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New Technology Raises the Bar for Contact Centre service
13 Mar 2006
Reprint of article from Contact Centre World by Exony CEO, Ian Ashby - March 2006
As contact centres become blamed in part for Britain’s rising stress levels, Ian Ashby, CEO of Exony explains how modern technology means that keeping customers waiting should be a thing of the past.
A recent poll by a UK charity has cited poor service by Britain’s contact centres as a reason behind rising stress levels. Of particular annoyance are automated contact centres, the study found, and I think we all share this frustration from time to time – most of us would prefer to deal with a human.
The scale of the industry is vast - over 10 billion phone calls are made to contact centres in the UK each year. Each household spends the equivalent of a whole day on the phone (source: BBC) yet there is no pressure group to represent contact centre callers and champion better service for all. No wonder that one set of research found that 65 seconds was the average callers were prepared to wait before hanging up.
For financial services institutions in particular, customer service is a major issue. With so much competition out there, one bad experience could result in defection and for the financial services sector the main problem is ‘equality’.
Levelling the land
It has been argued before that contact centres outside the public sector have struggled with the concept of equality for callers. Often, business callers will have priority over private account holders, and those with the biggest balances force their way up the pecking order.
This is a very basic way to prioritise customers and makes perfect business sense, if banks are purely interested in providing good service to some customers and not all customers. The “Big Four” high street banks combined enjoy the custom of 70 per cent of the UK population making over £30,000 a minute in profit, yet customer service is still a consistent issue.
The onset of internet banking has given consumers an alternative with often better rates than existing “bricks and mortar” establishments. Customers disaffected with high street banks now have a wider choice, and, according to a report last year by Which?, internet banks enjoy better customer satisfaction. While high street banks could have treated this as a rallying call to up their game, they often opted to put cost-cutting at the heart of their agenda rather than customer service by shipping out already maligned contact centres to the Indian subcontinent, where, according to research, you are three times more likely to have to call back to get what you want.
Rising to the challenge
It is understandable that banks want to turn a contact centre, often viewed as a “cost centre”, into a profitable business, but striking the balance between purely saving money and providing a quality service that will retain customers has proven tough.
This is where technology can redress this service imbalance and enable financial services institutions to filter calls from every type of customer and ensure that they are not only routed correctly to the right service team, but also that those contact centre agents have instant access to that caller’s information and calling and credit history before they even speak. The right technology enables financial institutions to choose what they do, either in totality for the business or for different branches, brands and segments. For example, filtering customers:
• by demographic profile
• based on customer or account information
• according to request type (e.g. sales, faults, complaints etc.)
• by time of day
• based on availability of contact centre resources
The other option, of course, is to treat all customers equally, all the time. Word of mouth is an incredible marketing tool, and one that is often underestimated. The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) conducted some research in 2005 into the effects of customer experiences passed on in conversation. There was clear correlation between consumers willing to recommend their financial institution and increased profitability of that organisation over one that consumers would not recommend. Given that the contact centre is often the first line in the customer experience, this underlines how vital an organ it really is.
Coupling the prioritising of customers with improved visibility tools for contact centre agents will enhance the customer experience. The more the contact centre agent knows about the customer through the first few stages of touch tone, the more chance that the caller will get what they want out of the call. Ergo the higher the chance of positive word-of-mouth and increased profitability.
Conclusion
In a competitive market, anything that enhances the customer experience will enable a financial services organisation to build closer relationships with customers, gain more useful data on them and their habits and cut the overall cost of dealing with customer enquiries. In the long term this will help them win new customers, turning the contact centre into a profit centre and converting it from what is currently perceived widely as a necessary evil into a very real engine for winning new business.
The technology exists to be able to treat contact centre customers equally and fairly, which, as I hope I have proven, can positively impact the bottom line. Those financial institutions that deploy smart contact centre technology will enjoy a huge competitive advantage, not to mention helping us over-stressed Brits sleep a little easier.
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