Tactics > contact centres and customer service


Managing contact demand W


Is “self service” just an excuse for poor customer service?


e all know that in the


current economic climate we need to make the most of the resources that we have. This


is certainly true for call centre managers who have to wrestle


with the challenge of managing increasingly higher levels of contact—by phone, email and SMS text messaging—within a fixed resource budget. The challenge is that callers inevitably get


frustrated when they cannot get through to your company, or when they are met with an automated menu of incomprehensive choices. So how can you best manage increasing levels of customer contact without a corresponding decrease in customer experience? Many centres have a principle that all


calls will be answered by a “real” human. A good example of this is apparel cataloguer Lands’ End, where the use of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) touch-tone menus is outlawed. The downside of this approach is that when a centre gets busy, you end up forcing all callers to wait, regardless of whether their enquiry is relatively straight-forward and can be dealt with quite easily by some type of self-service method.


The numbers quickly stack up Speech-recognition applications that respond to callers’ spoken words and phrases can have a dramatic impact on call centre resourcing needs. Consider an operation that has an average call duration of five minutes, with the first part of the call requiring the identification of the caller. Assume the process is to collect some structured information—for example name, address, postcode, and date of birth. This combination of verification data is suitable for a speech application to automate and can be applied to many different types of call. Once the identity of the caller is known, then


the customer details are “screen-popped” onto call centre agents’ desktops, allowing them to focus on what they do best—dealing with the customer’s enquiry. As a result, if this speech application were


By Paul Weald 22


to save 60 seconds in the agent’s call-handling time then there would be a 20 percent reduction in average call duration. If your operation is 200 seats and you operate your centre seven days a week then a simple Erlang


Catalogue e-business www.catalog-biz.com


calculation means this will save resourcing for circa 50 staff. Well worth the effort.


Managing the online channel Whilst your call centre may not be open 24 hours a day, your website is. The online service, however good the content, cannot deal with every type of enquiry. This will create a backlog of contact demand. The call centre manager will see this in the number of emails that accumulate overnight and create a pool of work for the following day. If these enquiries are not dealt with promptly, it creates repeat contacts— callers who were already frustrated when they first called, but you were closed, become even more so when their email is not acknowledged and have to call again. In call centre management, it is important


to always stay on top of contact demand. But can we all copy the approach of Amazon, a great exponent of the philosophy that “the best service is no service”? What Amazon does well is getting to the root cause of the reasons why its customers would need to contact the call centre in the first place. In effect, it has eliminated “failure demand” by setting clear expectations in the customer’s mind about how he should track the progress of his order through to delivery On the other hand, the call centre also has the ability to enhance the online channel— supporting features such as callback, webchat and outbound text messaging:


• Callback can be used where the online system recognises that a user is stuck on a particular page and a pop-up window appears allowing the user to request a telephone call from an agent. This can be very effective in sales situations, for example, to significantly drive up the conversion rate of payment pages.


• Webchat is similar to callback but allows the user to request an online live chat session with a call centre agent. This is most effective where a user needs some help in making a purchasing decision.


• Outbound text messaging is all about a mail order company being proactive with its customers, educating and informing them of the delivery process. Sending customers a


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