Europe may not yet have honed its customer service skills to the same extent as the US, but companies are increasingly aware of the role that efficiently run contact centres can play in retaining customer loyalty in fiercely competitive markets.
And boosting profits by luring customers into repeat buying is only one half of the financial equation; the flip side is that converged IP telephony applications help reduce the underlying network infrastructure and communications costs.
Many organisations have converged voice and data onto their networks, but specialist IP-based contact centre solutions designed to give call agents better, more flexible access to the tools of their trade are comparatively recent.
They have also grown steadily more sophisticated, with traditional computer telephony integration applications delivering functions such as click-to-call and caller ID from the PC screen being joined by multimedia applications that add the option of sending email or SMS messages, initiating instant messaging (IM) sessions or even opening video telephony windows to provide the customer with every possible communications preference.
Research conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of software company Touchpaper indicates that 70 per cent of customer service directors believe their call centres can be improved by increasing investment in this type of new technology.
Some 85 per cent listed rising customer expectations as one of their main challenges, with an overwhelming 97 per cent reporting that today’s customers are more likely to complain about poor treatment by customer service representatives than five years ago.
Examples of regulators and public sector bodies stepping up the pressure on companies to improve their customer service levels are also in evidence. For example, the Financial Services Authority has set a deadline of March 2007 for financial firms to demonstrate that they are following the principles of its Treating Customers Fairly (TCF) initiative.
Elsewhere, public sector bodies are being encouraged to achieve the Charter Mark 3, the UK government’s national standard for excellence in customer service for public service providers. In the water industry, regulator Ofwat has been considering tough fines for providers who fail to meet adequate levels of customer service.
Though none of these regulations specifically call for improved contact centre or IP telephony solutions to take up the slack, it is taken as a given that use of the latest technology can go a long way towards providing the enhanced efficiencies being demanded.
Sixty-two per cent of Vanson Bourne’s respondents said self-service technology – automated response menus that guide the caller to the information they want without having to talk to an agent – can help boost customer service levels.
A further 76 per cent of Vanson Bourne respondents said improvements to contact centre efficiency could be made by enhancing the ability to communicate with customers via multiple channels, including VoIP, email, SMS and IM.
A separate report by telecoms researcher MZA indicates that many firms are set to act upon these intentions; although adoption of converged IP-based multimedia applications represents a modest 22 per cent of the total, that figure is set to increase to 75 per cent in the next five years.
MZA forecast that the UK single-media contact centre market will start to decline, reducing from 168,000 agents in 2010 to 163,000 agents in 2011. At the same time, the equivalent UK multimedia equipped market is anticipated to grow nearly five-fold over the same period, from 15,000 agents in 2005 to 70,000 agents in 2011.
Richard Mahony, a senior analyst in IT services, telecoms and software convergence at research firm Ovum’s Enterprise practice, says one of the biggest drivers for converged contact centre technology is cost savings.
‘I think that if you look at networking and contact centre application convergence, there are some very real cost savings to be made in the infrastructure, because you are essentially running one network instead of two or three. These savings are not only on Capex [capital expenditure], but also result in management savings and operational efficiencies,’ he says.
Greenfield sites able to deploy the latest IP-based contact centre solutions from scratch will show more established companies with greater legacy environments the way forward, adds Mahony, citing the case of US-based healthcare interpreter services provider NetworkOnmi.
The Californian services firm’s 1,500 interpreters work from offices across the globe and must be available 24 hours a day, serving 150 different languages. The priority is putting the customer in touch with an available translator who meets their needs.
Using virtual agents, NetworkOmni extended beyond the traditional contact centre, and uses the Genesys 7.2 IP-based system to treat virtually any agent as if he or she was in the contact centre, even though they are probably sitting at home. As a result, NetworkOmni is able to intelligently route calls, allowing it to employ hundreds of agents in multiple time zones, each with specific skill sets and availability.
‘Some organisations have released organisational efficiency by simply making customer information far more integrated and easy for contact centre agents and systems to access. Some, such as NetworkOnmi, have been able to take advantage of virtual call centres,’ says Mahony.
‘But it is important to say that convergence makes sense for different organisations at different times. It depends on the market the organisation operates in and its legacy network. But as technology and implementation prices fall, more companies will look at this.’
Clive Longbottom, senior director at analyst firm Quocirca, agrees, but warns that maintaining a properly managed IP-based contact centre may not save as much money as firms would wish. However, he does say it enables a more flexible environment that can make it more effective instead of just efficient.
‘Call quality can suffer and, not surprisingly, result in lower call closures. Doing things such as screen sharing and managing Skype-type calls all have cost implications as well, because the standard call centre agents are poorly equipped to become blended service agents overnight,’ he says.
Longbottom advises a phased approach to the use of converged contact centre strategies, functions and applications. He believes those firms wooed by the idea of blended call centre agents, who share responsibility for incoming problem-solving or information-giving calls as well as more sales-related outgoing calls, have mostly pulled out of large-scale plans through underestimating the cultural and training aspects of combining multimedia communications channels.
‘On one hand, if you do not move towards converged network services you are going to find it difficult to find contact centre applications from the likes of Avaya and Cisco that do not assume you already have VoIP integration,’ he says.
‘But on the other you may have thousands of call centre staff to retrain. Imagine 1,000 agents take two days each to train on new IP-based systems, that is 10 man-years, which is a fairly serious financial commitment. It would be better to move the best performers over to more sophisticated, converged systems first and the rest over slowly. It will give you the chance to identify those who will not be able to keep up and evolve the skills of those who can.’
As ever, the difference between an efficient call centre able to keep its customers from jumping ship to a competitive provider relies on much more than technology or agents’ ability to use it. Once the people and systems are in place, with centralised information repositories providing access to scripted or prompted contacts through integrated application interfaces, companies should make sure they define their contact centre processes properly so as to give customers what they want.
Longbottom feels that many companies see converged contact centre applications as a silver bullet, but in reality it is very hard to meld flexibility with consistency of service. Agents who think they can carry on exactly as they did before, especially when it comes to making scripted calls that shunt customers from one pre-recorded menu to the next, are in for a rude awakening.
‘With convergence you have more flexibility to script calls. But then you get into the worst-case Indian call centre scenario where a call takes ages because responses do not conform to a prescriptive set of prompts. Ultimately, customers want flexibility in talking to firms they buy from, and a human conversation,’ he says.
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