Call Centre Information
The Pros – Lower costs, better service
Hotlines are drawing a lot of criticism these days because they are always busy. The same goes for call centres that keep routing calls instead of actually solving customer problems. Also under scrutiny are self-service portals and speech recognition systems incapable of identifying even the simplest of city names. The consumers’ main criticism: companies are saving money on service, at the customers’ expense.
So, okay, we have been registering these critical consumer suggestions for years now. The result: the quality of solutions and hence the acceptance of self-service and voice applications have increased dramatically. That was the key finding of a recent study by Genesys surveying 1,500 consumers. According to the survey, 71 per cent of consumers feel that voice response works in a satisfactory manner or even “very well.” Sixty-seven per cent of consumers view a company’s Web site as a very important factor in customer satisfaction. The well-known researcher Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Wahlster, head of the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), recently concluded that modern voice portals can convince every customer these days – that’s how far advanced the technology is by now.
Modern contact centre solutions enable companies to use a dual strategy. First off, they can offer customers the service they want, 24 x 7 service every day, and on all channels. The customer can choose whether he gets computer-backed support, whether he sends his inquiry via e-mail or SMS, or whether he actually wants to speak to an agent. This approach saves the customer time, while also averting possible annoyances. For example, 59 per cent of those surveyed are already using self-service applications for money transfers. Around half of the conducted customers do all of their general banking business via voice response and Web applications. Forty per cent of users even use e-service applications for product inquiries or research.
The second major advantage: Voice Portals help to reduce contact centres costs and ensure competitive advantages because a self-service solution or a voice response portal is, in many cases, more cost-efficient than an agent. At the same time, it offers the same level of quality – without any time- or day-dependent performance discrepancies.
In order to implement these vast opportunities into everyday business operations, companies must know who their good and profitable customers are. After all, the so-called “watering can principle”, that is, offering the same to everyone, is outdated in the realm of service. Generally speaking, each customer wants a quick response: 90 per cent of customers expect a response to their e-mail within 24 hours. Ideally, the customer’s problem is supposed to be solved during the initial contact, and the form of salutation should be personal. They also expect a greater availability of standard information, a better accessibility of companies, and a freedom of choice on the channels they use to interact with suppliers.
A comprehensively integrated contact centre platform can meet all these customer requirements, as it links all points of contact within the company to the customer. Intelligent routing ensures that customer inquiries are always passed on to competent staffers. In other words: these days, it’s not about replacing humans with technology. That would be too simplistic. Software capabilities, paired with service provided by humans – that’s the way to overcome customer frustration.
The Cons – Help that’s out of tune
At first glance, the idea looks brilliant: First, you have a customer get familiar and comfortable with telephone-based service, and then you largely replace this service with a computer voice. A pre-qualification is certainly helpful, and the inquiring customer gets direct access to the expert for the given question. Help is on the way – quickly and competently.
All of this looks good and seems to work – at least in theory. More or less charming voices ask the user to enter his mobile-phone number. The ensuing waiting times seem like an eternity (even though the minutes are actually measured). Once the wait is finally over, customers are surprised by a suddenly very-much alive call centre agent asking, yes, for the customer’s phone number.
So, apparently the system process was not as stringent as promised. Of course the producers of such systems reject any wrongdoing on their end and point fingers at the companies using these products. Allegedly, their processes are not running smoothly. But to what extent are the system providers to blame when a product that’s not exactly easy to implement anyway does not work properly?
In the producers’ advertising films and brochures, everything works just perfectly. The reality is different, though. Complicated and confusing menu navigation, paired with databases that should be connected with one another, but aren’t – that’s the reality. And at the end of the day, the customer ends up in some call centre and actually has to be grateful that the agent is a native speaker and can help out.
However, there’s probably a very methodical approach behind this sloppy implementation. Even though a phone is a cheaper customer channel than a store visit, it is still vastly more expensive than when a customer or potential customer heads to a Web site to search for information. Speaking from personal experience, the deterring effect of phone service works so well that I don’t even bother using it in the first place.
At the same time, the idea is still pretty brilliant: a computer-backed support is used to get to the most competent agent for my problem on the line. If it actually worked in the end, I would be happy to click my way through countless sub-menus and pre-selections, and I would be willing to take on the battle with voice response (that is, if the connection is not as good as the mobile-phone providers always promise. Although: that’s a whole other story).
Voice Self Service has been available for several years now, and it will need a few more years before its technology can understand every dialect and can deal with hissing connections. What also needs to happen is a change of mind: those who buy this technology should not be using it as a virtual wall to protect their employees against “pesky” callers.
About the Author:
Bruce Eidsvik, Vice President of Sales, Genesys Telecommunications Labs
Currently, Bruce manages the Voice Portal sales for Genesys across EMEA. Prior to Genesys, Bruce was a co-founder of VoiceGenie Technologies and ran the global sales force. Bruce is a pioneer in the VoiceXML marketspace, having worked with AT&T since 1996 in the development of the original VoiceXML phoneweb product. Bruce was also instrumental in securing VoiceGenie’s early lead in the marketplace and devising the focused product strategy that led to early profitability for the company. Prior to VoiceGenie, Bruce worked for several years as VP of Sales and Marketing for Array and as Director of Engineering and Director of Business Development for Sparton of Canada. He received his BSc. with Honours in Engineering Physics in 1985.
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