The top ten customer service trends set to shape the customer service and contact centre agenda during 2010
The Customer Service sector is clearly set for a challenging year in 2010 as it continues to deal with the twin pressures of an economy still in recession and a rapidly-evolving consumer landscape. Economic conditions are still clearly exerting a significant downward pressure on contact centre and customer service costs, and that’s already having an impact on overall agent seat numbers. We’re also finding that customer service management teams are being tasked with either maintaining current service levels with fewer resources, or are being challenged with delivering service level improvements without significant additional budget.
To achieve these goals, our industry has to get smarter, and there’s been strong progress in key areas such as customer retention, engaging customers earlier in the sales cycle, and providing greater support for online channels. The challenge, however, is that consumer behaviour is changing even faster, particularly among the ‘millennial’ generation - who really don’t remember a time before the Internet was omnipresent, and are consequently presenting many companies with completely new challenges in terms of selling products and delivering services.
It’s more and more difficult for organisations to hide their poor service performance, when consumers increasingly have the means and determination to capture their own record of the service provided to them, and then share it with the world within hours. It’s estimated that within the UK by the end of 2011 there will be 30 million mobile devices in circulation with a video capture capability, and YouTube already serves up over one billion videos a day. The word of mouth infrastructure is now in place, and companies can’t afford to ignore customer feedback – particularly if it’s their brand being associated with an ‘epic fail’.
So what can organisations do to stay out of the firing line? Perhaps the most important step is to realise that these pressures aren’t going to go away. Tighter budgetary constraints are here to stay, and customers will get more and more informed, particularly with the growth in social networking and services such as Twitter. To succeed within this more complex environment, organisations and their brands will need to do everything they can to optimise their customer service activities, both stategically and at an operational level. At Sabio we believe there are ten areas that require real focus – here’s our Top Ten for 2010.
1. ‘Getting in the shape’ – you need to match your customer service resources with anticipated contact demand, and that means fine-tuning your Workforce Management tools to ensure optimised performance. Go beyond staffing levels to look hard at real time management and multi-skilling to drive customer service centre occupancy levels. It’s also important not just to handle demand levels, but instead to really challenge the underlying root causes of calls. Speech analytics can have a key role to play here, giving you the ability to identify and act on customer service issues before they start to significantly impact contact centre performance levels.
2. Managing your infrastructure costs with SIP – many customer service operations micro-manage details such as Average Call Handling times without looking at the bigger picture. We believe that 2010 will see a real emphasis on reducing overall communications costs, as the introduction of SIP trunking supported by developments such as Avaya Aura platform lead to significant reductions in monthly line rental costs. Having a single, centralised company-wide communications platform removes constraints such as geographic numbers and branch office barriers. This can also potentially unlock sufficient savings to fund other key customer service projects during 2010.
3. Get proactive – call avoidance sounds like a bad customer service principle, but it’s actually smart providing you can focus on removing non-value calls from the contact centre queue. Adopting a proactive service approach can help an organisation to reach out to the customer before they need to get in touch, using techniques such as SMS fulfilment, mobile web applications based on the latest presence data (such as BlackBerry-based boarding passes at airports), as well as focused outbound IVR initiatives that can reduce or eliminate the requirement for follow-up customer calls. Broadcast technologies such as Twitter are now also proving useful in getting a message out to an audience quickly for certain companies to avoid a call from everyone of them.
4. Breaking down the back office – maintaining distinct front and back-office operations has always presented both organisations and their customers with a potential service quality disconnect. The deployment of UC-enabled techniques such as application sharing, unified messaging, conferencing and mobility/presence can now effectively embed back-office operations within a broader customer-facing environment, while techniques such as workforce management and activity blending can integrate resources and lead to significant operational efficiencies.
5. Addressing the security challenge – fraud is still a major financial issue for contact centre operators, potentially accounting for up to three percent of the bottom line for most financial services based companies. Consumers are worried about Phishing, and increasingly Vishing, while many organisations are still struggling to address their PCI credit card compliance obligations. We believe 2010 will see the increased deployment of biometric voiceprint techniques that reduce security concerns for operators while increasing ease of access for customers. Biometrics also add an essential third factor for security, going beyond ‘something about you’ and ‘something you know’ to the much more secure – ‘something you are’.
6. Any channel, any time, any agent – the true shift from call centre to contact centre has been a long time coming, but it’s now a reality with the contact centre playing an essential role in supporting and enabling corporate e-commerce activities. To make the most of these opportunities, organisations need to implement proactive tools such as web call back, web chat and email and phone blending that all contribute to driving conversion online.
7. Adjusting to real time email – with the rapid growth of BlackBerrys, iPhones and other smartphone devices, we now have a generation of consumers that are effectively online all the time. For the first time, mobile starts to deliver a content-rich experience that brings email, IM, SMS, Twitter and blogposts all together in a single mobile inbox as part of Web 2.0 initiative. This always-on experience is driving consumer expectations for much quicker response times from their various suppliers, and they’re going to have to be ready.
8. Service personalisation becomes a pre-requisite – in today’s post credit crunch environment we’re often being told that ‘we’re all in this together’, but then our banks, building societies and insurance companies often fail to recognise us when we actually want something from them. There’s really no excuse anymore, as it has long been possible for organisations to route a contact based on customer data using open call steering. This provides a more natural opening to an interaction and automation to handle the necessary identification and verification processes before actually reaching an agent. We believe next year will see an increased focus on much more intelligent call routing techniques. The smarter contact centre operators will be using customer data to prioritise calls, and propensity to purchase, agent skills and customer contact histories to route calls more effectively.
9. Encouraging customers to self-serve – There’s no doubt that the recession is driving the customer service automation agenda, not least because of its underlying business case of resource reduction. However, it’s also important to acknowledge that self-service channels work increasingly well for organisations who gain direct inputs, and for customers, many of whom actually prefer self-service to agent interactions. 2010 will see even more emphasis on speech-enabled self-service, with voice portals gaining momentum, as well as biometric-enabled speech solutions helping organisations to meet their PCI payment security obligations.
10. Measure for success – traditional call centre metrics have always been a barrier to exceptional contact centre performance, so we’re hoping that 2010 will see more organisations focus instead on more relevant, customer-focused metrics. The problem with the old approach is that average metrics always hide inconsistent performance. We believe it’s far more valuable to concentrate on Net Promoter Scores, real time customer feedback and more balanced measurements that always match quantity with a qualitative aspect. Organisations don’t have to look far to find a measurement approach that could work for them, whether it’s post call IVR or feedback survey solutions, data mart mining, ACD statistics, scorecards from vendors such as Verint, or intelligent reporting approaches such as IQ from Avaya.
Next Steps – helping to solve customer service challenges with Sabio
Given that 2010 is likely to be as competitive as 2009, we believe that following up on any of these customer service trends can deliver quantifiable advantages for organisations. For many, however, the real benefits come with those who adopt a longer-term approach and invest in best-of-breed contact centre systems and applications that make an incremental and cumulative difference project by project.
HomeServe is an excellent example of this, working with Sabio over the last five years to build a customer service infrastructure that has not only helped the HomeServe business to achieve real growth but also provide a much better experience for its customers. Find out how HomeServe and Sabio took a call centre that was a potential bottleneck to growth and turned it into a real strategic asset with savings of £3.5m per year.
