| Research |
10.08.2007
The US Contact Center Operational Review - Multimedia
By Steve Morrell
Although the volume of email into a typical contact center accounts for less than 10% of all interactions, 75% of this year’s respondents deal with customer email within their operation. Text chat and web collaboration have a minor role in the overall scheme of things, but these are found in a small minority of contact centers which tend to use them quite a lot: email is much more widespread.
17% of respondents give themselves an hour to answer customers’ emails (this does not include sending auto-replies saying the issue is being looked at). A further half of respondents say that they try to answer within a working day, with 21% of respondents setting themselves targets of longer than a day. 12% say that they don’t have a target at all.
Interactions by channel:
Telephone (live agent ): 76.2%
Telephone (pure IVR or speech recognition): 6.9%
Email: 6.9%
Web collaboration/page pushing: 2.4%
Fax: 2.1%
Letter: 3.0%
Text chat: 1.2%
SMS: 0.2%
Other: 1.1%
When setting a service level, we believe that businesses should aim to complete the interaction to the customer’s satisfaction within the allotted
time, not just to answer the initial enquiry with a standard automated response and consider the service level reached.
However, only 38% of respondents state that they even automatically acknowledge their reception of customers’ emails (a figure that should be 100% - not doing so is like answering an incoming telephone call with silence). For a virtually cost-free activity to be so underused is little short of a disgrace.
16% of emails in respondents’ contact centers are answered fully within one hour, which is a good standard to be aiming for. A further 18% take up to one working day, and 29% are answered by the next working day at the very least. This means that 63% of emails are answered within one working day, against a service level target of 67%, which is broadly positive.
Only 8% of emails are acknowledged to take longer than 24 hours to deal with satisfactorily, which on the face of it, seems reasonable. However, there are a further 29% of emails to which respondents admit they have no idea what happens, although the emails’ senders will tend to have a pretty shrewd idea.
There is a very important reason that email generally plays a distant second fiddle to telephony, and that is because 81% of emails are answered manually by an agent, with no assistance from an email management solution linked to a knowledge base, which could help get through the volumes of email, and provide consistent responses.
Respondents report that, in an ideal world, 21% of their interactions would be through email, rather than the 7% that it is on average today. Of the vertical markets surveyed, only outsourcing had reached this goal. Interestingly, despite varying levels of email today, the general desire seems to be for around 20% of interactions to be via email.
One of the main problems that has held email back is the poor support and attention that many contact centers have given to it, placing it very much behind telephony in terms of importance. This has mean that email service levels have been weak, and this in turn has discouraged people from using the channel.
Of course, as the expected volumes of email have failed to materialize, businesses have tended to continue to ignore email. The main inhibitor for increasing the use of emails as stated by respondents was connected with the fact that they believe customers prefer using the phone. As such, the companies themselves and the contact center industry in general must bear some of this responsibility for not putting the investment in place to deal with the email channel as soon as it was introduced.
However, email may not be the most suitable channel for many transactions, which may either require security checks, or a rapid response. As such, businesses need to analyze and understand the types the interaction that they receive, and push the email channel to customers only when it works as well for the customer to use email as it does the telephone.
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10.08.2007
The US Contact Center Operational Review - Speech Technology
By Steve Morrell
Despite the growth in use of internet-based services the popularity of contact centers continues to grow:
- Customers like to talk and find voice the most convenient communication channel in many instances
- Customers’ expectations continue to rise. Not only do they seek out competitively-priced goods and services, but they require quick, efficient services as well
- Customers’ general level of awareness of identity theft as a real issue has also grown, and they expect to see that their private and personal information is protected by those organizations with which it is shared.
The challenge for businesses is to improve the customer experience, protect their customers’ private and personal information and control their own costs. As such, the use of automated
voice-based solutions has become widespread and promises further to offer a high-quality, rapid service to customers while keeping contact center costs down.
As we would expect to find, there is generally a positive correlation between the size of the contact center and the use of IVR. However, even in contact centers with at least 250 agent positions, IVR usage is only around 70%. This does suggest that commercial decisions not to use IVR have been made that are based around something other than cost considerations, i.e. if size were the only, or main factor in using IVR, we would expect to see almost all large contact centers using IVR.
However, there is wariness about IVR and indeed self-service of every type. Many businesses wish to be seen as strongly focused upon customers’ needs, and putting what can be seen as a barrier between customer and business is anathema to them, despite missing out on the cost savings that an IVR implementation can create.
Identity verification procedures also cost businesses time and money. Although it only takes an average of 20 seconds to verify a customer’s identity, this mounts up considerably: the US contact center industry spends over $ 11.7bn each year, just to verify the caller is who they claim to be. Using statistics from the Operational Review, it is possible to calculate how much US contact centers spend each year on screening customers by using agents:
Inbound call minutes per year: 243bn
Average inbound call length: 340 seconds
Inbound calls per year: 42.9bn
Proportion of inbound calls that require security and identification checks: 53%
Proportion of security and identification checks carried out by agent: 79%
Average length of agent-handled security and identification check: 20 seconds
Mean average cost per inbound call: $ 11.07
Cost of time spent on agent-handled security and identification check: 0.65 US Dollars per call.
Overall cost of agent-handled security and identification checking: $ 11.7bn per year
Biometric technology uses physiological or behavioral characteristics to verify a persons claimed identity. Physiological biometrics includes fingerprints, iris, or retina recognition, and voice verification. Behavioral biometrics includes signature verification, gait and keystroke dynamics. Of these, voice is the only biometric that can be used over the phone.
In fact, a voice verification system’s strength lies in its
ability to work over the phone or web making it a viable identity verification solution for contact centers. Since speaking is natural and intuitive, a well-planned implementation can result in a
better customer experience that eliminates the need for PINs or passwords.
In cases where a two-factor authentication process is required, voice verification can be combined with a ‘something you know’ – such as an answer to a memorable question. Businesses benefit from two types of savings, which can be illustrated in the following example, whereby a contact center receives 10 million inbound calls per annum with the existing identity verification procedure taking on average 20 seconds and being performed by an agent:
- Eliminating the time taken by an agent verifying a caller’s identity can save 0.65c per call ($ 6.5m per annum)
- Secure automated identity verification enable a broader range of fully automated services to be offered. An increase in the percentage of fully automated calls by 10% would result in agent cost savings of over $ 11m per annum.
The potential benefits for the business are huge, and the customer also gains through a better experience, longer opening hours and greater identity
protection.
Download this Study for free at www.contactbabel-downloads.com.
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09.08.2007
Transformation from a reactive to proactive Contact Center- Seven simple steps to being a strategic, value adding and profit enhancing service provider
By Vijay Pereira MCMI, UK
Researcher and Lecturer, University of Portsmouth, UK
Organisations are striving to mature their contact centers from simple call centers into multi-channel centers tied to strategic imperatives to deliver improved business performance. BPO providing organisations delivering contact center services must broaden their examination of productivity from the conventional company-oriented perspective to a dual company-customer perspective.
This broadened approach can help reconcile conflicts and thus leverage synergies between improving service quality and boosting service productivity. This article proposes a conceptual framework in the form of seven simple but paramount steps- for understanding the inter-linkages among service quality and the various components of the company-customer perspective of productivity, and discusses the implications of this seven step framework for service executives and researchers.
Contact centers are nowadays seen as profit-enhancing and value adding rather than a cost both internally for departments and externally for clients or customers. The contact centre is also often overlooked as a source of valuable business intelligence. However recent advances in voice and screen recording technologies and real-time call center reporting and analytics applications have enabled virtually every division of the enterprise to benefit from the vast store of valuable information gathered by this front-line communications hub.
Thus a contact centre also increases productivity by being a valuable internal motivational agent- apart from being an excellent external agent. For example the ‘Marketing departments’ can now gain extensive marketplace feedback on specific campaigns, the performance of individual products, and customers’ attitudes towards competitors’ brands.
For the ‘Human Resources’ department, contact center interactions are an essential tool for conflict or complaint resolution, disciplinary action or training programs modification, and improvement of scripts for recruiting and interviewing. At the ‘Boardroom’ level, reports formulated from intelligence gathered from the contact centre can assist in strategic decision-making – from organisational positioning to resource allocation.
Important business decisions are now being made on human time. With ‘Actualised Intelligence’, instead of waiting for days, weeks, or even months for a performance report, executives and managers are promptly alerted to the fact that a specific campaign is resulting in an above or below average number of sales or other objectives – even as they are in progress. They can then drill down to individual agent/customer calls that have resulted in a sale and discover what the customer is responding to and why.
This information can be used immediately to strengthen and focus the campaign and/or make adjustments, thus increasing profit margins and customer satisfaction. For example, by using an analytics application, a marketing executive can be automatically alerted to the fact that a specific marketing campaign is resulting in an above average number of sales. The executive can drill down to the individual agent/customer calls that have resulted in a sale and discover what the customer is responding to and why. Simultaneously, automated business rules will trigger the delivery of targeted training materials directly to the desktops of the agents handling the campaign.
The following seven simple steps would greatly enhance the contact center performance (individual, group, and overall). Following these seven steps would thus enable management to increase agent
performance, decrease agent attrition, increase customer satisfaction, decrease costs, and raise revenue. From global enterprises to mid-sized contact centers- contact centers can collect data and present real time and historical performance information to agents, managers and executives within the enterprise. Nowadays it is possible that Key performance indicators (KPIs), quality scores, scheduling information and service level indicators can be distributed to contact center personnel using desktop dashboards, Web-based consolidated reporting, and television monitor display systems. Contact centers can also monitor both telephony and business metrics in real time – providing the tools to leverage that data into business intelligence that can dramatically enhance contact center and business performance.
The seven simple steps for doing so- along with examples are:
1. Realise efficient call center monitoring- To turn a reactive customer service center into a proactive profit generating center an organisation would require data to drive key management decisions, customer treatment initiatives, targeted training, and quality process improvements. The success of this would depend on its acceptance by all levels of the organisation and its integration into the organisation’s service culture. Hence an organisation would need to develop and initiate a Customer Contact Monitoring (CCM) Program, providing coaching for supervisors and managers in monitoring skills, and create training and coaching programs for incumbent representatives on service and sales skills. Thus it would provide a series of supervisory coaching sessions to assist managers and supervisors in using call monitoring. This would drive customer satisfaction, loyalty and profitability up significantly.
2. Augment skills for customer service- For example-If an organisation needs to design and implement a telephone call monitoring program to assess the performance of Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) and administer a customer satisfaction survey to assess the performance of CSRs- It would have to conduct a thorough behaviour assessment to identify behaviours necessary for CSRs to perform successfully. It would also then have to develop a standard set of call monitoring guidelines and reporting tools. The objective would be to assess performance of CSRs in a standard, valid, detailed, and customer-oriented manner, and to provide actionable feedback through detailed reports that could be used by CSRs in order to develop improvement areas. Here it would have to develop a survey used to assess customer satisfaction that would be used subsequent to a merchant’s call with a CSR. The objective of this survey would be to provide an understanding of overall levels of satisfaction and to identify specific strengths or opportunities for improvement, thus augmenting the necessary skills for CSR’s.
3. Boost customer satisfaction- There is certainly ample evidence to suggest that- As organisations experience a surge in demand for services, there is intense scrutiny from its stake holders. Similarly in the ‘Customer Contact’ industry- To meet the increasing need of its customers and improve customer care, the organisation would need to initiate a plan to improve customer service. The plan would include a culture shift from being solely an ‘information provider’ to also becoming ‘customer centric’. Organisations could conduct surveys showing what customer satisfaction rating Contact Representatives (CRs) received as an average. To improve customer satisfaction, the organisations could conduct an in-depth assessment of the calls handled by the CRs. Hence an organisation could develop a set of call monitoring standards to facilitate the implementation of best practice service. Organisations could train and certify all call center management on how to monitor calls and effectively coach the Contact Representatives. Once management is trained in call monitoring, the CRs could be trained and coached on ‘new-improved’ customer service expectations,
the monitoring process and how to respond to coaching by their supervisors.
4. Save considerably on costs of selection and training- Most organisations would want its customer service positions to have the skills and abilities necessary to learn quickly and perform well. It is important that customer service applicants have a full and accurate understanding of call center work and the environment. However at the least cost. Hence the endeavour to overcome the challenges of: Reducing hiring costs; provide a realistic job preview; reduce turnover to increase employment ROI; and to ensure that customer service representatives are hired using best practices- Organisations could begin with a job analysis and formal needs assessment to identify critical competency areas for each customer service job. They could implement various available methodologies as a selection tool which thereby provided a multi-media, web-delivered computerised simulation of inbound contact center representative work that would serve as a job preview. Care should be taken however that the chosen tool assesses the skills necessary to learn quickly and provide excellent customer service.
5. Decrease turnover costs significantly- Contact center organisations need to cater to a variety of clients or customers. Certain customers, for example in the financial sector rely heavily on contact centers to sell products and service policy and account holders. The BPO service providing organisation would need an innovative and affordable customer service assessment tool featuring outstanding prediction of job success and easy administration. Here again a ‘best fit’ ‘selection tool’ needs to be selected. Also the organisation would need to look at the validity of the test in the specific industry of the client and ensure that the selected tool assesses the skills necessary to learn quickly and provide excellent customer service. If strategically and thoroughly pursued- A variety of dramatic results for several different client companies could be realised in the form of saving turnover costs; Reduced turnover; Lowered customer attrition; Reduced customer complaints; and saving in hiring costs per new hire group to name a few.
6. Enhance performance greatly- Certain client organisations of BPO providers would want to ensure that it stands out among the competition for outstanding service. Hence such client organisation would look for exemplary services of a tele-services provider to serve as its ‘Customer Care’ function. The challenge for a BPO provider here would be to brand itself in a different way to attract and retain such clients and customers, and to ensure it hires and trains Customer Care representatives who will embody the brand image. The BPO provider could define customer service representative behaviours which not only ‘do the job’ and ‘need help’, but also those behaviours which exceed customer expectations. They could stand out by assessing candidates’ service, communication, multitasking and sales skills. While the tele-services vendor implements its own selection process, the client company takes comfort in the fact that it provides a final and accurate screen for selection of these key skills. They could also provide a reliable metric, through call monitoring, to measure the quality of calls. This metric could be used contractually to evaluate the call center vendor. This could see the BPO providing organisation and client company both gain consistently and significantly in quality and customer satisfaction.
7. Increase ROI substantially- One of the paramount paradigms of a successful business is the Return on Investment (ROI) - The bottom line really for CEO’s. No business would want to see more going out than coming in- and this stands true for any Contact Center business too. Instituting a rigorous methodology that aligns an organisations people, processes and technology can decrease costs while reaping the benefits for an increased ROI. For example organisations could develop a strategy to reverse the trend of
declining customer satisfaction and also develop a call monitoring tool that could provide a level of precision in anticipating customer satisfaction, so that the business would know that if call monitoring scores increased by X%, a Y% increase in customer satisfaction could be reasonably estimated.
The above seven steps are not exhaustive but would certainly enhance a ‘Contact Center’ organisations’ performance and save costs. This would result in a win-win situation where all stake holders are satisfied and remain in business.
Vijay Pereira is an experienced consultant and researcher. He is currently lecturing and researching at the University of Portsmouth, UK. He has over 15 years experience in consulting for the IT and BPO industry. He specialises in Human Resource Management. His current research interest lies in looking into the strategic role of HR post HR outsourcing. His overall experience has been gained in Industry, Consultancy and Academia in countries like India, UAE, Israel and the UK. Contact him at vijay.pereira@port.ac.uk .
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08.08.2007
The US Contact Center Operational Review - Outbound and Call Blending
By Steve Morrell
Retail & distribution and outsourcing respondents carry out the most outbound activity, of which a large proportion is of course sales-related. Only 5% of respondents are 100% outbound, with almost three-quarters doing some mixture of inbound and outbound. Smaller contact centers seem to carry out a greater proportion of outbound calling than larger operations, although in absolute terms, the large contact centers will be making far more contacts.
Despite the strictures of the Do Not Call Registry, it seems that 36% of outbound activity is still dedicated to winning new customers. Proactive customer service - which can be a strong brand builder as well as an effective call avoidance tactic - is in second place, at 26% of outbound activity. Cross-selling and up-selling to existing customers is not pushed as hard as it could be, at only 11% of outbound activity.
The Do Not Call Registry (and CAN-SPAM Act which deals with email) are part of the general social and political drift towards allowing consumers and businesses the right not to be contacted by companies. This is part of a global movement, perhaps indicated best by the state government of California, which does not allow overdialing at all. Over 40% of respondents said that their outbound calling had noticeably reduced due to legislation, with more than half of this number saying that it had reduced a great deal.
Preview dialers are the most common type used by respondents. Smaller contact centers will tend to use preview dialing, with a greater proportion of large operations using top-end predictive dialers. The overdial / drop rate for calls made by respondents with a predictive dialer is calculated to be 2.9%, although the highest rate admitted to was 8%.
Call blending gives the ability to deliver both inbound and outbound calls seamlessly to the agent, regulating outbound call volume based on inbound traffic. When inbound traffic is low, outbound calls are automatically generated for a specified campaign.
When inbound traffic picks up, the dialer dynamically slows the number of outgoing calls to meet the inbound service level. Results can include increased agent productivity, streamlined staffing, and improved customer service. However, this process needs to be understood and managed carefully, as not all agents are adept at dealing with both inbound and outbound calls.
A structured blended environment, where agents are moved seamlessly and dynamically between inbound and outbound, is used in 21% of respondents’ operations, with finance, outsourcing and insurance being the most likely to try to benefit from getting the most from their agents.
The retail & distribution respondents are likeliest to get agents to make some outbound
calls in their slack times, with healthcare respondents keenest to separate inbound and outbound entirely. Smaller contact centers are more likely to ask their agents to pitch in wherever is needed (ad-hoc), while larger operations are more likely to be able to use dedicated outbound agents.
Download this Study for free at www.contactbabel-downloads.com.
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02.08.2007
The US Contact Center Operational Review - Hosted and On-Demand Solutions
By Steve Morrell
Hosted or on-demand solutions can mean anything from network-based routing, to the complete outsourcing of a contact center’s operations. The types of business and/or contact center that should be most interested in learning more about hosted solutions include:
-Small and medium business, especially those needing rapidly deployable, easy-to-use services, such as enhanced routing
-Enterprises that would like to voice enable their web applications to achieve unified self-service
-Enterprises with CTI functionality today who wish to enhance enterprise functionality with network call parking and network routing or other components such as workforce management, Internet or web functionality
-Enterprises that desire advanced contact center functionality and are interested in acquiring a complete solution as a service.
Put simply, whether delivered by customer premise equipment (CPE) solutions, hosted in the network or a mixture of both, enterprises always demand control, choice and intelligence in a financial framework that is acceptable.
Hosted solutions offer businesses the opportunity to deal with operating costs rather than capital expenditure which will always get a positive hearing at the budget-holder level of a business. Respondents reported that they were most likely to get their website hosted, with outbound dialing functionality being hosted (or likely to be hosted soon) in 24% of respondents’ contact centers.
17% of respondents use or are shortly to use hosted ACD and routing functionality, allowing them to manage agents, quickly change route plans, enable virtual contact center functionality and deploy skills-based routing to specific agent groups or even agents. 14% of respondents use hosted IVR solutions, allowing them to capture information, enroll callers, take orders, field requests and complete transactions.
Larger contact center operations are more likely to consider the reduction in operating costs that hosted solutions can provide to be worthwhile altering the structure of their contact center. In particular, the advantages to being able to route across sites to specific agent groups is seen as very important by this set of respondents, who are also very positive about hosted IVR solutions. Smaller operations are keener on hosted outbound solutions, meaning they do not have to pay for the equipment when they are not using it.
Respondents feel that the main advantages of hosted solutions lie in the decreased capital expenditure that such a model brings, as well as the possibility of increasing functionality quickly and cost-effectively, allowing them to try new applications without having to commit massive resources of time and money. More than half of respondents report that they strongly feel that hosted solutions can provide these two advantages.
Large contact centers are most interested in hosted solutions from the point of view of increasing the functionality offered, and managing call fluctuations. One-third of call respondents feel that hosted solutions will allow them to cope with problems arising from call fluctuations: call spikes and the attendant high call abandonment rates are seen as a major problem for almost one-quarter of respondents, with a further 47% admitting that these peaks did sometimes cause problems with high levels of call abandonment.
The biggest negative issue around hosted solutions is nothing to do with any
concern around cost or effectiveness, but rather a feeling that it is difficult to justify replacing the current technology in place. Certainly, if a business has just invested heavily in new technology, replacing the equipment with a hosted solution may be difficult to justify, but there are many businesses that are being held back by the lack of functionality or flexibility in their current systems, and which could benefit from moved to hosted solutions.
From a financial perspective, most hosted solution functionality is paid for as an ongoing operating cost, rather than requiring an upfront major investment: this should make it easier for contact center management to persuade the budget-holder to upgrade the systems in place.
“Loss of control” is quoted as the third most important reason for not choosing a hosted solution, and is linked with the perceived inability to alter or fix issues as quickly as is necessary. While this has been a negative in the past, new hosted solutions allow the enterprise to control the application themselves and receive realtime management information about what is going on in the network.
Using a hosted solution provider is rightly seen as offering contact centers the opportunity to add new functionality quickly and easily. Within the next twelve months, respondents state that workforce management, CRM and VoIP will be the technologies most likely to get investment, with ACDs/PBXs and homeworking also coming into contention. 6% of respondents intend hosted solutions to be their no.1 technological priority, but much functionality can be offered as hosted solutions as well as traditional premise-based equipment.
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