developed a methodology for calculating ROI when taking into account the value of customer who may be calling with a complaint. By treating people accordingly, CPM calculates Kellogg's receive an ROI of £13.79 for every £1 invested.

CASE STUDY

According to research from the Service and Support Providers' Association, less than 20 per cent of customer service is actually spent talking to customers. Instead, more than 80 per cent of time is spent identifying the problem, escalating call waiting times. For TD Waterhouse, this was something it knew could be a problem.

The company is the UK's second largest discount broker to 350,000 share investors. It is also the point of contact for 3.3 million customer accounts (including offering services to customers of Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest). It realised customer service was often the 'make or break' factor and wanted to improve call routing effectiveness of its contact centres. To solve this, its UK division turned to CRM provider KANA and call handling time was reduced by eight per cent and on-hold calls reduced by 25 per cent in four weeks.

The facilitator was KANA IQ - a question and answer directory made available to agents, so that no matter what the problem was, most calls could be dealt with in one call. In fact, answers were provided immediately in 90 per cent of cases through 3,000 different scenarios being listed.

Darren Hepworth, vice president for TD Waterhouse's customer contact centre, says: "By providing agents with the answers they need, not only are we improving productivity but cooperation between departments.

HOWTOCOMPLAIN.COM

Call centres could soon be monitored according to how many complaints are passed on to them via howtocomplain.com, the website run by entrepreneur Stuart McCandish. Visitors to the site can make a complaint about how they were dealt with by a company when they tried to phone them, and these are passed on to the marketing directors and call centres concerned. "Consumers are finding that call centres have provided obstacles rather than opportunities to raise issue with companies," says McCandish. "We forward about 40-50 messages a day and receive more than 800,000 hits a month." Howtocomplain.com will follow up complaints six weeks later and report back to the original consumer. "We like to think of ourselves as a helpful third party," he adds.

CALL CENTRE INNOVATIONS/TRENDS

- Age matching callers and centre staff

- Allowing callers to pick call back times

- Call me now buttons on websites

- Voice recognition software