Homeworking, Analytics and Voice Self-Service
Three key innovations that are set to deliver real performance improvements for contact centres in 2004

The customer service sector has always focused on driving productivity. With contact centres processing thousands of calls a day, simple quantitative measurements have been the primary metric that contact centre managers have come to rely on. What’s clear is that basic measures, such as the volume of calls handled and the average length of calls for each centre, don’t tell the whole performance story.

Everyone seems to agree that a simple, quantitative focus on productivity won’t solve the underlying quality issues that contact centres need to address such as:

• How to ensure your contact centre is equipped with high calibre agents
  
• How to evolve your contact centre towards more qualitative and customer-focused measurements, and
  
• How to drive call productivity within the contact centre, while still ensuring a high quality personal service

In this paper, Sabio has identified three key innovations that the company believes will help drive performance improvement in each of these areas, and has also produced interactive demonstrations that clearly show how the latest technologies can be deployed to speed up the evolution from a productivity focus to a focus on overall contact centre quality.

Sabio is an innovative contact centre consultancy and services company focused on maximising contact centre performance for its customers. The company offers business consulting, technology integration and outsourced services, and has worked with over 100 major organisations across the UK and Ireland, including BSkyB, Glasgow City Council, Peabody Trust and Yorkshire Building Society.

1. Using Homeworking to help solve your recruitment challenges

Agent turnover has always been a major challenge for contact centre operators. Everyone talks about providing a high quality customer service, but it’s difficult to sustain quality levels when agent turnover is so high.

The Incomes Data Service reports UK contact centre staff attrition is still 25.1 per cent – its highest level since it started tracking these numbers. This figure is also potentially conservative. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) suggested that call centre labour turnover rates were 50.9 per cent in its June 2004 Recruitment, Retention and Turnover report, with a voluntary turnover level of 33.4 per cent.

Internationally, agent turnover numbers are also high. Mercer Human Resource Consulting in New York in its 2003 Call Center Compensation Survey reported that agent turnover in the US remains high at 33 per cent. Datamonitor has looked at the Indian market, and has found that labour competition from offshore outsourcers serving the Western market are increasing Indian-based outsourcers’ attrition and salaries, with turnover rates rising 25 to 30 per cent over the last year.

So agent attrition is a worldwide issue, and it’s not difficult to identify some of the key reasons:

• Despite the move among many organisations to move contact centre jobs offshore, there’s still an overall growth of agent jobs in the UK, with the DTI reporting that the UK will recruit an extra 200,000 contact centre workers during the next three years 
  
• There’s a distinct regional focus in the contact centre market – areas such as South Wales, the Greater Glasgow region, Ireland and the North West of England have all been very successful in attracting major inward investment in contact centre jobs, and this has caused a tightening supply of quality labour – contact centres employing 200 to 500 agent workstations can quickly ‘burn through’ a community’s specialist agent labour pool
  
• Contact centres typically compete for labour with other high turnover sectors such as hotels and catering (with a CIPD turnover rate of 45 per cent), retail (CIPD 27 per cent) and transport (CIPD 17 per cent). However in some sectors such as healthcare, nursing and housing, more specialist staff requirements result in reduced attrition
  
• Pay – contact centres attract a lot of temporary workers, and as a result they’re inclined to gravitate quickly to employers with better pay rates. Employers need to investigate pay plans that reward staff loyalty and compensate according to agents’ growing skill sets
  
• Training and motivation – when agents leave they typically cite lack of career path, feeling undervalued, poor supervisors and lack of training as reasons for their departure – while often intangible, effectively addressing these issues can make a big difference for frontline agents

To a certain extent, there’s not a lot that organisations can do to protect themselves from the impact of these issues. Of course they can offer improved pay and training, and they can locate to areas where there’s a strong agent labour pool, but these steps won’t address the core fact that retaining skilled agents is difficult. That’s one of the reasons that offshoring proved initially attractive, but as Datamonitor’s Indian research showed, attrition is also a factor in overseas locations.

Instead, organisations have to consider alternative approaches to contact centre staffing to meet their resourcing requirements. One particular concern is that as call centres evolve into professional contact centres, there’s a growing requirement for highly skilled agents who provide assistance, can solve problems and can identify and close potential sales opportunities. Contact centre managers are now looking for specific skills such as multi-tasking and e-mail handling - it’s no longer enough just for agents to turn up. With this increased skills focus, contact centres face potential recruitment competition from administrative and IT organisations rather than the traditional retail and hospitality sectors.

Homeworking as a potential solution to agent staffing issues

Homeworking is one area that organisations are now looking at with renewed interest. It can address some of the key issues of high staff turnover, staffing to meet spikes in contact activity, customer satisfaction levels and traditional productivity concerns such as lateness, staff sickness and office costs. Contact centres with homeworkers can realise significant productivity gains and cost savings. They can attract better quality, more flexible employees – including those who’d never dream of working in a traditional call centre, and they can broaden their potential workforce catchment area by removing the practical limitation of commuting distance.

Homeworking is a trend that’s already becoming mainstream in the US – according to a 2003 Dieringer Research Group survey, the number of employees working out of their homes has grown 40 per cent since 2001 to approximately 24 million people. In the UK the numbers are growing too. According to the 2003 Labour Force Survey, more than two million, or 7.5 per cent of the working population, are now involved in some form of teleworking. One of the key drivers accelerating this growth is the speed of communications. The first homeworkers used modems with connection speeds of 9.6 kps, now broadband connections are 50 times faster, allowing homeworkers to connect to corporate networks and deliver the same services as their office-based colleagues.

Removing the technology barriers to homeworking

With the development of IP networks and broadband connectivity, combined with an employment law that increasingly supports flexible working, many of the barriers that have prevented contact centres connecting to homeworkers have now been removed. With hosted contact centre applications running across IP lines, remotely-based agents can in effect be managed exactly as if they were physically together in a contact centre. The virtual contact centre, as this development is known, opens up many opportunities for flexible management of variable workloads.

With IP, the management of calls is carried out at a network level, so instead of duplicating technology within the contact centre, a single network infrastructure can support all of an organisation’s contact centres and remote workers. Calls are routed through to the most appropriate agent quickly and with a guaranteed quality of service – irrespective of location.

Consistent performance is achieved through the use of Dual Connect technology that involves installing an analogue line with ADSL into an agent’s house to handle voice communications and to manage data. This approach ensures a resilient customer service infrastructure, while still enabling organisations to integrate home workers and benefit from real time reporting.

Homeworking delivers real benefits

For the contact centre industry, already challenged by the shortage of skilled resources, homeworking is an exciting development. It opens up the potential to draw on skills that match the evolving requirements of a contact centre market looking for increased quality as it shifts from traditional outbound cold-calling to more targeted and sophisticated inbound agent roles.

Integrating homeworkers into the contact centre infrastructure provides organisations with access to many more mature, potentially more responsible, often better-educated and more reliable agents than are typically recruited. It also opens up career opportunities for physically and mobility-impaired individuals, who can now develop their careers while still working from home. As a side benefit, an integrated network of homeworking agents also provides a very strong back up in the case of any disruption to the central contact centre.

For some organisations, initial homeworking initiatives have been extremely successful. When US outsourcer ARO adopted teleworking, agent turnover dropped to seven per cent from 25 per cent, facilities costs fell, and productivity increased by 15 per cent. In the UK, the AA trialled 125 agent homeworkers and found a 34 per cent increase in productivity and staff attrition fell to a third of its previous level. Absenteeism also dropped by a half.

2. Taking advantage of powerful analytical and reporting tools

Contact centres have always struggled to balance the seemingly conflicting requirements of reducing operating costs while improving customer satisfaction levels. These two goals have often been seen as mutually exclusive – with costs escalating rapidly if more focus is placed on customer satisfaction, and satisfaction levels dropping when overall costs are shaved. The reality, however, is that contact centre optimisation isn’t just about increasing spending levels. With the latest generation of analytical tools, organisations can now look at optimising performance by managing the many different dynamic variables that help drive today’s contact centres.

According to the Aberdeen Group, over 60 per cent of contact centre executives and managers listed analytics as a priority for their contact centre development plans for 2004. The latest performance analytics provide businesses with access to potentially dozens of key performance indicators (KPIs), ranging from ‘time to resolution’ and customer satisfaction, to agent performance and service level fulfilment.

As the touch point for influencing thousands of customers a day, the contact centre is often seen as an advantageous listening post to collect and then act on customer feedback. . Whilst many of these same companies have implemented elaborate programs to capture customer satisfaction information, very few of them make optimal use of this information to actively drive their businesses. In short, they've become quite adept at listening to the voice of the customer but are failing to act on the information – perhaps the most critical step to achieving competitive differentiation.

Moving away from the numbers – looking beyond telephony

Measuring contact centre performance has traditionally been a numbers-based exercise. Most organisations still take their existing ACD and wallboard statistics and then track performance based on rather inflexible measurements and statistics such as the number of calls received, the number of calls handled by each agent, and the length of each call.

While providing a basic guide to productivity, it has always been quite possible for agents and contact centres to score highly according to quantitative measures but still not address key customer satisfaction issues. Increasingly organisations are looking at quality monitoring approaches – indeed many have already invested in call recording technology, but this is often only used for training or compliance purposes.

Rather than wait for the annual customer satisfaction survey, senior management now have an opportunity to use their contact centres to find out what customers are actually talking about - and what they’re planning to do next. According to Reicheld and Sasser Jr’s update to their original Harvard Business Review article on “Zero defects: Quality comes to Service”, a five per cent improvement in customer defections can lead to a 25 per cent plus improvement in profitability. Listening to customers and what they say in the contact centre is starting to look like a pretty smart thing to do!

A new generation of analytical and reporting technology is enabling companies to ‘listen’ to their customers to gain and maintain a competitive edge. These new solutions can analyse both the content and context of all customer interactions, including telephone calls, email, instant messaging and web chat. Advanced speech recognition together with automatic recording, advanced analytics and assistance features can directly translate into real business benefits.

Providing a real time window on customer issues

Traditional contact centre analysis techniques have involved a considerable amount of time consuming manual effort on the part of contact centre supervisors. This typically involved listening to hours and hours of calls to get to any particular content that might be of interest. Analysed content was either random or case-specific, and not surprisingly, potentially insightful and valuable information was often overlooked, as there simply wasn’t the time or resource available for full analysis.

On effect, valuable customer data stored within traditional call recording systems was inaccessible, or could take weeks to access. If the data related to a customer reporting dissatisfaction with a service, the likelihood would be that the customer would have acted on their intentions by the time any analysis was possible.

Evaluating interactions based on call content

This innovative technology offers the ability to analyse all aspects of calls made by customers to a particular contact centre. This could include knowing how many customers have called regarding a given product or service, through to enabling management to drill down and listen to all calls relating to a recent campaign or a specific fault. Voice content can be clustered via a graphical interface to show hot topics or emerging themes. This clustering approach allows quick visualisation of what’s actually going on in the contact centre. at any given time.

Knowing in real time what the key customer issues are is a powerful business tool, and can quickly translate into a valuable competitive differentiator.

3. Improving the customer experience using speech solutions

Customer voice self-service has always been viewed with mixed feelings by contact centre managers; it offers lower cost customer transactions with the risk of increasing customer dissatisfaction levels and growing levels of frustration.

This has been an issue for the customer service industry, which is always under pressure to reduce costs. To address this, organisations have typically had two avenues available to them – by automating the process; or by concentrating on the agent cost, which inevitably led to initiatives such as offshoring. However offshoring hasn’t addressed the key issue of customer satisfaction, and there’s renewed interest in voice self-service solutions that deliver a customer experience accepted by the consumer.

What we’re now finding is that organisations have recognised that low-cost customer interactions are here to stay, but they don’t necessarily need to be offshore. Voice self-service or automated transactions obviously have a key role to play here, but it’s important for organisations to recognise that while there are some applications that are ideal candidates for automation, others clearly need to remain the preserve of live agents.

Many businesses and consumers alike are wary of voice self-service, but is this really fair? We’ve always felt that the problem has been more of a design issue rather than a technology one. Traditional IVR-based solutions are ideal for enquiries like the balance of your bank account, but obviously less suited to more complex enquiries such as investigating a mortgage or a detailed insurance request.

Before implementing a new self-service solution, we believe contact centre managers need to carefully consider the fundamental design of the service including who will use it, the proportion of touchtone vs speech and the brand/persona portrayed.

Step-change improvement in speech performance

Over the last 12 months we’ve seen a step-change improvement in both the technical capability of natural language speech-based technology and in the real world capabilities of the latest voice applications coming to market. Over the next year we’re projecting that many more UK organisations will be implementing speech solutions to help improve their customer service offering. We believe that the introduction of applications that drive agent effectiveness can improve overall contact centre quality and customer satisfaction.

For 2005, analysts are projecting that there will be more new speech ports installed than previous generation DTMF touchtone ports for self-service applications – signalling a clear shift towards speech as the interface of choice for self-service applications.

There is evidence that voice self-service is becoming more accepted by the organisations who implement it and the customers who are being asked to use it. In a recent survey conducted for ScanSoft’s SpeechWorks operation by Gartner, 47 per cent of users said they were much more satisfied with speech automation than by touchtone automation. We’re also seeing a real shift in the economics of speech solutions deployment, with ROI becoming much easier to achieve.

Until recently, major speech solutions were strictly the preserve of larger organisations, with applications proving too expensive to deploy unless the contact centres had huge call volumes. Now, however, with a move towards standards and packaged-based speech applications, there’s a real opportunity for voice self-service to move into the mainstream.

The most successful voice self-service applications will be those that are designed around caller and agent needs. Design should be user-centred, providing easy access to supported functionality and showing clear customer benefits – typically in key areas such as security, privacy, convenience and cost of service. Along with delivering caller benefits, voice self-service solutions can also support corporate objectives through the provision of more consistent customer interactions and brand image.

We’re finding that the most effective speech applications are the ones that acknowledge that speech-driven self-service won’t necessarily be able to solve every customer requirement every time. Solutions that focus on one particular part of the customer value chain, such as the agent greeting or customer identification verification, and do that part very well, are setting the speech standard.

Deploying speech technology for the customer

At Sabio, we’re focused on deploying fully integrated voice self-service solutions that will provide a much improved customer experience. We have identified areas where we believe speech solutions can add significant value to the traditional customer/agent interaction. These include:

• Agent Greetings
  
• Secure Telephony Payments
  
• Customer Identification Verification
  
• Automatic Call Completion
  
• Service Prompts
  
• Agent Assistance
  
• Integrated Customer Surveys

While it’s unlikely that any single organisation will adopt all these solutions concurrently, each potentially has an important role to play. The common factor is that all these innovative solutions are about supporting rather than replacing the live agent, and the focus is on delivering an accepted customer experience and enabling higher quality agent performance rather than simply automating processes to cut costs.

Automating repetitive greetings with Sabio Agent Greeting

With the introduction of the Sabio Agent Greeting capability, Sabio has developed a solution to help agents address the repetitive, and potentially demotivating task of answering large volumes of calls in a comparatively short period of time. Working with 118 888, Sabio has developed an Agent Greeting solution that allows agents to record and play back appropriate branded service greetings at the beginning of each call. The Sabio solution ensures that agents can provide customers with clear, accurate and positive greetings for each and every call – irrespective of whether it is early in an agent’s shift or in the middle of the night.

Pilot trials have identified typical call quality improvements of between 15 and 25 per cent for Sabio Agent Greeting initiated calls and 118 888 has seen reduced agent talk time on every call by at least three seconds, agent churn has significantly reduce and the business can adhere consistently to its brand values.

Enabling Secure Telephony Payments

According to research conducted by VISA, 84 per cent of those who did not shop online said they would be more likely to do so, and 71 per cent of those who already do said they would shop more frequently, if payment was more secure. It’s clear that there’s consumer concern about the security of giving card details out to agents over the phone, and perhaps quite rightly. In the UK last year, Card-Not-Present (CNP) fraud grew again and is now the largest type of card fraud in the UK.

Customers who provide credit card and payment details to contact centre agents do it with a certain degree of trust. By the same token, many agents are aware of the position of trust they’re placed in and follow their contact centre’s procedures to ensure that any credit card transactions are as secure as they can be. At present, many agents have visibility of credit and debit card numbers and customer details, so removing the agent from the collection and processing of credit card data provides protection for both customer and agent alike.

By automating the payment process from the rest of the call, Sabio has developed a secure payment solution that will deliver increased confidence for consumers, provide added protection for contact centre agents, and potentially deliver process benefits as payments can be processed more efficiently.

Delivering further security through speech verification

As the frequency and value of telephone-based commercial transactions increases, organisations and their customers are increasingly concerned with security. In addition to techniques such as DTMF-based passwords and PINs, the latest speech technology is making it possible to use voiceprint in place of existing means of authentication.

With the ability to recognise a person’s characteristic voice patterns, speech verification can significantly reduce the risk of unauthorised access to secure data by requiring callers to pre-record a spoken password and to identify themselves by speaking the password each time they wish to access secure information and services. A voiceprint – like a fingerprint – is a biometric or measurable physical characteristic and can be used to verify a person’s identity.

According to research earlier this year from the Zelos Group, the growth of conversational speech in key markets such as financial services, telecoms, health services and payments could see sales of speech verification software grow six-fold, from its current estimated $25 million to some $150 million by 2009.

The use of voiceprints to confirm the caller’s identity provides both caller convenience and can reduce an organisation’s operating costs by cutting the amount of agent-based customer service required to verify a caller’s identity. More obvious potential applications for this technology include access to banking and account details, but it’s equally applicable for a wide range of other sectors. These could include: telecoms providers who want to support payment for pay-as-you-go cards, retailers for order entry, travel companies whose customers need to buy tickets using the phone, even healthcare and medical applications where patients need to process prescriptions with their health centre, or confirm appointment bookings with a hospital.

Together these Sabio Innovations show it’s now possible to deploy speech technology to make the talk time between your agents and your customers more valuable. By addressing key customer service requirements, Sabio is showing how the latest voice-based solutions can drive call productivity within the contact centre, while still ensuring a high quality personal service.