Charting the changing role of the contact centre
Kenneth Hitchen, Consultancy Director at Sabio, the contact centre technology specialists, hosted a debate which highlighted many of the factors driving change in contact centres today. A key theme identified by those attending was a significant shift in consumer expectations, with individuals increasingly expecting organisations to keep pace with their demand for best quality service across a wide range of channels.
Taking part in the debate were senior customer service professionals from many of the UK’s largest organisations, including local government, financial services, leisure and travel, technology and outsourcing.
- Richard Basham-Jones who heads up the Customer Contact Centre operation for Cheshire Building Society and is focused on delivering exceptional service for the Society’s members
- The Head of Oracle’s Customer Service Programme, Nadine Carlaw, who used to head up the company’s UK CRM software sales. Oracle uses customer success as one of the key metrics of its own performance
- Margaret Diffey, Contact Centre Manager for Whitbread’s Premier Travel Inn operation, is a strong advocate for customer service across multiple channels, and needs to use them all to help sell some 31,000 rooms every night
- Steve Downey, who is Head of Customer Services at National Savings & Investment, manages a major multi-channel operation and has seen real changes in customer behaviour over the last 18 months
- BUPA’s Head of Service, Pauline McMichael, was keen to hear more about what the panel thought about matching service experiences with a brand, and making sure that service operations lived up to customer expectations
- Tracey Morgan, Head of Customer Service at Bristol City Council, is involved in a major programme to ensure that the authority is more customer-focused
- Sitel UK’s Client Services Director, Mark Osman, has worked on major outsourcing projects both in the UK and overseas, and has seen a greater level of seriousness in the way that organisations are treating their customer service operations over the last year
- As Contact Centre Manager for EasyJet, Vince Scibetta is currently involved in a programme to evaluate the company’s customer service processes to identify how they can improve support for the 35 million passenger flights EasyJet handles each year
- Lorraine Taylor is Head of Telephony Service & Operations for the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, and a strong advocate of the need to provide customers with choice in how they deal with an organisation
- Coors Brewers’ Director of Customer Services, Brenda Worsdale, is determined to put the customer at the centre of everything that Coors Brewers does. For her the Executive Debate provided an excellent forum to hear about best practice in other sectors
To provide a focus for the day, the Monopoly board game was used as our model. We used Community Chest – for more operational issues, and Chance – for trickier, more strategic questions. We then asked our delegates to pick a card, answer the question first from their perspective, and then open up the debate to the other attendees.
Among the topics we covered were: how joined-up are our multi-channel operations, whether organisations have been impacted by OFCOM’s legislation on outbound marketing, how will customer service metrics develop over the next few years, staff attrition in contact centres, the role of SMS in customer contact, developments in benchmarking, and should offshore still be part of the overall customer service mix.
The first topic we looked at was the issue of multi-channel, where we asked the question: “If a customer completes an application on the web and then calls you, can your agent see what the customer has just done?” For most of our attendees the answer was yes, but a general discussion highlighted multiple examples of how organisations were still not offering a joined-up service to their customers. For some this issue was down to incompatible legacy systems, for others it was mergers and acquisitions that hadn’t yet been fully realised. The general consensus was that with the widespread take-up of broadband at home, consumers were now able to engage with organisations in a range of different ways – phone, branch, web, email, SMS. According to Cheshire Building Society’s Richard Basham-Jones: “customers now channel hop all the time, and even though we offer Internet-only products, we still find those same customers ringing into our contact centres. As organisations we’ve got to acknowledge this shift and make sure we’re ready to work with consumers in the way that they want us to.”
Lorraine Taylor from RBS echoed this sentiment: “customers don’t migrate from one channel to another, they simply extend the number of channels they’re using. It isn’t a straight either/or choice, it entirely depends on the context, where the customer is, what service they are seeking – most people still prefer a face-to-face meeting to discuss a mortgage.” Steve Downey from National Savings & Investments agreed – “our customers aren’t wedded to a single channel. They might go into the Post Office to pick up a leaflet, phone their IFA and quiz them, then go online and check it out, and then call us up to buy the product. That’s how we are today.”
At Coors, Brenda Worsdale found that even though there was an initial requirement to encourage customers to place their orders online, it was important for those who weren’t comfortable with this to be able to use the traditional telephone service. “We’re not there to dictate channels, our mix is there for customers to be able to make a choice.”
Lorraine Taylor believes that organisations also have to structure themselves better to allow multi-channel capabilities to really succeed. “Many organisations still pay and reward their staff to succeed in their individual silos – whether it’s branch, contact centre or online. Without addressing this issue, it’s very difficult to drive the behaviour and will to enable a true multi-channel environment.”
The next issue addressed was that of outbound telemarketing, with the question “How has your organisation been affected by the new OFCOM legislation on outbound telemarketing?" This proved a particularly relevant issue, with OFCOM now starting to get serious about diallers. Most of the attendees had seen outbound calls become less of a requirement in their own businesses, with many now only using outbound as one part of their relationship-building programmes. BUPA’s Pauline McMichael believes that “customers are generally happy to have a relationship-building call, and they also don’t mind hearing about other services – providing there’s a clear need and it’s done from a relationship perspective, for example as part of a call to remind people that their plan is coming up for renewal.”
As an outsourcer, Sitel’s Mark Osman had seen the volume of outbound work decline considerably, and that dialler-based outbound campaigns for short-term sales success was essentially doomed to failure. “We’re working with organisations who are using outbound to follow up on Internet interactions – we’re using it to validate customer interest, then passing that opportunity on to local dealers who have subsequently been able to double their sales conversion rates. There’s clearly a payback from this outbound activity, but it’s definitely not a sales call!”
The group also discussed the role that diallers played, with all agreeing that they were a complex technology solution that needed to be fully understood if organisations were to stay on the right side of the OFCOM guidelines. “Rather than bang your head against the wall trying to solve an outbound issue, at Sabio we’ve increasingly seen that the successful engagements are those where you take an outbound activity and find ways to turn it into an inbound process – it’s just a question of changing the momentum and getting the customer to want to talk to you.”
When the discussion turned to metrics, it was interesting to hear from a group of professionals who’d clearly done a lot of work in this area. Our question was: “How do you see the key metrics in customer service developing over the next few years?” Richard Basham-Jones stressed that it was important to measure the right things. “We used to measure how successful we were in closing new mortgages, but we didn’t balance that with the number of customers who were switching. You always have to look at both sides.” Lorraine Taylor agreed, highlighting the need to research customer satisfaction, but from the customer point of view. “Organisations are always interested in satisfaction scores for their processes, but customers really don’t look at individual processes, they see the whole experience. You’ve got to get down to what dealing with you means for a customer, not just how satisfied they are.”
Oracle’s Nadine Carlaw believes her company is quite advanced in their metrics: “the key measurement behind all our management bonuses is based on customer satisfaction, which is fine, but we’ve now got to live the process and make sure we look beyond the satisfaction scores to really focus on what the customer is saying.” Kenneth Hitchen recommended “it’s no longer enough for organisations to conduct a quarterly or half-yearly survey, indeed some businesses are already thinking in terms of taking a daily pulse”.
Staff attrition is clearly an issue that impacts all contact centre operators, and provoked an active discussion when we asked: “What is your current level of attrition?” Some of our Executive Debate attendees didn’t see attrition as necessarily a bad thing. According to Lorraine Taylor: “you need an element of attrition to get the balance right, and it’s often a natural result of organisational changes. We found that when we improved our first call resolution there was a consequent fall in hand-offs to the back-office – we therefore had to move some back-office staff to the front-office. Some of them liked it, and have done very well – others chose not to stay.”
Margaret Diffey explained how a number of those leaving the Premier Travel contact centre were actually moving on to other positions within the Whitbread Group. “Working in our contact centres gives our staff an excellent grounding in our different services and provides them with a strong customer focus, so we’re kind of pleased that they’re moving on to develop their careers.”
What our group showed was that attrition rates were highly dependent on issues such as location and skills. At Cheshire Building Society’s HQ in Macclesfield for example, unemployment rates are low at just two per cent, so it’s always going to be a competitive marketplace. Steve Downey at National Savings and Investments found himself at the other end of the range, with highly-experienced staff groups some with an average length of service of 15 years, so clearly it’s not wise to generalise about attrition.
Kenneth Hitchen’s view was that “in a very positive employment market, nine times out of ten attrition wasn’t related to what organisations were doing wrong, it was a result of what other businesses were doing better.”
When asked: “Do you use SMS as part of your customer contact strategy?” again experience varied. Brenda Worsdale at Coors had experimented with text as a means of reminding pub operators to place their orders, and found that the results were not that positive. At Premier Travel, however, Margaret Diffey believes SMS gives them a real advantage. “We ask our customers how they’d like to be contacted. As many of our customers book at the last minute, an SMS message to confirm their booking can be really re-assuring, taking away any uncertainty they may have about their reservation.” The team also identified other applications where SMS could make a difference, with Kenneth Hitchen adding that SMS was proving an awesome tool for debt collection where the anonymity of the SMS process was proving an ideal vehicle for automating the return leg of the collection process and generating significant improvements for one operator.
The next topic was email, and we asked: “What is your current service level on emails, and is the volume increasing?” Given consumers growing preference for channel-hopping, our executives acknowledged the importance of the email channel, but reported quite different service levels. Bristol City Council’s Tracey Morgan operates a policy of responding to letters within 15 days, and feels that emails should be quicker, “the problem though is that whatever targets we set need to be consistent across our channels.” According to Vince Scibetta from EasyJet: “our email SLA is the same as our service level for letters – 20 working days. That’s very much not in line with our branding as a low-cost airline, but it’s an area that we’re looking at.” At NSI, Steve Downey targets the operation with responding within 48 hours, and email is currently handled in the back-office but that won’t necessarily always be the case. “We’re finding that 48 hours is about the right timeframe, and we’re not feeling any pressure yet from that level.”
Mark Osman from Sitel had interesting views on our next question – “Should offshore still be considered as part of the mix in providing customer service?” As an outsourcer, Mark has had detailed experience of both onshore and offshore operations, and his conclusion is that from an operational perspective offshore works, with lower delivery costs and strong customer satisfaction scores when done well. “From the customer perspective, however, it fails completely, mainly where organisations haven’t been brave enough to go offshore completely and have instead tried a more risk-free approach and taken their service offshore in smaller pieces. The result is that you condemn the offshore agent to failure before you start, because you never give them all the pieces they need to resolve the customer’s requirements.
“We shouldn’t ignore the fact though that larger organisations can and are using offshore to help use their resources more smartly,” continued Mark. “The ones who are doing it well, however, are those who are thinking intelligently and identifying what are the best transactions for offshore delivery. Simple, process-driven back-office operations, for example, are an ideal candidate for offshore operations. Where the agent has to put themselves in the customer’s shoes, or where you have more complex transactions where the agent needs to show intuition, it’s not going to work well.”
Lorraine Taylor’s company, RBS, took a conscious decision based on customer feedback not to go offshore. “We saw our competitors’ customer satisfaction scores dip when they went offshore, so it just didn’t make sense to us. We find that our customers appreciate working with UK-based agents who have access to all the processes and information they need to handle whatever a customer might be asking for. So in terms of cost efficiencies, staying in the UK doesn’t always work, but in terms of customer satisfaction it does – that’s why we advertise our 24/7 UK contact centre capability so strongly.”
BUPA’s Pauline McMichael felt both points were valid. “We obviously deal with a lot of sensitive customer issues, so using offshore for customer-facing tasks wouldn’t work, but we do a lot of our back-end data processing in India because it makes sense.”
Kenneth Hitchen then raised the issue of some organisations making the choice between offshore and self-service, particularly as there was a growing consumer acceptance of self-service as a channel, particularly with some of the latest natural language speech offerings. “Self-service doesn’t necessarily mean bad service, and it’s providing an increasingly attractive option for organisations looking to manage their customer service costs.”
So does offshore still make sense – the answer is clearly “it depends”.
Next we asked Richard Basham-Jones of the Cheshire Building Society: “Do you regard benchmarking as a key tool for determining strategy?” Richard felt that benchmarking against other building societies helped his organisation to identify what it can do that’s different – “we’re always working to find ways that we can do things better and make people want to be a member of our society.” Pauline McMichael took a similar approach at BUPA – “we need to understand about Government and NHS policy and identify the spaces that exist in the market for BUPA. We also benchmark from a customer service and an employee perspective, and take time to talk to other organisations to find out what they’re doing in terms of leadership.”
Bristol City Council’s, Tracey Morgan said that there was a lot of comparison between different local authorities “but we’re also keen to learn from the private sector, particularly in areas such as staff recruitment.” Kenneth Hitchen felt that in the B2C world, one of the most valid benchmarking practices is to ‘walk the service’, and that it was essential for organisations to live their own customer experience. Lorraine Taylor from RBS also felt it was important to look beyond her own industry – “we of course benchmark against the other Big 5 banks, but we’re as interested in how other market leaders are developing best practice in customer experience, strategy and the leadership needed to drive these areas.
“At a time when customers are touching everywhere, you can’t just benchmark in terms of your own industry. In our sector it’s not just banking excellence we have to deliver, we have to perform against expectations that may have been set by customer service excellence in other markets – so we need to find ways to benchmark that too,” continued Lorraine.
Finally we asked “Is homeworking a desirable objective – if so why, and how are we going to get there?” Not everyone was convinced that homeworking would become the major trend that predictions often suggest. At BUPA, Pauline McMichael commented that “we trialled an element of homeworking for a back-office project and it was OK, but I was left feeling we still needed to address the challenge of inclusivity. As an organisation we’ve got to focus on finding new ways to make the management of these staff an integral part of our processes.”
“There’s obviously going to be issues in terms of data protection, particularly for organisations in the financial services sector,” added Nadine Carlaw, while Bristol City Council’s Tracey Morgan was looking at ways to involve other parts of the community in the authority’s contact activities. “One of the areas we’re looking at is in terms of how we interact, and we’re investigating the possibility of much smaller contact centres – possibly in schools – that could help children to start to get work experience.”
At Sabio, our view is that the optimum profile for homeworking is for second line service and support operations, and that the model can also work well for more technical or specialist skills that aren’t necessarily always available in a traditional contact centre environment. The panel’s opinion, in conclusion, was that while homeworking could be part of the overall mix, it wasn’t mainstream yet.
