Get the basics right before you turn to technology

Contact centres were introduced initially to provide a better, more consistent service for customers, but it’s always proved difficult and expensive for organisations to deliver a high quality service based solely on using agents to field all their calls. For any customer-facing business, the challenge of balancing service quality with the cost of delivering acceptable service availability has always been tough.

Organisations have only really been able to address this through one of two ways: by automating the process and cutting their costs, or by concentrating on the agent and aiming for either higher productivity or lower salaries. It was this cycle that led many first generation contact centres to embrace early IVR solutions - which did so much to alienate customers. And when the pendulum started to move back towards live agents, ongoing cost pressures inevitably led many organisations towards offshore call centres. It’s fair to say that those businesses that invested in offshore resources didn’t do it to improve service delivery – the decisions were all about cutting costs.

While undoubtedly cost-effective, it’s no surprise that offshore has had an impact on the quality of service delivery. Clearly the pendulum is now starting to swing back, and we’re seeing a number of organisations actively responding to customer concerns about the overall quality of offshore service delivery. In recent months, for example, NatWest has committed itself to a UK-focused strategy, actively promoting the fact that all of its contact centre staff will be based in Britain and that no jobs will be outsourced overseas.

Focus on what works for the customer

This is a significant statement, however it’s important to remember that this approach won’t work for all types of business. The focus now needs to be around what actually works for the customer, rather than on what just happens to work this year for the service provider. But before we all rush headlong into branch renewal programmes and self-service projects, it’s essential that we establish in more detail just what customers are trying to achieve when they contact your organisation. Only then can you really start to build an effective customer contact strategy and start thinking about how technology can be deployed to improve the customer experience.

Low-cost airlines, for example, have built a new kind of business based on no-frills and low ticket prices. Customer service is not a high priority in their business, so it would be entirely appropriate for them to adopt a low-cost customer interaction approach. Indeed callers might be confused if they were ‘over-serviced’ by such companies. In contrast, if you’re a bank aiming to deliver high value financial services to high net worth customers, then it’s unlikely that self-service and offshore call centres will play a part in your business model, and it would be far more profitable to pay live agents to handle calls.

Flexibility is essential here – some customers might be happy to go through an automated system, while others might want to deal with an agent. Both might be important long-term customers so you have to find a way of accommodating both types in your customer interaction strategy,

Moving towards personalisation

That’s why we believe it’s important for organisations to find out more about who their customers are and why they’re calling. Only then can you really start to define an appropriate strategy. For example, if you’re developing a call centre solution for an insurance company, and you know that 60 per cent of calls are likely to be about insurance claims, then it makes sense for claims to be a key focus of any greeting – having it sit down at number five in a lengthy list of ‘press x for y’ dialogues just isn’t going to work.

It’s also worthwhile thinking hard about automation. When is self-service acceptable to your customers? More importantly, try and work out what won’t work. Some of the key areas where the latest speech-based voice self-service solutions can add real value is through increasing customer satisfaction, first call resolution and profitability, whilst reducing operating costs and the volume of calls to agents, which leads to greater internal efficiency and team morale.

With improved accuracy, more sophisticated speech recognition is the next generation in IVR automation. Organisations that have been successful here typically follow the ‘don’t make me think’ approach, where the service or application is effectively transparent for the caller. If I call a bank asking for a balance enquiry, I don’t want a long conversation – I just want to get secure access to my account details. Automation can have a key role to play here, identifying callers, providing a secure ID and verification process, and providing organisations with the ability to route calls based on individual customer experiences and profiles.

Once you know who your callers are, when they contact you, how they communicate with you eg email, telephone etc, what they use each channel of communication for and what is important to them for each channel, then you can select the right automation approach to deliver an appropriate and personal customer service. It’s probably only at this stage that you can start to determine whether a self-service approach will match that customer’s profile or you may only automate one aspect of a call such as identification and verification. Whatever the approach you take, you must ensure that automation offers your customers a service that feels natural and easy to use and they can achieve what is important to them.