European Contact Centre blog

Has video finally arrived for branch and contact centre?

2011-03-10T11:46:00.003Z

For as long as I have worked in financial services IT (and some time before), video has been trumpeted as the "next big thing" for retail financial services but has not taken off as predicted. Yet I wonder if this solution that Bank of Moscow has rolled out and the news week before of Bank of America is piloting video for wealth management might change that....

The vision presented by technology vendors has been compelling; the idea that an expert in a branch or in a contact centre could cover many other branches by being video conferenced in to that critical customer meeting. At a stroke travel expense could be reduced as there would be no need to have advisors moving around doing one day a week at each branch of their territory. Customer experience could also be improved radically, as no longer would a customer wanting advice on a pension (or other regulated product) be told to "....make an appointment and come back when the advisor is in".

The financial arguments have also seemed compelling. Training staff to sell regulated products is expensive and HNW (High Net Worth) and other attractive target customer groups are not the customers who frequent high street branches. My last blog post ("Where did it go wrong for Barclays branches?") went into this more detail, but there are very limited returns from basing expensive people in branch and relying on passing trade and the business marketing can drive to those branches.

To a certain extent the puzzle is why video has not been used earlier, and I think the problem has been partly technical and partly organizational.

The organizational problems are understandable. Branch managers like to be able to see their staff, and when measured on sales they want to have control over the people doing the selling. Having them physically in the branch is one of the easier ways of meeting that need. Similarly, branch sales advisors have enjoyed the status they have within the branch and moving to a contact centre environment (even a video contact centre) has been seen as a demotion. Given the low barriers to setting up as an IFA if you are already qualified, retention of qualified staff has been an issue for all the major banks. Finally, the customer experience of early video conferencing did not meet the hype, and this has stayed in the minds of many business users and customers.

The poor experience of early video conferencing solutions were largely a result of the technical limitations imposed by making any solution cost effective. Early approaches lacked common standards and, as with much in telecoms and IT, the rise of IP (Internet Protocol) has helped hugely to drive down costs and increase compatibility. IP hasn't solved everything, and there are still 'debates' among vendors (sometimes pursued to the levels of near religious war) about the relative merits of the H323, H264 and SIP protocols but common standards have made a huge difference to costs. Furthermore, IP protocols put video conferencing much more into the world of IT and software and into a world where the user experience matters. I would argue that the problem with many of the initial video conferencing solutions was that they were so focused on the technical challenges that they tended to neglect the user. The poor quality image with a slow refresh rate and of early video conferencing (as well as the difficulty and poor user interfaces for setting up calls) has been largely addressed in the solutions from today's the leading vendors. In fact user experience has been one of the key features of both Cisco Telepresence and HP Halo and may be significant factor why these are succeeding where more specialized predecessors have failed.

I find it especially interesting in the case of Bank of Moscow is that this integration is based on Avaya. Avaya are noted for their strength in contact centre, most notably around the ACD (the system that distributes calls to agents) and video is a relatively new area for them. It is a sign of the impact of protocols that Avaya (who have launched their next generation of contact centre based on SIP as a standard) are able to integrate video into what has historically been a voice environment.

In other words, the historic obstacles to video of user reluctance and technical inhibitors have been largely addressed and video can be deployed. The question, though, is will video deliver?
I believe there is one more hurdle to overcome that many vendors have not yet appreciated. The technical, the business case and the usability by non-IT staff are merely pre-requisites for video to be deployed. For video to succeed in this type of retail financial services it remains to be seen how it affects the psychology of consumers. Will consumers be prepared to take financial advice in a video session? Will the technology prove too distracting or disorientating for some demographics to engage in the integration?

These questions remain unanswered, but it will be interesting to see if video can deliver on its potential.

Where did it go wrong for the Barclays branches?

2011-01-31T20:28:00.004Z

It was a surprise last week for me to see the news that Barclays was to sack 1,000 Financial Advisors from their branch network.

It’s a while now since I last worked on bank branch IT, but when I did (only four years ago) the focus was very much around replacing old branch systems and enabling branch as a sales channel. The market was full of software vendors offering everything from the RFID identification of clients to analytics engines that ensured the presentation of the best offer to clients. Many of these products also talked about their multi-channel capabilities (by which they meant internet) and a very significant focus of the market was on enabling sales in branch. Occasionally lip-service was paid to contact centre or ATM or mobile, but the main focus of the analysts, consultants and many banking executives was on branch based sales.

So where did it go wrong for the Barclay’s branch advisors? At a superficial level, being a sales person at a bank with a strong brand, at one of the few banks not to need a government bail-out and with a large UK retail market share would seem very attractive. Barclays has a good SMB business banking franchise, so that would suggest lots of small business owners to sell products to.

I think part of the answer is that the target market is still attractive and still there. The number of individuals just below High Net Worth (HNW) status continues to grow and these individuals need advice. The true HNW demographic that is targeted by the Barclays Wealth division, part of Barclays Capital, so although there may be some overlap the branch advisors had a significant number of potential customers. The branch advisers were meant to target individuals who were below the £500k asset threshold required for Barclays Wealth, but I suspect the advisors didn’t for a number of reasons.

Firstly these higher earners or asset significant individuals do not regularly visit branches. I’m prepared to bet that most Finextra readers (especially those who live & work outside a city centre) have not been to a bank branch in a long time and this seemed to be the case for many Barclays branch customers.

This misalignment between the demographic the advisers were meant to target and the demographic that actually was accessible in branch accounts is perhaps one of the significant factors in the decision to end branch based advisers. My suspicion is that it was this misalignment that partly contributed to the investment advice failings that led to the FSA fining Barclays £7.7m and requiring Barclays to pay up to £60m in customer redress. On the retail banking side, that is a significant sum, especially when added to the not insubstantial cost of maintaining a staff of financial advisers and paying for the associated training and compliance.

Additionally, as Barclays acknowledge, buying habits have changed substantially and as Barclays say the reduction in branch advisors is “…reflecting a growing trend of customers purchasing and managing their investments online”. The problem for Barclays is that the wealthy middle class individuals who they most want to target are some of those who have most readily adopted the internet as a comparison shopping channel. The growth of UK financial services comparison sites (Go Compare, Money Supermarket.com, etc…) has had a profound effect on insurance (I last wrote about it in this blog post on Aviva 2008) and clearly is catching up with retail banking. There seems to me little point marketing to customers on the basis of brand when most customers can purchase products without engaging with any of the brand value propositions and can instead buy more easily on price, on line. Barclays are acknowledging some of this reality with the launch of their online "Investor Zone" and all their retail investment services will now go through this route on a non-advice basis.

The problem is I’m not quite sure where these leaves branch banking. Advisers in branch were expensive, but were always justified as necessary for selling the higher margin, usually longer term products. The trouble was that branch advisers were not necessarily that well utilized and many of the more aware customers preferred to use either on-line purchase without advice or the service of an Independent Financial Advisor (IFA). I thought Barclays had the right idea with their centralized Barclays Financial Planning team when they had that operating as a central team, based from a contact centre. That model, where an IFA qualified adviser could remotely cover the branches too small to have a dedicated financial adviser seemed to me to combine the necessary level of coverage and scale that was necessary to be cost effective. However, the model didn’t seem that successful in practice and I wonder if that was due to the maturity of the technology. At the time, multi-channel was not easily possible in an integrated manner and this made things very difficult when trying to run a sales business that was regulated by both OfCom and the FSA. Longer term, I wonder if video could be the solution for the centralized adviser model (though it’s been talked about for long enough) or whether we may seem some of the ideas Bradford and Bingley toyed with, of having an IFA in branch who is more independent than the traditional tied financial advisor. The one area this has always neglected is how the internet channel can be supported by advisors in the contact centre and that, with or without video, strikes me as the best future for low cost advice.

Whither voice biometric security after the UK Department Work & Pensions drops anti-fraud trials?

2010-12-02T20:23:00.003Z

An interesting story last month on Silicon.com, that the UK Department of Work & Pensions has abandoned its trials of voice biometrics as an anti-fraud tool.This is not a snap decision, as Silicon.com reports that the DWP has spent at least £2.4m on trials since May 2007. This is one of the largest payment organisation’s in the UK, so its decision is of interest to most organization who need to validate customer identity and handle payments. Voice biometrics has had a lot of interest from the financial services industry, so the DWP’s decision may well lead a number of banks to study it closely.

What makes it especially interesting is that fraud is such a huge problem for DWP (the DWP’s own estimates put their annual fraud losses at £5.2bn per annum) and voice biometrics has promised so much to reduce fraud. Indeed, as anti-fraud has been one of the major pitches of the voice biometrics industry, why on the surface might it have failed at the DWP?

The first part of this is to understand what types of problem voice biometrics are good at tackling. In my experience, voice biometrics are a useful tool in identity validation. Passwords tend to test “do you know what you should know?”. By comparison, biometrics can test “…are you who you say you are, even if you do know your password?”. There are valid arguments about biometrics accuracy, but provided they are not used as a single factor authentication when taking a voice sample over a poor quality public telephone line, I believe that they remain a valuable addition to the security toolkit.

I have to admit that while I haven’t worked directly with DWP, I do have some knowledge of the issues they face from work with local government and other government departments.
Identity theft is the sort of fraud that voice biometrics is ideal for tackling, but traditional identity theft in the form of impersonation is relatively low. This is partly because although the amount stolen in benefit fraud is large the value of individual claims is relatively low and identity theft impersonation is generally uneconomic.

A much bigger problem (where voice biometrics could perhaps play a part) is false identity. The problem here is that once you let a false identity into the system through one channel, then it can ‘validate’ itself through other channels and become very hard to detect. Preventing false National Insurance numbers being created is crucial and this is perhaps an opportunity for voice biometrics, at least to prevent serial fraudsters creating multiple identities themselves.

The biggest problem, though, for the DWP is the complexity of the system and the massive fraud figure of £5.2bn (2.1% of all expenditure) is as much a reflection of error as it is of more exotic types of theft. This error can be genuine on the part of claimants, or deliberate, but either way it is the complexity of the system and the lack of real time information that prevents its resolution and detection.

Surprisingly, this was the problem that the DWP tried to tackle with voice biometrics, basically trying to use tone & emotion detection and similar mechanisms to detect claimants lying. I have to admit some doubt here as to whether this is a practical application in real time. In the world of call recording it has long been used as an application that can detect calls where customers (or call centre workers!) have become angry, but this has not tended to be a real time application. The other problem is the inbound call to DWP. At the risk of stating the obvious, claimants of benefits are more likely to be stressed than average and especially so when talking to the DWP. Furthermore, most of the demographic who regularly deal with the DWP are likely to be calling on mobile phones rather than landlines (so poor call quality) and be may well not have strong English language skills (so will be more hesitant, accented and less standard).

My suspicion is that the best way for the DWP to tackle fraud would be to use more process simplification and back this up with analytics rather than try and fix the front end with technology. Once that’s done, voice biometrics could have a very valuable anti-fraud role to play, but as the solution to the right problem.

CC Expo reflections (Contact Babel) & Cisco's latest Contact Centre Announcements

2010-11-09T18:56:00.010Z

The blog has struggled to find time to comment since CC Expo, so regrets not having done a follow up post recently. One notably omission from my last post was of Contact Babel. As analysts go, they are one of the ones that I rate very highly. The huge bonus of visiting them on the stand is that they were giving away CDs of "The UK Contact Centre Decision Maker's Guide", which is a publication I use the report regularly as it's one of the few to give details on things like the number of multi-channel interactions in UK contact centres. If you missed them at the stand, then the good news is that the report is available for free download from their website.

The other interesting things happening this week were major announcements from Cisco about their contact centre portfolio. The two most exciting parts of this were Social Miner (an integration for the contact centre to track social media) and the Open Recording Architecture (ORA) that will allow capture and recording of media across the network, both inside and outside the traditional contact centre.

For those interested in more, there is a good public webinar on the ORA on the CRMXchange site today.

Presented by Ken Rehor, Product Manager, Cisco
Date: November 11th, 6-7pm GMT, 7-8pm CET
Registration: click here

Contact centers handle thousands of customer conversations a day, but unfortunately much of the enterprise intelligence that could be gleaned from those conversations is never used because it's either too expensive to capture, or too difficult to mine for useful information.
By attending this webcast you will discover how to take an open-standards, network-based approach to recording that addresses these challenges.
You will learn about:
• Example topologies and scenarios for network-based recording
• Sample open Web APIs that facilitate integration of network recording with business applications
• How network-based media forking facilitates live/silent monitoring
• Multiple methods of media playback

Speaker, Ken Rehor, Product Manager, Cisco
Ken Rehor works in Cisco’s Voice Technology Group on the application of new speech technologies for customer care. Prior to joining Cisco, Ken held various consulting and R&D roles at industry leaders including AT&T, Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs, Nuance, and Vocalocity. Speech Technology Magazine named him one of the industry’s 20 most influential people for his pioneering work as principal founder of the VoiceXML Forum and one of the original authors of the VoiceXML 1.0 specification. Ken is co-chair of the VoiceXML Forum’s Conformance and Speaker Biometrics Committees. He is co-editor of industry standards such as VoiceXML 2.0, 2.1, Call Control XML 1.0, and the forthcoming VoiceXML 3.0. Ken holds seven patents in the area of web-based telecommunications. Ken earned BSEE and MS EECS degrees from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

CC Expo 2010

2010-09-21T19:27:00.009+01:00

It’s that time of year again and the UK Contact Centre industry is once again in Birmingham at the NEC for Call Centre Expo. This year feels a bit different from previous years (as covered by the blog at: "Contact Centre Expo 2009 - Day Two" and here for 2008), and I think there are signs both of economic recovery and a fundamental shift in the way customer service is provided.

The blog’s view of top trends this year:

• Cloud is real & here to stay – Last year this was an emerging trend. This year the number of cloud based vendors had, if anything, increased. Interestingly, this was both the cloud based contact centre and the CRM vendors. I was particularly impressed by the Salesforce.com stand (and loved the squeezy cloud giveaways!). For me it was interesting to see how far ahead CRM is over voice and that where CRM leads, voice is likely to follow. For the moment there is still seems a customer preference for deployments of voice kit on premises (perhaps driven by some lingering concerns over QoS) whereas the same customer will happily consider cloud based CRM. Among the voice vendors, the most credible seemed to be New Voice Media, with a large stand next to Cisco by the entrance with a host of smaller vendors (such as Virtual-Call-Centre.eu ) further inside the show. The difference between Cloud and Hosted is perhaps worth a separate post, but the trend is clear.

• Where were the traditional vendors? – For me this was one of the big surprises. Cisco had a brilliantly located stand right in front of the entrance. Genesys also had a good, well designed stand further in with some excellent hard copies of white papers & case studies (though I can't find them on their website). I found Aspect with a smaller stand in a quieter section (& no mention of all the Microsoft advertising they had last year), but where was Avaya/Nortel? There were signs of the odd Avaya partner, but this was a real surprise given that last year the show was plastered with Avaya/ BT partnership advertising. I was also surprised not to see any sign of Mitel, especially as NEC was present (and who are traditionally only a small player in the UK market).

• Overseas destinations have really shifted – Over the last few years nearly every English speaking emerging market has taken a stand and pitched for offshore contact centre business. This year I was pleased to see that only the serious seemed to have stayed the course and Bangladesh were there with an impressive stand for the third year running. BACC (the Bangladesh Association of Call Centre & Outsourcing) has significant support from the Bangladesh government and I was impressed how well they understood that for outsourcing to work they had to provide more than just a proposition based on cheap labour.
More curious (and completely unexpected) was the French Pavilion. I have to admit that France with a 35hr working weak and strong unions has never struck me as a natural destination for outsouring work. Indeed, from my experience of working there, French companies have been very enthusiastic (if discrete) about building offshore contact centers in French speaking North Africa (see my blog post: "Offshoring and mainland Europe" for example). Still, there was a charming chap from Invest in Champagne-Ardenne and he stressed the benefits of Chalons-en-Champagne. things such as rents 25% cheaper than Greater Paris and a high quality working environment. All nice things to be sure, but I’m not sure that these would lead to much business at the UK Contact Centre Expo. I was even less convinced by Team Cote d’Azur, as while it’s a lovely place it’s not somewhere that I think of as low cost. I would agree with them that it is very high tech and multi-lingual, as Sophia Antipolis houses outposts many of the world’s top tech firms and I would agree that they have an existing contact centre base, with the very substantial American Express Travel contact centre operation base there, but I still struggle to see it as a destination for investment. More likely to be successful were the French IT firms on the stand. I was impressed with digitaleo (who offer a rather nice SMS application) and A2iA who already have a reference list of deployments at blue chip UK companies and some very interesting document recognition & processing applications.

• CC Marketing seems to be having a “Life on Mars moment” – A real surprise was that as the economy has improved, some contact centre marketing seems to have regressed to the 1970s or some other pre-feminist “Mad Men” era. The RoCom stand with its pretty nurses was of debatable taste, but could perhaps claim some justification around a marketing message of “heal your contact centre”. The guiltier stands should perhaps remain nameless. I’m not sure the use of hotpants, models in very tight t-shirts or ‘ironic’ marketing messages/ innuendos across the models chests really deserves a link or much recognition. I do find it disappointing that marketers should be so unimaginative in a industry such as contact centre which has so many women in senior business positions.

• Analytics, analytics, analytics – The final trend that I found very interesting was the focus on analytics. Some of this was from familiar vendors such as Nice, who have long done very interesting analysis on the data in voice and video recordings. The less expected was from IBM, who were back at the show sponsoring a series of seminars on analytics. To a certain extent this illustrates the transition IBM has made away from hardware (most contact centre vendors offer an IBM server on Unix or Linux somewhere in their product) and away from the applications like IBM Call Path and IBM Direct Talk (for those old enough) and the more recent IBM Websphere Voice applications. Here was IBM positioning innovative high-end, high value services rather than their traditional approach of pushing product. Equally interesting, but somewhat different, was Autonomy. This is the first time I’ve seen their focus on contact centre and it was impressive. Autonomy has always had enormous strength when it comes to analyzing unstructured data and contact centre looks a very suitable environment for them as contact centre generates structured and unstructured, multi-source, multi-channel data in a way that only the web channel can rival. I was impressed with the very chunky ‘Autonomy Promote’ brochure I was given (a mere 210 or so pages!) and felt that Autonomy could soon be a major challenger to the more traditional voice recoding analytics vendors and workforce management tools.

• Social Media- Definitely one of the hot topics. Genesys had Social Media as a hot topic and did a very good presentation on it, as well as some good case studies and white papers on their stand. Cisco and a number of Cisco partners also had some very good things to say on the subject.

What was also interesting was what was absent. I saw very little of IVR or Speech Self-Service, and comfortably the best of what there was, was the pitch Mark Pritchard from JAMIP. I was very taken with the JAMIP approach to self-service, especially their flexibility around enterprise or cloud based delivery and their very innovative approach to win/win pricing. The pricing in particular struck me as something that made them stand out and was supported by the reference from their work with the NHS (UK National Health Service). Overall, I thought they provided one of the more innovative propositions on display. Another notable absence was that of Eastern European companies. Last year I was impressed by several of them, but this year there seemed to be hardly any.

That’s my take, I’d be delighted to hear what you think or of any trends that I may have missed.

The economy & mixed news for the UK Contact Centre Industry

2010-09-11T13:46:00.008+01:00

It's a very strange contact centre & customer service industry in the UK at the moment.

On the one hand, there is real fear of a double dip recession and the impact of government cuts. You might not spot this immediately, as according to CCF magazine, HMRC (Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs - the UK tax collection agency), is able to hire a massive number of new agents - despite the downturn and the state of the public finances. CCF reports that HMRC will be able to recruit up to 20% more agents to cope with the latest tax blunder. Now by my calculations, the HMRC agent numbers are in the region of 6,000 (or so), so this means perhaps 1,000+ temporary jobs. It also highlights the cost of poor CRM and contact centre technology. CCF cites a source as saying,

"A computer system, which the source said ‘still doesn’t work’ despite being on the fourth release, is also making it difficult for call centre workers to identify callers. “The initial identifier is in fact the employee number and not the National Insurance number, which causes all kinds of problems.”"

The caller identification problems are on top of being unable to answer calls, to the extent of not answering 40 million of them a year according to the BBC. This is partly from HMRC still being a user of TDM telephony in the call centres and so not having the call routing flexibility that IP and VoIP would bring.

Still despite HMRC being able to hire, the long term trend in government spending is clear. C&WW (Cable & Wireless Worldwide), one of the largest government telecoms suppliers issued a profit warning in July (reported by the Register here) based on the proposed cuts in public expenditure. The cuts are sufficient for the C&WW share price to have dropped by 20% as the market assessed how little government work there would be in the years ahead. Even if individual government agencies are temporarily allowed to increase their workforce, the long term direction of government spending seems clear.

Less clear, though, is the direction of consumer spending. Much better news than HMRC (though sadly on a smaller scale) is the news from the Aussie news site CallCentres.net that the Australian company Flight Centre is to open two new UK contact centres and recruit 16 agents. New jobs are always good news and this is particularly good news as it suggest that the private sector is seeing signs of growth and for a sector like travel that has a large element of discretionary spending, this suggests increased consumer confidence.

It may be grim in the public sector, but it is not all doom & gloom outside....

Instant Messaging ....and its strange survival in B2C banking

2010-06-07T17:48:00.015+01:00

The BBC News website had a great article last week on the slow but steady decline of Instant Messaging.

It was not so long ago that Instant Messaging (IM) was seen as the tool that would replace e-mail. Some technology players still think this might happen (think of Google Wave, for example) but the majority now view IM as a technology that has passed its peak. Instant Messaging had some great advantages over e-mail, such as immediacy, the ability to see it the other party was present and small message size, yet it largely failed to prevail.

The BBC provides some thoughts on why this has happened, such as the initial incompatibility of IM platforms and, perhaps more importantly, the rise of social networking sites. Facebook may have an inferior instant messaging system to the stand-alone applications, but it is very convenient and integrates everything into a single interface.

The one area where Instant Messaging is growing is the "Click to Chat or Call" functionality that you find on websites. While I don't have hard statistics, my suspicion is that banks (and insurers) are steadily investing here. Over the last few months, I've had an increasing number of requests from financial institutions to help them integrate web chat into their contact centres.

There's a number of things that I think are driving this. Firstly, banks have trained consumers well not to respond to e-mail for fear of phishing. This is a valuable security development, but it does make communicating with consumers difficult, especially when outbound calling is heavily regulated and traditional post can also have low response rates in relation to cost. Instant Messaging integrated into a bank's website offers a cheap way of potentially capturing a high value interaction that might drop out of the web channel.

Secondly, and more interestingly, IM offers a mechanism for bridging channels. Traditionally, channels that could serve customers remotely were restricted to voice (real-time & interactive, but finite information presentation) or post (slow & static content, but information rich). Adding IM to the website (or part of the website once the consumer has commenced a product purchase) allows the financial institution to start the transaction in the information rich web environment and then move the transaction into something more interactive, be it a pure IM chat or an IM chat that progresses into a call. This, is the other cause of the decline of the stand-alone IM application, that development of Skype and the increased availability of bandwidth removed some of the great advantages of IM.

The final factor is that IM is blending into social media and new channels such as Twitter. Facebook and banking still looks to me to have significant potential issues around privacy and security, but launching an IM capability on its website gives a bank the opportunity to start experimenting with new service capabilities with some control over the environment. I've looked at this back in 2008 (see my blog post "Online banking and contact centre" for a look at what Rabbobank was doing with IM), and this need to experiment with a selection of functionality at a targeted audience remains a very valid approach.

To me this is a key point. Cloud based services offer a great potential for the rapid deployment of these web 2.0 and IM type technologies, but all the ones I have worked on have run into security or operational issues. It's not that cloud can't be secure, rather that cloud providers struggle to guarantee that they comply with every detail of a bank's security policy, especially when it comes to managing changes in that security policy.

In short, a premises and application based IM approach still enjoys a lease of life in banking. Cloud, social media and web 2.0 approaches may all offer greater functionality, but the underlying security concerns do mean that IM remains an attractive channel strategy option in the B2C financial services world.

RBS to shed 2600 jobs 500 roles to be shipped offshore

2010-05-10T18:05:00.008+01:00

A very interesting story on Finextra stating that RBS is to shed 2600 jobs and 500 roles are to be shipped offshore.

It's always sad to see job losses on this scale and (if it's correct) the Finextra calculation that Royal Bank of Scotland has cut 22,600 jobs since the crisis began, helps provide an indication of the human cost of the banking crisis. The problem is that while popular anger at senior banking mangers is in many cases justified, most of those who are losing their jobs are generally people far lower down the organisation who had nothing to do with management decisions.

To see the banking crisis and subsequent nationalisation as the cause, though, is to slightly misunderstand what is going on here. I would argue that the banking crisis has forced retail banks to start looking hard at their front office operations and many have realised that, if this was a retail business, (and to a certain degree it is!) this is not necessarily how a retailer would run things. One consolation for the Edinburgh, Glasgow or Newcastle based staff of Royal Bank of Scotland is that retailers like Tesco Personal Finance have seen the opportunity and are setting up operations to challenge the banks directly (see "Tesco Bank creates 1000 customer service jobs"). For the bank, though, this represents a real challenge as Tesco bring skills in customer service, channel management & distribution and especially in customer analytics that the banks may find hard to build themselves.

The other part of this goes beyond the efficiency of a banking distribution channel. I blogged in February on how Shop Direct had gone from thousands of contact centre employees to hundreds (see "Shop direct cut 1,500 jobs - the internet finally takes its toll").

I suspect the same dynamic is at play for the insurance market. The phone based model of Direct Line and Churchill is costly to operate and under threat from both web aggregators and web only insures such as Swiftcover.com. These are both subjects I've blogged on before here, so I won't cover the ground again. It's also the case that the contact centre infrastructure at RBS Insurance was aging and was likely to need an upgrade. Under cost pressure and a shift in consumer channel usage, the bank has had to cut costs dramatically.

I'm not always a fan of offshoring, but the bank does seem to be approaching it sensibly and moving back-office (presumably non-customer facing) roles offshore. This type of move is where offshoring can be very cost effective without generating the hostility and customer service issues that come with moving a call centre.

To a certain extent, though, the back-office offshoring may well have happened anyway. The big theme here is how the very large onshore call centre handling straightforward transactions is contracting as business moves to the web. Call centes will remain very important for problem resolution, for complex interactions, cross-sell and for high value interactions, but it is clear that the banking crisis has brought forward some of the fundamental changes in banking and insurance channels.

A meditation on SIP, SOA and Software

2010-04-26T12:14:00.012+01:00

Today, the blog is thinking about SIP.

This was triggered by one of my customers turning to me yesterday and saying,

"SIP, isn't it just another of the IT industry's three letter acronyms for marketing? Just like SOA really, but even less likely to change things".

Now the blog has looked at SOA before (see posts like: "SOA - bringing CRM, telephony and business together? part 1") and the blog is a strong believer that SOA is a very major change in how IT is done. The downturn has perhaps slowed down the rate of SOA adoption, but nearly all the customers I work with are considering SOA approaches to at least some part of their IT environment.

For the communications industry, I think there is now little doubt of the impact of SIP. I suspect that SIP is going to bring with it a radical series of changes. To a certain extent (and to stretch an analogy), while SOA is the consequence of what client/sever did to the mainframe, SIP is the consequence of what IP has done to networking.

While I wouldn't defend this analogy beyond a certain point, I do think it highlights one interesting truth. The consequences of IP were to open up standards (much as client/server blew apart the vertically integrated architecture of the mainframe) and SIP just takes that to the next level. The impact of SIP may also be as disruptive as those changes were to some of today's business models.

The big thing for me about SIP is that it removes some of the last remaining geographic restrictions on call control. SIP trunking removes the last part of the TDM world, namely that lines had to terminate somewhere and there had to call control near it. To be sure, in the SIP world there still is a need for physical lines, but many of the physical dependencies on call management have gone.

For the call centre industry, this raises interesting possibilities. For example, Avaya have started to show how the use of a SIP session manager might allow them to virtualise ACDs without the application layer approach of Genesys or the network management approach of ICM. For Cisco, the rise of SIP represents a significant opportunity as services at the network layer (such as security) become increasingly important when using such a lightweight protocol. Also, SIP permits video as easily as voice, something that Cisco sees very much as the future. For other vendors, who haven't yet become so comfortable with IP, the rise of SIP represents a fundamental challenge.

Of course, an industry change tends to bring in new entrants and this is where it gets really interesting. I see SIP as ensuring that the future of the voice industry lies with software. That is a view some of the software firms share and is why so many have entered the voice market. I blogged this time last year on Microsoft and Google (See "The future of contact centre - Google, Salesforce, Skype & Microsoft"), but that was primarily from a CRM perspective.

Following VoiceCon this year (which I covered in this blog post), it's clear that so far Microsoft has the most advanced plans for voice of the software vendors. The enabler for this is SIP and OCS 14 leverages a very significant portion of its capability from what SIP enables. It's the capabilities of SIP that that provide OCS with its more interesting capabilities around presence, video and voice integration.

SIP has triggered a very interesting three-way fight. Previously separate areas (voice, data and desktop) are now different aspects of the same question. SIP brings into conflict the legacy voice vendors (with their communications expertise, such as Avaya), the network vendors (who have deep IP protocol vendors, such as Cisco) and the desktop/ software vendors (who understand presence and the desktop, such as Microsoft). It will be very interesting to see who can win this collision of different architectural layers.

Voicecon 2010 Orlando - Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya & SIP...

2010-04-13T16:42:00.019+01:00

Most contact centre blogs don't start with Kierkegaard, but his famous quote, "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards", is very applicable to VoiceCon. I find that it is only with sufficient distance from the event (VoiceCon 2010 ran Feb 28th to March 3rd this year) that you can actually get a perspective on what was said. In previous years I've blogged on the main events (see posts like "VoiceCon 2009 - Now that the dust has settled, and IBM and Microsoft" or "VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect") but this year I want to stand back and take a longer view.

There's a very good summary of what happened on Blair Pleasant's No Jitter blog, and I don't intend to duplicate that here. Similarly, there is some very good ideas for the overall state of the voice industry on Dave Michels No Jitter blog. I'd slightly disagree with his order (I agree virtualisation is very real and very significant, but I wouldn't have put it at number one ahead of the change we're seeing from SIP and the vendor landscape) but I think his sentiments are spot on. Rather, my aim is to think about what was new for contact centres, and what wasn't from a strategic perspective.

Microsoft
This, for me was as important for what wasn't said as what was. There has been a lot of excitement following Voicecon about the release of OCS 14, and most of that is deserved. The capability to do 911, the transcription of voicemails and contextual calling are all nice features for the business user and strengthen Microsoft's case in for enterprise voice/ telephony systems.

What hasn't been commented on so much is the amount of time that Microsoft devoted to the call centre. In the 45mins of the video below, about 9 mins (from about 29mins in to 38mins) a decent proportion of Gurdeep Singh Pall's pitch:

Clarity Connect isn't a vendor I'm that familiar with, but they represent a very interesting Microsoft based approach to the contact centre and the customer service market. I've been previously quite dismissive of Microsoft in contact centre voice (see blog posts like: "Technology firms, Europe and speech recognition") while positive about their CRM Dynamics and CCF offerings (see posts like "The future of contact centre - Google, Salesforce, Skype & Microsoft").

I think my views have changed. Microsoft may not have announced that they are in the contact centre, but there is no doubt about the thrust of OCS 14. Microsoft are a serious voice player and have arrived in the contact centre even if much of the rest of the industry hasn't realised it yet.

Avaya
I think Avaya have to get full marks for managing to make a joke about entropy! It's not a natural subject for comedy, so not mean feat to get a decent laugh at the start of the presentation. The message I got from Avaya was that SIP was the source of profound & fundamental change in the nature of contact centre architecture. I'm inclined to agree and I believe that while SIP may not bring immediate change tomorrow, I think it's likely to fundamentally change how the technology works. Whether or not Avaya will ride this change or be crushed by it (much as Aspect has struggled with IP), I'm less sure. The Avaya Aura architecture looks very powerful, but it is as yet relatively unproven and the Avaya Session Manager is something I need to understand better to have a clearer view on. There's a lot of potential advantages to the Avaya approach and SIP helps explains how they think they can get synergies from their Nortel acquisition. The downside risks, though, should not be underestimated and I feel Avaya still have to negotiate some very tricky changes to achieve their transformation.

Cisco
The contact centre was only briefly covered in the Cisco pitch (from 14mins to 15:30mins in the key note address!) and was focused on the role of social media in contact centre. It was interesting and the role of Twitter, Facebook and so on in customer service is one that excites marketing departments greatly. This will be an area of future activity for contact centres, I have no doubt, but I'm not sure whether it will be a major one. Blog analysis (for instance) has been much hyped and can yield very interesting insights, but only about certain demographics and is still a niche part of analytics. Twitter is perhaps more widely used than blogs and so more revealing but I still think there is a debate to be had as to whether it is going to be a core part of customer service. My suspicion is that where industries are already using it (e.g. airlines) we will see it used by related industries (e.g. rail or toll roads) where customers are disconnected from the PC and reliant on mobile phones. Whether we will see it more widespread than that, I'm not sure.

In short VoiceCon revealed that there are some fundamental changes underway in the voice industry. The organisers have clearly recognised this with the decision to re-brand as 'Enterprise Connect' and I think they are right to. The future looks to me to be about software and communication, and anyone still pushing voice hardware will find it challenging.

Will Broadband make Cornwall a Contact Centre hotspot?

2010-04-07T12:11:00.004+01:00

A very interesting article in The Times earlier this week looked at the prospects of high-speed broadband coming to Cornwall.

The plan is that Cornwall, historically one of the remoter areas of England, will receive ultra-fast broadband giving users speeds of between 100 megabits per second and one gigabit per second, making it one of the fastest internet connection areas in the country. The figures to support this are that it will create 4,000 jobs and £250m for the Cornish economy.

Fortunately for Cornwall, this plan does not rely on the UK Government's proposed 50p broadband levy (which the BBC says is scrapped until after the election), but rather on European Union development funds.

The Times article focuses on the benefits this high-speed broadband will bring to 'sexy' industries like digital animation, but I rather think this misses the point and sets Cornwall up for failure. Animation and creative media are growth industries and Cornwall is lovely place, but many of these dynamic, rapidly changing companies will be employing outsiders rather than locals and keeping their head offices in London, especially the media-centric areas around Soho. These companies will put money into the local economy, but they won't necessarily create many jobs for local people. Instead, I suspect that it's industries like customer service that could make the most difference.

It is often not appreciated how dependent the contact centre industry is on bandwidth. It's obvious that you need bandwidth for the volume of voice calls, but less obvious that you need vast amounts of bandwidth for the data that needs to accompany those voice calls so that you can do something useful with them. This is occasionally highlighted by outages (see my past post "Onshore, Offshore & Internet Resiliency" for when a break in sub-sea cabling caused major problems for offshore Indian contact centres) but otherwise not always visible. To a certain extent, the policy of 'build it and they will come' has worked well in other areas. A few weeks ago the Economist ran an excellent article entitled "Fibre in Paradise" looking at the impact optic fibre has had on Bristol, Virgina. The key point for contact centre was,

"...and the fibre brought jobs. In 2007 both Northrop Grumman, a big American defence contractor, and CGI, an international IT consultancy, said they would hire between them 700 technicians, consultants and call-operators at offices in nearby Lebanon, Virginia, part of BVU’s [Bristol Virginia Utilities] fibre backbone. Both cited the area’s universities and low cost of living, but neither would have come without BVU’s investment, which Northrop calls absolutely critical."

It's far from guaranteed, but the likelihood is that if Cornwall wants to create local jobs and boost its economy then building broadband is essential and attracting call centres and back office operations is where they should focus.

The blog is back

2010-04-06T17:50:00.002+01:00

Apologies all readers, I've been absolutely laid out with 'flu and not been able to blog for weeks.

I'm back & better now and I've finally got time to blog. The first post should be up and posted tomorrow and I look forward to resuming posting.

Shop direct cut 1,500 jobs - the internet finally takes its toll

2010-02-05T11:34:00.007Z

It was bad news last week for a lot of people when Shop Direct (one of the UK's largest catalogue retailers) announced that it was cutting 1,500 jobs in its call centres. This is another very big cut, as it was only a year ago that Shop Direct cut 1,150 jobs from their warehousing operations.

The sad thing is that some of these job losses were, perhaps to a certain extent, inevitable.

I was always interested to see how much of their business was phone based (I did do a little work with them some years back). The management at the time told me that for the demographics they targeted with their catalogue the phone was the primary channel of communication. Most of these demographics were mid to lower income people and as a result they did not use the internet extensively and preferred to phone in their orders when a physical catalogue arrived.

I was dubious that this was sustainable indefinitely, but even in the mid-2000s, the primacy of the phone channel seemed to be holding true. It's very interesting therefore to read that in five years the proportion of online sales has gone from 18% to 60%.

My suspicion is that an aggressive bundling of internet and TV solutions by UK service providers (such as Sky and Virgin) has increased internet penetration into demographics where previously internet was seen as either unnecessary or too expensive. The steady fall in price of PCs also probably helps, but I suspect that it is the role of UK service providers that has so fundamentally changed the channel mix for firms that do indirect and distance selling.

The one thing that could have changed some of this is the integration of the contact centre with the web channel. Co-browsing technology is well established, as is click to call and other ways of assisting customers on the web site. There are some startling statistics (anything from 40% - 70%) of the number of shoppers who start to fill a basket on a website but then don't go through to checkout. Offering them help if they get stuck, or an easy way to ask a question, could dramatically improve the number of completed transactions in the web channel. It doesn't necessarily require a huge contact centre but is an example of how a contact centre that adds business value is still very necessary for a business that has the internet at the core of its channel sales strategy.

Google Nexus - the need for a contact centre

2010-01-15T15:52:00.004Z

Google is generally seen as a very slick operation, which is why this blog is more than a bit surprised to see them miss-step so badly on customer service for the new Google Nexus smartphone.

I understand fully that Google believes it can change the world, and (generally speaking) Google has been right so far that it's technology has changed things. On customer service, though, there is more than a hint of arrogance in Google's idea that customer service should be done the way Google does things, not the way customers want to do them.

Most consumers want to know that their problem is being fixed and that the company takes it seriously. Offering customer service by e-mail and forum doesn't give that experience to customers. For a more technical user group running websites and so on, e-mail and forums can be more than adequate and very cost effective for Google. For a mass market product (even one target at early adopters) it seems to be a unique approach to support. I have no view on the volume of complaints, but headlines such as "Google Faces Deluge of Nexus One Complaints" in PC World hardly do Google any favours or suggest they understand the market they've just entered. Blogs have been even more direct, for example Gizmodo talks of "Nexus One's Lousy Customer Support Shows Google's Weakness".

It's been interesting to see that even web retailers like Amazon, who traditionally have driven as much support to the web or e-mail channels as possible, still see a significant role for the contact centre. It may not be the first level of customer service they offer, but once the first line has failed to resolve the question Amazon do see the need to provide real time, interactive service to customers. Voice is the ideal channel for this, with web chat a distant second and for both a contact centre is ideal.

What makes this particularly interesting as Google struggle with customer service, is the hint that Amazon might be moving into providing contact centre infrastructure for third parties. The story comes from Tech Flash "Amazon.com to sell call center service to other companies? " and wonders if Amazon is looking at customer service as a logical extension to the Amazon cloud services. Given Amazon is one of the leader is web services and these already include storage, relational databases and payment services, customer service would be a logical and very interesting addition.

It would be ironic if while all the attention was focused on Google's customer service failings, the real customer service cloud revolution was quietly taking place at Amazon....

Dimension Data Benchmarking Report 2009

2010-01-13T16:03:00.005Z

I've always covered the The annual Cisco & Dimension Data Speech survey but I've not focused so much on the Merchants contact Centre Benchmarking report. That's perhaps a mistake as a quick read of this summary of
the latest Dimension Data Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report would show. The report came out last week so this data on contact centre performance is hot off the press. Here are the some of the major themes and findings from 2009:

A MIXED BAG FOR OPERATIONAL PERFORMANCE - Looking at aggregated operational performance data always requires a degree of license. Overall, we would summarise this year’s operational performance as ‘mixed’ - there have definitely been no great strides forward or any significant decline in standards.

CALL VOLUMES STILL ON THE RISE - Overall call volumes have risen slightly this year, contradicting predictions of the demise of contact centres as self service and contact avoidance initiatives are developed. Growth in call volumes is more pronounced in emerging markets. Since the onset of the Global Economic Crisis there has been a clear shift in the reasons for customer contact.

COMPLEXITY FOR AGENTS - Average Handle Times have continued to creep up but we believe that this is largely down to the migration of the simpler, commoditised transactions to self service channels which continues to increase. This obviously leads to front line agents having to handle more complex interactions that often require a greater degree of empathy, communication skills and access to the relevant information.

STILL WORK TO DO ON MANAGEMENT INFORMATION - Management Information (MI) reported at board level under the guise of Strategic MI is still too focused on service levels. Instead of focusing on the inner workings of the operation, strategic MI focuses on outcomes. We believe this is an issue across the industry and we are still measuring the wrong things for the wrong reasons.

PROCESS OPTIMISATION REMAINS PRIMARY FOCUS - From a customer and agent perspective, the ongoing trend towards more End-to-End Process Automation is good news. Through increasing the number of processes that can be handled within contact centres, hand-offs will reduce as will operational costs.

OUTSOURCING STILL A COST DECISION - While we continue to see the role of outsourcing maturing, the top three reasons for outsourcing are all cost related. Cost remains the biggest driver for adopting an outsourcing strategy, but it is encouraging to see results that indicate a more balanced approach to outsourcing decisions.

CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE IS BACK ON THE RADAR - Over the past 12 months there has been a positive indicator trend suggesting that organisations are looking to improve the way they show how Customer Lifetime Value is impacted by customer interactions taking place in the contact centre.

CHANNELS ARE STILL TOO SILOED -Organisations are still not using customer insight across the organisation. It’s a clear and disappointing indicator of the extent of the challenge facing the industry to deliver a joined up end-to-end experience.

WHY NOT MEASURE COST PER INTERACTION? - A third of all contact centres report that they do not measure the cost per interaction of agent assisted telephone calls. When you consider that this is the most accurate means of determining the cost effectiveness of an operation, it is a worrying trend that we have not seen improve in recent years.

SEGMENTATION BECOMES MORE SOPHISTICATED (BUT FEWER PEOPLE ARE DOING IT) - More companies are using increasingly sophisticated methods of segmenting and differentiating their customers. There appears to be a very real desire to generate more value from customer interactions. What is worrying though, is the drop in the number of companies using segmentation.

HOME-WORKING BECOMES A REALITY - The number of home-working agents is generally growing in more mature markets across the globe. A large proportion of respondents are considering home-working, signifying a major shift in approach to employee management, where benefits include lower staff turnover and cost, improved productivity and reduced travel through the use of technology.

HOSTING AND ‘ON-DEMAND’ BECOMES MAINSTREAM - Most contact centres are still owned and managed within the organisation. The number of centres owned by organisations continues to drop year on year. With hosted technologies more secure and easier to manage than in the past, we expect to see an increase in the number of hosted centres due to the economic climate and convenience of the technology.

All very interesting, and probably well worth getting the full report from the Dimension Data/ Merchants site.

Bank Leumi introduces biometric password re-sets for online banking

2010-01-05T11:18:00.008Z

An interesting story about Bank Leumi on Finextra just before Christmas.

It seems that Bank Leumi will be using voice biometrics for password re-sets for online banking. There are a couple of interesting things about this.

The first is that password re-sets are an absolute pain for helpdesks and similar types of contact centre. Depending on whether this is an internal helpdesk for an organisation or an external facing one, password re-sets can be anything from 50%-70% of the call traffic. The two follow on problems from this call volume are that password re-set is an expensive thing for IT technicians to be spending most of their time on and that they represent a significant potential security risk.

It is this security risk that is the other area of interest. Passwords authenticate you based on what you know, not who you are. Re-setting a password changes that, as it potentially makes the password available to an identity thief. The blog has covered a number of examples of identity theft (this theft from Barclays in 2008 using the identity of Barclays own chairman being a particular case in point) and the vulnerability is obvious.

In theory, biometrics removes some of this risk as it is focused on who you are and not on what you know. In practice things are not so straight forward and this is partly why biometic adoption has been more limited than might be expected. For more detail on the limitations, here's been some good posts on Finextra see "Biometrics - what's that all about then?" by Dave Griffiths and "Who's in your Wallet?" by Jarvis Kandik from 2008.

In Europe I've tended to see biometric deployments mostly for internal password re-sets. A good example that I know of is AIB and VoiceVault who have piloted password resets for staff. The key thing here is that the staff are in a controlled, secure environment and so the biometrics is effectively only one part of a multi-factor and multi-layer authentication.

This is what makes the Bank Leumi example so interesting. I haven't before seen biometrics used directly for consumer authentication for something as sensitive as banking.

I have seen quite widespread use of biometrics outside of Europe and the US and especially for areas like welfare benefits. I got a fair amount of comment to my blog post "BBC Moneybox on Speech Recognition for banking " back in February with examples of biometrics in use from the Philippines (interstingly using PerSay, as does Bank Leumi).

Depending on how the Bank Leumi deployment foes, I may need to revise my last post on the subject "Where are Speech Biometrics in Europe?..... and the Your Call Blog "....!

Twitter in Contact Centre & Customer Service

2009-11-23T09:39:00.009Z

I had a very interesting comment from Simon on a past post, where he asks,

"What's the best example you've seen of a company embedding Twitter in its suite of contact centre channels? I'm interested to know what's seen as the best of the best."

I've covered Twitter in quite a few recent posts ("Cisco Contact Centre on Twitter ", "Cisco Contact Centre on Twitter - part two " and from back in February "Google and Twitter for Customer Service? "), but I haven't really talked much about Twitter as part of customer service in the contact centre.

Part of the challenge is that very little has yet been done beyond trial stages, and as result there's very little research on what best practice might be. It's also the case that a lot of the trials are in B2B environments (such as the two Cisco Twitter feeds I've blogged on), rather than the more traditional B2C environment of contact centre. Datamonitor have a short but interesting report "Twitter and Google as Customer Service Tools" and Forrester have the interesting report: "Using Twitter As A Customer Service Channel".

Forrester cites the US company JetBlue and mentions Bank of America and Comcast. I'm interested to see Jet Blue as an example and their Twitter page is here. To be honest, Twitter is clearly about much more than the traditional narrow definition of 'customer service'. My suspicion is that is about 'customer relationship' but with the focus on the 'relationship' part of things that CRM so completely missed by focusing on 'customer' and 'management'!

The other interesting thing is that JetBlue has always been innovative around customer service. They were one of the first companies to really use home contact centre agents extensively (there's a write up on the business model in Fast Company magazine here), and so it's not a huge surprise to find that JetBlue is they type of company innovating with Twitter.

The interesting thing about Twitter is how fast it all moves, so my suspicion is that best practice will evolve very rapidly as firms practice and play with it.

The UK Contact Centre industry - a snapshot & top contact centres

2009-11-17T20:19:00.005Z

I was very interested to see the Times carrying a "Top 50 Contact Centres" supplement on the 7th November. It was backed with a decent sized event in London and accompanying website.

This is tied to the CCF (Call Centre Focus) magazine and aims to recognise outstanding customer service. I have no quibble with the aim of putting customer service higher up the business agenda, but my concern is that there is a real danger of too many awards from too many organisations. Afterall, the 4th & 5th of November was the CCA (Customer Care Association) awards, where I had a vested interest because I had provided some sponsorship and where Cisco's own customer service operation has previously done very well (see the past post: Congratulations to Cisco's own contact centre team ).

I don't think we're quite at the stage of world professional boxing with the alphabet soup of title awarding bodies, like the WBC, WBA, IBF, etc..., but we are getting close.

There is, though, a decent argument that this shows that the UK contact centre industry is in good health and extremely vibrant. I think there may well be an element of truth in this and that the number of associations is a reflection of that.

I was also particularly interested to see that the excellent Australian blog "Your Call" on CallCentres.net had also seen the Top 50 supplement and provided a snapshot from it of UK Contact Centre Industry stats:

5180 contact centres in the UK
48 billion calls received by companies from customers annually
3% of UK workers are employed by call centres
53% of employees would recommend the job to a friend
84% is the overall average performance score for the Top 50 centres with regard to timeliness, ease of use, personalisation, reliability and knowledge
94% of queries are answered in the first call.

While it's hard to draw quick conclusions from such high-level stats, this looks like an industry that is generally coping even though the downturn has made things quite challenging. This was the impression I got from the rather good Contact Babel report, "The UK Contact Centre Decision Makers Guide". A decent range of statistics but from my reading of it, supporting the view that the UK contact centre industry is generally very capable, even if under pressure due to the economic circumstances, and is a significant part of the UK economy.

The annual Cisco & Dimension Data Speech survery 2009

2009-10-27T16:30:00.010Z

Never one to rush into comment, the blog is pleased to note that the annual Speech Survey from Cisco, Dimension Data and (new this year) TellMe. For those interested, a PDF of the report is available from Cisco.com here, and I recommend it highly.

I covered the report last year (in the post "It's time again for the Cisco/ Dimension Data Speech Survey"), so I'm please to see that the 'annual' report is continuing to be annual! This may seem a bit silly, but in the downturn many companies have cut previously committed marketing programs and so it's good to see that Cisco, Dimension Data and Tellme are continuing to invest in this research.

There are three key findings of the report that I found quite interesting:

Online self-service is critical when thinking about IVR: Very interestingly, the report found that 44 per cent of consumers use online self-service first for their customer service requirements. Some 52 per cent of consumers between the ages of 16-34 fall into this category. As the report says “The increasingly multi-channel nature of customer service creates a real challenge for enterprises and vendors to design and deliver service experiences that are consistent across channels,”. It's clear that the voice portal and re-use of presentation components is likely to be the future way to go for IVR development.
Customers don't like most speech implementations: Some 41 per cent of consumers say they would prefer to use speech recognition as little as possible, while 15 per cent of enterprises have this position. Only 3 per cent of vendors have this negative response. Reinforcing consumers’ dislike of speech recognition, 40 per cent of respondents said they avoid using speech systems “whenever possible”. Only 25% of consumers say they would be happy to use speech solutions again.
Customers and Enterprises don't see speech as bringing the same benefits: While vendors and enterprises largely viewed speech recognition’s ability to reduce waiting times as an improvement in customer service, consumers did not, the report found. In fact, he number of consumers who perceived no benefit to using automated services had grown from 20 per cent in 2008 to 31 per cent in 2009. “It clearly shows a failure on the part of vendors and enterprises to explain the benefits to consumers and highlights an area for improvement,” the report said. “To achieve a shift in customer perception, vendors and enterprises need to actively invest in delivering and promoting the perceived benefits and educating consumers on the additional, less apparent benefits.”

I think the key issue here is the user experience. If you deploy speech for inappropriate functions and do so purely to cut costs, then (oddly), customers do not feel valued or that they have had a good experience. I found it very interesting that the report also found that one reason for the high level of consumer dissatisfaction with speech recognition systems came down to poor or non-existent levels of integration with the next stages of customer service which resulted in callers having to repeat all their information again to an agent once they got there. It strikes me as elementary, but if you are going to spend all that money on a speech implementation, then ensuring that the data you capture in the self-service environment is passed on to agents is surely a basic step!

All very interesting and highlights that some of the success challenges that Speech faces are not the ones that vendors tend to think of!

Cisco and Salesforce.com launch joint offering

2009-10-21T09:54:00.004+01:00

Quite an exciting development earlier this month, when Cisco and Salesforce.com announced the launch of a joint contact centre in the cloud offering.

This is very interesting for a number of reasons. The first is that this is a very interesting example of a cloud based, fully bundled CRM and contact centre solution. The second is that this is part of a wider trend of alliances in the IT industry where customer needs require firms to integrate pre-sale, rather than the more traditional post-sale integration of all the bits the customer has selected.

The Cisco and Salesforce.com solution is (for the moment) only available in the US and is targeted initially at mid-sized firms. There's been a lot of coverage internationally (click here for UK examples) and I expect the solution will be available in Europe, perhaps during 2010.

Contact Centre Expo 2009 - Day Two

2009-09-24T14:00:00.011+01:00

I meant to get this post published yesterday, when it really was the end of Day Two of Contact Centre Expo. Sadly, the lack of a wireless connection on Virgin Trains meant that it has had to wait until now for me to get the post up onto the blog.

In my previous post ("Contact Centre Expo 2009 - Day One"), I raised the question as to whether there was much innovation to be seen at this years CC Expo. I was very please to have my question taken up by Plantronics (see the comments to Day One's post) on stand D17, who suggested that if I was interested in innovation I should come and have a look at their stand.

I'll admit that I was slightly unsure, as while I was sure that headsets could be improved from the days when I was an agent (back in the late '90s), I just didn't know what was possible. In fact, an awful lot is possible, and 'headsets' was a totally misleading concept.

Two of Plantronics products showed innovation that got me very interested:

Plantronics IP40 Audio Processor - The name is all a bit deceptive. What Plantronics are really talking about here is a SIP endpoint that gives all the benefits of a phone handset to an agent without the cost (and space) of having to buy each contact centre agent a traditional phone handset. After all, a contact centre agent usually drives their telephony environment through the CTI user interface on their desktop computer and so doesn't use most of the buttons that a phone provides. This rather neat little device gives the agent all the controls they need while saving on space, power and cost. The use of SIP was, I thought, particularly intriguing as the this opens up a lot of software to device options that could stretch beyond the traditional contact centre. It's potentially a very disruptive technology as it attacks those contact centre manufacturers who have relied on high-priced handsets to subsidise the cost of their core software technology. It's potentially very interesting and for a little device it may be much more disruptive than it looks.

Plantronics Savi Office - I've encountered wireless headsets in the past, but generally these had been unsuitable for the contact centre as they'd run Bluetooth. I was much more taken with the DECT based options that I saw on the Plantronics stand. These headsets were reliable enough for proper contact centre use, but allowed the agent to move away from their computer for an extended period. I wouldn't see this as suitable for the majority of agents, where the agent handles so many short duration calls that they need to be close to the screen and a cable makes little difference over wireless, but for higher end agents (such as financial planners), I could see this working well. This type of agent that has longer duration, very high value calls may well need to move around or get information that's away from their desk and this sort of headset is definitely the way forward for that type of role.

Other stands that caught my eye were:

CCC - Another interesting outsourcer, this time focused on Germany and Central Europe. The CCC stands for Competence Call Centre and they had some interesting ideas around BPO and how to add value when running contact centres in a high cost country.
Eptica - An interesting company focused on the web and e-mail parts of multi-channel customer service. What was interesting for me was that being European, they instinctively understood the need to manage channels in multiple languages, something that the more US-centric start-ups sometimes forget.

All in all, a good show (at least for me) and I think perhaps more valuable for me than last year.

Contact Centre Expo 2009 - Day One

2009-09-22T17:38:00.013+01:00

It's that time of the year again, when most of the UK Contact Centre industry gathers in Birmingham for the Contact Centre Expo.

I covered the Expo last year (see the posts "UK Call Centre Expo" and "UK Contact Centre Expo Day 2") and was interested in the feedback I got as both comments and as e-mails. In the feedback, there was a solid body of opinion that the 2008 Expo lacked much innovation from the vendors. This needed to be weighed against a smaller set of feedback arguing that the show did offer new and valuable ideas, but nonetheless, there was a strong view that the exhibitors needed to raise their game.

I understand where the first group are coming from, but I still find the Expo very useful just because it has so many vendors and customers gathered in the same place and I find innovation a bonus on top of that. There are interesting ideas out in the exhibitor hall (as well as a few rather tired ones) and it's worth going round the Expo to see what is genuinely new.

So the stands that worked for me in the exhibitor hall, in no particular order, were:

Sword Ciboodle - In some ways, nothing radically new from what I used to know as Graham Technology. In other ways some interesting incremental improvements and a feeling that the market for process based CRM was probably one of the growth areas of CRM. I've felt for a while that the record-centric approach of Oracle/Siebel grown too big for many customers and too 'one size fits all', so it was interesting to see a CRM approach that was much more process-centric.
60k - Presenting themselves as 'The Alternative BPO & Contact Centre Outsourcer', I was interested to see what 60k thought distinguished themselves from the many other outsourcers in the hall. Part of the answer was "Bulgaria", but the value proposition was much more than that. I've managed outsourced contact centres in a past job (we had European customers with customer service sites split between Europe and South Africa), and my experience is that outsourcing to far off locations can have real disadvantages when you try and manage the resulting operation. Nearshoring and so locating your centre within three hours flight time, but still with cheaper labour is very interesting. The crucial advantage of Bulgaria is that it is in the EU and the EU location is a big advantage over destinations like India when you think of the challenges with outsourcing and data movement compliance with the laws on exporting data outside the EU. What also interested me was the focus of 60k on higher value business process. I've long argued that this is where outsourcing needs to go (see past posts like "Offshore - why I would go for South Africa over India") and it was good to see 60k as a European outsourcer positioning things like 'Insurance Claims Processing' and 'Product Recall Management' that add real value to customers, rather than trying to sell cheap call centre seats.
Egypt - I am very interested in the Egyptian contact centre industry as it shows what growth can happen very quickly with government support. I had a good chat with Raya contact centres, who run the contact centre operations of a number of the big tech firms. I must confess a vested interest here, as I recently blogged on Cisco opening their 300 seat centre in Egypt (see "New offshore developments in the European Market") and it was very useful to hear the Egyptian perspective on this.

So all in all very useful (on top of being an exhibitor with a decent number of customer visits to our stand).

Tomorrow, things I'd like to do are:

Catch up with Redbox Recorders to understand what they are offering.
Have a look at the Nortel stand to understand how they are presenting things after last weeks acquisition by Avaya.
Talk to Aspect and better understand the relationship with Microsoft that is so prominent on their stand. (I'm guessing things have moved on since I covered posted on the tie-up announcements back in March last year "VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect")

As always, do let me have any suggestions for other areas that are getting attention.....

Cisco Contact Centre on Twitter - part two

2009-09-11T12:37:00.004+01:00

One of the things with Web 2.0 is that it can be a little bit of a lottery as to which information sources you find.

So earlier this week, I blogged about Cisco CCBU getting onto Twitter. In fact, this is just one of the developers in the Cisco Contact Centre Business Unit setting up a Twitter account for his area of work which is the next generation reporting based around the Cisco CUIS product.

What I'd not known was that already on Twitter was the Cisco Contact Centre feed, run by the business unit and available at: http://twitter.com/ciscoCC . More generally, for those who want contact centre news as part of the wider Cisco Collaboration offerings, there is: http://twitter.com/ciscocollab , covering the wider Cisco collaboration portfolio.

There should be something for every level of interest in contact centre in there....

Cisco Contact Centre on Twitter

2009-09-09T12:27:00.003+01:00

It's good to see that the Cisco Contact Centre Business Unit (CCBU) is up and running on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ccbu_dev .

At the moment there's a focus on the CUIS product, which is Cisco's new and rather appealing web based reporting tool. There will (I understand) be coverage of Cisco Unified Contact Centre Enterprise and Cisco Unified Contact Centre Express, as well as such core individual products as ICM.

I like this use of twitter as although I'm not a big user, I do like to be notified of updates and 'hot off the press' updates. I find RSS is good for this if I have my laptop set up, but if I'm off on customer sites (not all of which provide guest access) then twitter works well for my mobile device.

BT has problems returning contact centre jobs & workforce management

2009-09-01T16:04:00.005+01:00

It was only in July that British Telecom announced that it was returning at least 2,000 contact centre jobs back to the UK. I covered it in the post "British Telecom brings back contact centre jobs to the UK" and thought it was excellent news.

Now it seems there are problems as The Times reports that British workers are unwilling to cover the shifts that the Indian employees worked. The union is arguing that it is difficult for some employees with family commitments to change work patterns. I have a feeling this story is perhaps subject to an element of 'PR spin'. The Communications Workers Union is (I suspect) negotiating hard for its members, as it should, and BT is haggling over how much it flexibility it can get from it staff. In short, both sides are doing exactly what they should, and it will tend to look ugly until they get to an agreement.

To a certain extent these issues with shift work and agent availability are relatively familiar and have long been addressed by the call centre industry.

Whether through agent skills, or personal reasons, or employment legislation there are always restrictions on which calls which agents can take. This is why there is a lucrative industry of contact centre workforce management (WFM) software and why these products are needed in most large call centres. I've gone into the subject in some depth in the post "Workforce Management - is it only for high end call centres?" back in 2007, but it may be worth a re-visit. The point is, that with this software it is possible for BT to automate the management of some elements of their call centre changes without great cost.

How to reach an agent , Aussie style, and 0870 numbers in the UK

2009-07-29T08:14:00.010+01:00

Not strictly a European story, but interesting to see on the very good CallCentres.net site that covers APAC and Australia, a news story on how to reach agents directly.

It seems that such is the frustration with IVRs and self-service that an enterprising Aussie has set up a wiki type site called ihateholding.com so that consumers can share details of how to get straight through to a human. It's interesting to see how consumers really haven't bought into self-service the way much of the contact centre industry has. My suspicion is that consumers still need a lot of persuasion that self-service can benefit them and isn't just there for companies to save money.

To show how this can back fire badly, it's worth looking at non-geographic numbers in the UK. Originally these were introduced as a way of ensuring that consumers knew how much it would cost to call and so that a business could provide a single number for contact, regardless of where it's staff were located (or moved to). The problem was that once free local calls became more common in consumer telephone packages, a local non-geographic number meant that the consumer was now paying for something that free for them. Also consumers began to realise that non-geographic national numbers were costing them substantial sums in an era of otherwise falling telephone costs.

The consumer response (similar to Australia) was to set up the Say no to 0870 website, which was entirely designed to bypass national non-geographic numbers by instead giving the true, local number for each call centre. This was picked up by national media (especially by BBC Radio 2) and is now widely used in the UK and can save consumers significant sums.

The results for the users of non-geographic numbers have been less happy. One bank described to me how they had used non-geographic numbers to virtualise multiple contact centre sites in the UK. The idea was that by providing a non-geographic number they could virtualise their operations, use any agent anywhere in the UK to serve customers, and provide customers with a shorter wait time in queue. The problem was the Say no to 0870 website had had caused havoc with this by providing the local number for each contact centre so that calls were no longer queued centrally and customers ended up waiting longer.

The trouble is, that like the self-service example in Australia, the bank had never explained to consumers why the 0870 number might benefit them. As a result, consumer have seen something that appears to disadvantage them and have responded. It is arguable that this is all part of the consumer Web 2.0 response, and that these examples highlight how web 2.0 (or at least some technology changes, if you don't like the "web 2.0" term!) have empowered consumers.

Man in the middle fraud in call centres

2009-07-27T08:13:00.011+01:00

Never one to post only on up to the minute stories, the blog was quite interested in the Finextra report a fortnight ago on "man in the middle" fraud in call centres. I just haven't had a chance to write on it until now.

Traditionally, man in the middle fraud has been more associated more with the web channel than the telephone channel (see for example "Man-in-the-middle phishing kits circulating freely on the Web" or "ABN Amro compensates victims of 'man-in-the-middle' phishing attack" from Finextra), so it's interesting to see the attack take place in the telephone channel. It's also interesting that the attack described in Finextra is very low tech compared with the programing knowledge required for the phisihing attacks. The telephone version of man in the middle is described as,

"....where a fraudster calls the victim claiming to work for their bank, warning that their account may have been breached or compromised. The criminal then puts the customer on hold and calls their bank, connecting the two while remaining on the line.

The bank then requests authentication information, such as social security number, passwords and other personal information. Once the personal information is provided, the fraudster quickly ends the conference line and informs the customer that the issue has been resolved.

Meanwhile, with the personal information gathered during the call, the fraudster can take over the customer's phone banking relationship and transfer money out of their accounts."

The interesting thing for me is that for this type of attack to be successful, it highlights how weak the process side of some banks can be. This attack depends on the banks authentication process revealing (a) all of the customer's authentication data each time and (b) not ensuring that customers have multiple levels of authentication. Most banks I've worked with probably wouldn't be caught by this kind of fraud, so I'm interested to see that there are banks out there that still lag so far behind.

It's far less sophisticated than some of the the attack I've seen recently, where fraudsters have built fake IVRs to pretend to be the bank and used VoIP diversion to fool customers into thinking they are calling a local number (see posts like "Contact Centre impersonation arrives in the UK") and probably far less likely to succeed. Similarly, targeted social engineering attacks are also more likely to succeed as these tend to rely on bypassing security procedures rather than attacking them head on.

I would argue that deception based attacks around identity impersonation (such as the one on Barclays discussed in the post "Security, Call Centres and Fraud") seems to be where the real threat remains, but I'm not so sure that the man in the middle approach is where the real threat lies. My suspicion is that combinations of phishing and contact centre impersonation will remain the fastest growing threat for some years to come.

British Telecom brings back contact centre jobs to the UK

2009-07-17T19:42:00.005+01:00

Amidst all the gloom, it was good to see one positive news story. Yesterday, The Times reported that British Telecom was to bring at least 2,000 jobs back to the UK from India. In some ways it's a very significant move that, despite a recession and the cost problems at its Global Services arm, BT is not looking at running it's contact centre on the lowest possible cost base. In fact, BT is planning to close about half its Indian operation.

I was interested to see in the report that Ian Livingston (the BT CEO) denied that this was to do with customer service, despite a popular perception that BT hasn't got good customer service. The blog has looked at this previously (see the post from last year "CEOs of BT, the Royal Mail and Corel discuss telephone customer service"), and BT were quite open that they did not consider their customer service optimal.

I'm not sure this was a particular problem from their Indian operation, but it is certainly the case that Indian no longer represents the cheapest destination for offshoring and I've never thought India should compete for work on that basis. The problem is (as I've discussed in posts like "Indian Outsourcing, is it in decline?") is that many Indian organisations have competed on a cost basis and so have not necessarily delivered on quality or customer satisfaction. As a result, customer perception (regardless of the reality) is that many offshore contact centres are not going to meet their needs.

BT may have its own additional reasons for bringing the work back to the UK, such as wishing to minimise UK redundancies, but I think the CEO will appreciate any gains in customer satisfaction that this brings!

Scale and its problems in the contact centre

2009-07-01T05:54:00.006+01:00

This week and last week I've been on site at the contact centres of some of the UK's biggest banks. These are also some of the UK's biggest contact centres, so it's been very interesting to see the challenge scale presents.

These organisations tend to have at least 10 million customers, which is a decent number if they all decide to phone you! What makes it even more challenging is that these 10 million customers have they data spread across thirty or more years of legacy systems.

It's interesting for me that the challenge of scale that this presents has been well addressed by telephony but the IT industry still lags behind to a certain extent. This might sound controversial, but if I explain that this is viewed from the perspective of customer service, it should become clearer. Contact Centre telephony (whether Cisco, Avaya, or Genesys) pretty much scales to run a very large customer service operation. It's taken twenty years of ACD development to get here (and the evolution of TDM technology to IP), but the telephony side of things works in terms of getting a call to anywhere that the organisation wants it to go.

By comparison, the availability of data and customer information (especially in real time) is still a real challenge. All the organisations I've been working with run 3270 sessions, or other terminal emulation, as so much of their data is still mainframe based. Processes similarly can be embedded in applications and present real challenges scaling to the wider enterprise. There is recognition that the process and application layer is now one of the choke points for customer service and IT System Integrators are starting to address it (see posts like "System Integrators write interesting things about contact centre for the downturn!"). The problem is that while mainframe was previously a very good answer to many of the scaling problems that organisations experienced, integrating yesterdays good solution into today's customer service requirements is still a struggle.

It's an interesting set of challenges and one I'll blog on further.

New offshore developments in the European Market

2009-06-25T08:45:00.007+01:00

The blog is back from a week's sailing and is much refreshed. (Apologies to readers, but this is the European Contact Centre Blog, so please understand that the blog takes a European approach to getting enough vacation!).

I was very interested to see two new developments in contact centre offshoring while I was away. South Africa and Egypt may not be countries that instantly say "Europe", but both are making big plays for a share of the European outsourcing market.

The first was that South Africa did extremely well at the Contact Centre World EMEA awards on the 17th June. There were South African gold medals wins in the categories of Best Community Service Award for Kelly, Best OutSource Partner for The Institute of Performance Technology and in the the Best Supervisor for Zainool Abedeen Bux from Rewardsco Contact Centres. there were also a number of good silver medals and other runners up awards. There's a good report here at the Contact Centre World EMEA site or in the news section of the BpeSA Gauteng site. I've long thought that South Africa was potentially the next big thing for offshoring (see past posts like "Offshore - why I would go for South Africa over India") and the evidence seems to support this. I like the focus and the marketing on "business process offshoring". This is is a good differentiator over the "your mess, for less" approach of some of the Indian firms that have competed simply on the lower cost of Indian agents. Instead, a focus on process allows the South Africans to stress the value add potential of their work that comes with the cost advantages of their local labour market. I've always thought that with the widespread use of English and Dutch in South Africa (I know it's Afrikaans, but it will work for the Dutch/Belgian Flemish markets), that the South Africans have a potential advantage in any offshored work that required good language skills.

Meanwhile, on June 11th, Cisco announced that it was setting up a significant contct centre operation in Egypt that would to provide service for Europe and the Middle East. This is a 300 person centre which will provide customer service for Cisco's emerging markets customers in Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. This is a very interesting example of the power that government intervention and support can have, as the Egyptian Ministry of Telecommunications has been building up the country's contact centre and IT capabilities. The Egyptians were quite prominent at the UK's Contact Centre Expo last year (see my post "UK Contact Centre Expo Day 2") as the South Africans were the year before, which was what prompted me to write the "Offshore - why I would go for South Africa over India" post.

My suspicion is that there is enough market in Europe for both South Africa and Egypt to win share. I also suspect that this won't hurt the competent and forward thinking European call centres who understand the need to add value and be efficient. I suspect the casualties will be those older contact centres in Europe that weren't adding much value and are no longer meeting customer needs. Of course, one other important point is that both Egypt and South Africa have the opportunity to become regional hubs for Africa and they will both I suspect have opportunities to grow beyond the outsourcing market.

Contact Centre impersonation arrives in the UK

2009-06-05T18:14:00.006+01:00

I wrote yesterday on the problems the Commonwealth Bank of Australia was having with a phishing attack that caused customers to call a fake contact centre that impersonated the bank's centre and captured their credit card details ("Phishing fraud steps up a new level with fake bank IVR & contact centre").

It now seems that this fraud has reached the UK. The BBC is reporting here that the Bank of Scotland has been targeted by fraudsters who have been able to divert customer calls. There's few details in the BBC report other than that the calls were diverted and that there is a theory that a former contact centre employee may be involved. An inside job does seem a strong possibility, and the infiltration of call centres by organised crime is a real risk. Although it wasn't widely covered, the BBC reported back in 2006 that Strathclyde Police believed that perhaps one in ten call centres had been targeted by organised criminals (article here). Normally, though, crime in contact centres has been opportunistic and carried out by individuals. A typical example was when the Barclays Chairman, Marcus Agius, had his details and money stolen by one of his own employees (covered on the blog in the post "Security, Call Centres and Fraud").

It is a worrying development if organised crime has, well, got itself more organised, and moved up from individuals stealing details to systematic attacks from the inside on the banks' contact centre systems.

Phishing fraud steps up a new level with fake bank IVR & contact centre

2009-06-04T17:38:00.007+01:00

I normally focus the blog on Europe, but this story from Australia shows a very alarming new level of fraud. In this case fraudsters have targeted Commonwealth Bank of Australia customers with a fake IVR and call centre.

The story ( fully available at APCmag.com here ) is very worrying. It shows that fraudsters are graduating from e-mail phishing to a far more advanced form of fraud. While the e-mail is still the basic trigger for the fraud, a sophisticated use of VoIP (Voice over IP) and IVR systems is a new development. While most consumers are now knowledgeable enough of the risks of fraud to avoid clicking on e-mail links, phone numbers are much more trusted. This fraud relies on customers trusting local dial codes and the familiarity with entering information into the touchtone IVR system. APCmag describes the fraud as:

"An email sent out on 26th May included a phone number in Brisbane to call to unsuspend blocked Maestro cards, but as of today, the number is disconnected. However, another email received this morning has an 08 area code number that is still in operation. According to ACMA, the number is a GoTalk VoIP number, which anyone could have registered over the web using stolen credit card details. (We've tried contacting GoTalk to notify them of this problem but were not able to immediately reach our regular media contacts.)

We called it, and were alarmed that the computer on the other end recognised the fact that we were keying in bogus numbers — an indication that at a bare minimum, it is doing algorithmic validation of the numbers being entered, and in a worst case scenario is operating a live payment gateway system to immediately siphon funds from accounts."

At the moment, most consumers would see a local phone number and trust that to mean that their call was really going there. Few would understand the potential of Voice over IP to route the call anywhere in the world. Fewer consumers still would understand that an IVR system that answered a phone call and asked for identity verification and card details might not be what it seems.

Like most frauds, this is a clever exploitation of some basic technology, but an exploitation in a brand new way. It may be a one off, but I suspect it may represent a new development as the fight against e-mail based phishing becomes more successful. To date, security in call centre has been focused on internal threats and social engineering attacks (see my posts like "Security, Call Centres and Fraud" and "Call centre worker gaoled for data theft"), but no-one has yet impersonated a contact centre on this scale before.

In my view, it looks as if the ease with which IP protocol allowed websites to be impersonate will become a danger for voice.

Where are Speech Biometrics in Europe?..... and the Your Call Blog

2009-06-01T08:23:00.006+01:00

I was very interested to see the news on the Call centre.net site that CentreLink is moving to replace its PIN and password system with voice biometrics. For those not so familiar with Australia, CentreLink is the Australian Government's welfare agency and so it's a pretty substantial and sizable public facing organisation (there's more information on the organisation here).

What I find interesting is that in Europe I'm hardly seeing interest in speech on the same scale. Last time I wrote about speech (in the post "BBC Moneybox on Speech Recognition for banking"), I got a big response and a very good example of speech being used in the Philippines for accessing government services. Another APAC example, and I can't think of anything comparable in Europe.

What it makes it very relevant to me is that this week the Call Centres.net blog ("Your Call" by Dr. Catriona Wallace) is over in Europe. I admire Dr. Wallace's blog for the frequency of posting, even if this week I wasn't so sure of the etiquette discussion! Now in this week's blog post, she highlights that Europe seems to know very little of the APAC and Australian contact centre market. Of course she is writing from Lisbon, and Portugal is not one of those countries with strong connections to Australia. This is one of the problems with treating Europe as a single entity, I suspect she'd probably find Britain much more knowledgeable on APAC, but Britain would be no where near as knowledgeable on Brazil and South America as a Portuguese audience.

I appreciate that the many languages and size of some of the markets has made things difficult for speech vendors in Europe (and I went into this in more details in the post "Technology firms, Europe and speech recognition"), but that doesn't fully explain why speech seems to be taking off in Australia and making little headway in Europe. Is it perhaps ignorance of what is being achieved elsewhere? Are there more fundamental barriers to speech adoption in Europe that I'm missing?

This is perhaps time to appeal to my readership and say, "Why do you think we're not seeing many speech projects in Europe?" All ideas welcome!

Axa to create 600 new UK contact centre jobs

2009-05-27T19:33:00.006+01:00

A piece of good news reported on CCF, "AXA to create 600 jobs". I was particularly interested to see that these jobs are onshore in the UK.

The blog has looked at Axa contact centres before, at least the Swiftcover bit of the business) in the post "Are call centres so bad they hinder business?", so it's good to see that another part of Axa has more confidence in the power of customer service.

It's one of those things where the insight comes from the detail. The part of Axa creating these jobs is Axa Helathcare, and the part with the aversion to call centres is Swifcover who specialise in motor insurance. These are very different business, with different margins, expectations of service and complexity.

I've written on this a lot before, but Axa encapsulates this neatly. If the service required is simple, move it to the web. If it's complicated and a brand differentiator, then think about onshore and service quality as higher priorities than simple cost to serve metrics. It's noticeable that this contact centre will not just be onshore, but be in Kent (not the traditional lower cost contact centre areas of the North of England or Scotland). Presumably the ease of access to London and Paris, as well as access to high quality labour from a large catchment area influenced the thinking.

The view of automate or keep it high-quality isn't just my thinking, more authoritative writes than me have covered this, such as Sramana Mitra and her controversial article "The Coming Death Of Indian Outsourcing" in Forbes (covered on this blog at: "Indian Outsourcing, is it in decline? ").

I can see strong value in offshoring some back-office functions (see "Lloyds TSB offshores IT, not call centre"), but I do believe that if customer service is to be valuable, then it needs to be done with quality agents who understand the environment the end customer is in. This partly why I do see roles for countries like South Africa (see: "Offshore - why I would go for South Africa over India"), but I struggle to see a role for countries that try to bid for customer service business on a cost basis.

Still very good news in the current economic environment to see jobs being created.

Nortel - the misery continues

2009-05-18T10:38:00.004+01:00

I was very sorry to see the story on the Register of "Nortel Confirms Fire Sale - and shrinking revenues" . It is a dreadful situation for the employees to be in and not much fun for their existing customers either.

I was particularly struck by the short paragraph towards the end mentioning that Nortel employees were to demonstrate outside parliament over their dissmisal without notice or redundancy payment. This has been reported on the UK contact centre sites (see for example "Ex-Nortel staff lobby Parliament" on Call Centre Focus), but I'm surprised that none of the mainstream news organisations have featured it more prominently. It seems very harsh, if reports are accurate, that staff lost their jobs with no notice while at the same time the administrators approved executive multi-million bonus payments.

I appreciate that the troubles at Nortel are no surprise, and even this blog had problems at Nortel as one of its predictions for 2009 (see "First of my contact centre predictions for 2009 happens - Nortel"), but there's no satisfaction in seeing the what's happening.

I think this story will run and run, as while at the moment we're looking at the 229 staff who are demonstrating over the administrators actions, the pension fund will be the story soon. There's not been much since January when the size of the pension fund deficit was revealed (apart from this story in March in the Guardian "Nortel pension fund deficit rocks state lifeboat"), but the pensions will affect perhaps 43,000 people or more. If the administrators Ernest and Young think that there are problems now, it could be nothing compared to what happens if there are any issues with the pension fund.

FSA (finally) determines offshore call centres a risk

2009-05-08T13:41:00.011+01:00

I seem to hear the sound of a stable door being shut, and long after the horse has bolted.

The FSA seems finally to have realised that offshore call centres can constitute a risk in financial services. This is not to say all centres, but that offshore centres managed and compliant only to local standards may not protect consumer data that well. Indeed they may be in countries where the law does not recognise most cyber crime or where it is unenforceable.

This isn't news to anyone in the industry, but the FSA has been remarkably relaxed about this until now. It has amazed me that if the data was in the UK it had to be managed securely and comply with what the EU demands, but if the same institution took the data offshore, then the FSA took little interest.

It's perhaps best quote the report in the Financial Times, as it sets out all the issues very well:

"The FSA found that all firms it visited had a high staff turnover rate and a need for constant recruitment, which was seen as a key financial crime risk given the continuing infiltration of financial services firms by organised criminals seeking to obtain sensitive customer data.

In a number of firms the FSA also found that staff vetting procedures were "inconsistent" and did not apply to all staff, which increased the risk that firms may inadvertently take on a person with a criminal background.
The FSA also found that some employees had provided the financial services call centres with false CVs.
The regulator said: "We were informed that fake CVs, inconsistent references and previous employers being reluctant to provide references were common in India."

On top of this, the FSA also said staff training was "generally poor" and urged firms to do more to ensure staff are equipped to identify and report potential financial crime risks.

An FSA spokeswoman said the review was aimed at helping firms understand how having an offshore centre affects firms responsibilities. She added: "Whatever security processes or compliance measures you apply to your business in UK, firm must makes sure those standards are also being applied to the business elsewhere.""

The thing that amazes me is it has taken so long to get to this position. This blog has covered some of the failings in onshore contact centres (see "Call centre worker gaoled for data theft" or "Security, Call Centres and Fraud", for example) and the BBC has highlighted a number of examples in the offshore area (see "Indian Call Centre Fraud and the BBC News"). It's been an area of huge consumer concern and one of the focal points of the opposition to offshoring.

I still believe offshoring has a role to play but it has to be done in a way that complies with UK security standards and where the threat is no greater than onshore. It is no use getting customers to check a waiver box agreeing to their data being handled outside of the EU and thinking that is an end to the matter.

This also highlights one of the great fallacies in offshoring, that it is just a cheaper way of delivering a call centre with the value proposition of "your mess for less". I've long argued that offshoring for cost reasons only is a mistake (see "The comming death of Indian Outsourcing" or "Onshore, Offshore & Internet Resilliency" for examples) and that offshoring for cost has significant risks in areas outside of security such as brand perception and customer experience..

Longer term, I think offshoring still has great potential for businesses who want to provide 24hr customer service through a follow the sun model, but this story is another nail in the coffin for those who see outsourcing as a cost saving.

Design and the Contact Centre

2009-04-30T05:49:00.005+01:00

It's a hectic week, which is why I haven't had a chance to blog until now about the radio program I heard on Sunday night.

I was listening to the BBC's "In Business" program and it was one of those thought provoking epiphanies. The program was focused on how design should influence business and there's a good summary on the presenter's blog.

Now, design is something that manufacturers think about for products, but how many contact centres consider it? When we think of customer experience, it tends to be owned (if at all) by the marketing department. Yet, as Peter Day's program makes clear, customer experience could be tackled by designers equally well or perhaps better.

A brief think about Apple and their design led approach suggests that there might be a lot of merit to this approach. I would argue that Apple is not that technically superior to most of its competitors (though it is very good), but that Apple are light years ahead of the competition in looking at design as a way of driving the whole customer experience. Yet until Apple started getting serious market momentum, most of IT was led by a marketing based approach to features and functions.

What really interests me is what would happen to the contact centre if it were to take a design led approach to it's functions. I think it's something I should spend more time thinking about. IT seems to tie in very well to two other subjects dear to the blog's heart, brand and process (see posts like: "Barclays, silent calling & we've been here before... " for brand and "System Integrators write interesting things about contact centre for the downturn!" for some thoughts on process).

In the meantime, though, it's off to catch the 6am flight to Edinburgh.

Another outbound call that worked for me.....

2009-04-24T10:34:00.003+01:00

I think it's like buses, you wait for ages for one and then two come along at once.

In the same way, I've complained about poor outbound calling for ages, and then have received two good outbound calls. The last one was from my utility company (see blog post: " Getting a good cold call ...and from a utility company too! "), this one was from my television provider.

Again it was a smarter offer than most cold calls. It offered me something I'd been thinking about doing (upgrading my package to watch the British Lions vs. South Africa rugby union test series) but I probably wouldn't have got round to doing. Instead with a bit of a nudge and quite a bit of a discount, I did.

I'm not sure if this was good use of analytics to identify customers by interests, but it was a well timed call with a good offer. Not rocket science, but still something beyond much of the witless automated outbound dialling that goes on in the UK market.

Happy holidays - and bad news on jobs

2009-04-09T18:19:00.004+01:00

It's time for the Easter break across most of Europe but, welcome as a holiday is, the news on jobs stays grim.

For every story like that of Sallie Mae returning offshore jobs (covered on the blog earlier this week in the post "Sallie Mae - Customer service or protectionism? "), there is another side.

The BBC is reporting that T-Mobile is looking to offshore 500 UK contact centre jobs to the Philippines. This comes in the same fortnight that the UK CCF site reported that Virgin Media was looking to shed 150 jobs in its Nottingham Telesales operation.

Compared to the massive job losses reported at the banks (e.g. 9,000 at Royal Bank of Scotland) this may not seem much, but 650 call centre jobs is significant and the losses seem to be steady. All we can hope for is that things look a bit better after the Easter break.

Sallie Mae - Customer service or protectionism?

2009-04-08T17:22:00.007+01:00

An interesting story on Finextra that Sallie Mae is looking to bring back onshore around 2,000 jobs.

It's a trend that so far in Europe has been primarily associated with customer service. I've covered some other business that have brought work back onshore in previous posts (see "Despite the credit crunch, still call centre growth at Barclays" or "HSBC creates 250 UK call centre jobs & offshore in decline"), and in the UK this trend for onshoring has also been the case for non-financial services companies like Orange.

The main reason up to know for taking previously offshored work back onshore has been problems with customer service. This hasn't necessarily been a language competence issue (though sometimes it has been) but has been primarily about how agents' accents, soft-skills and cultural awareness have not always tied into the image a brand has wanted to project. It's also been the case that a broken customer service processes don't get fixed just by moving country. There is also little point for a firm to spend a great deal on marketing if the media regularly cite them as an example of poor customer service.

Sallie Mae, though, seems to be the first example of what might be a new trend. Their CEO is quite explicit that this drive back onshore has nothing to do with customer service, and is quoted in the Finextra article as saying:

"The current economic environment has caused our communities to struggle with job losses. They need jobs, and we will put 2000 of them into US facilities as soon as we possibly can,"

Sallie Mae does need to be attractive to politicians in the market it serves, but that need is not just confined to US financial institutions at the moment. It will be interesting to see if this drive back onshore to win favour with national politicians becomes a trend. Often it is some of the European countries who are most associated with protectionism, but my view is that this will only work for the countries that do it if it also gives customers better service.

VoiceCon 2009 - Now that the dust has settled, and IBM and Microsoft

2009-04-06T12:17:00.002+01:00

So what to make of VoiceCon 2009 Orlando?

There didn't seem to be the major announcements that we got in 2008 (see: "VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect ") but in some ways I think we saw events of more significance.

The first thing is that Microsoft are in this business and are in it seriously. Last year's announcements, while significant, suggested that partnering was the key to Microsoft getting into the voice business. This year the revolutionary aspects of Microsoft's arguments were much more explicit. I rather liked their key-note session. It made one or two very key points that as voice moves from a hardware based solution to a software centric solution, it changes dramatically and that this is the logical evolution of VoIP. I also liked the fact that their demo used a Mac running Safari to Microsoft compatibility. I'm not normally a fan of Microsoft, but I felt they did make the more insightful points. I remain dubious about their ability to execute, but then so were the TDM vendors about IP Telephony! The video is worth checking out:

IBM also did a good pitch, around their UC2 solution from Louts. I liked the blue screen of death April Fool's hoax, but otherwise I felt that they were showing an evolution of Lotus Sametime rather than the more radical changes that Microsoft had in their vision.

In short, I think this software-centric approach to voice is the vision of the future. Whether or not it will be delivered by Microsoft is open to debate, but this was a far more visionary view than the alliances of last year.

VoiceCon Orlando 2009 - Day 1 & Day 2

2009-04-01T16:34:00.008+01:00

The blog is not at VoiceCon this year (travel restrictions as part of the global downturn), but I'm taking a keen interest at long range. Fortunately for those of us not able to travel, the VoiceCon 2009 site is running a good series of videos of all the key note speakers.

Last year saw some big announcements (covered in my blog post "VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect ") but so far these haven't translated into much market change. To be sure Microsoft continues to push with OCS and has a developing Unified Communications story but I have yet to see them get significant traction in Europe. Microsoft and IBM go today, so it will be interesting to see if there are any major announcements from them.

Yesterday it Cisco and Avaya (among others) doing the key note speeches.

Avaya announced the launch of their new solution architecture 'Avaya Aura'. I have to say that at the end of it I was slightly underwhelmed. It seemed good but not as radical as some of their previous SOA type of messaging. There's a very good summary of Avaya Aura on the nojitter.com site from Shelia McGee-Smith.

Cisco's key note was by the CTO, Padmasree Warrior, and focused on the interaction between collaboration, social networks and video. This was illustrated with a (fairly lighthearted) scenario showing how these could be applied to health care. It also showcased real-time translation which is rather gee-whiz stuff, though probably going to be necessary in the future if conversations between different language speakers are to take place.

In short, so far all very interesting, but nothing terribly radical. We'll see if any of that changes with today's presentations. Even if there aren't major changes, it's clear that VoiceCon remains the main event for most of the world's voice industry.

HSBC redundancies and their call centres

2009-03-30T15:52:00.011+01:00

It's always sad to see bad news on jobs and HSBC's announcement last week was no exception.

The BBC report is that while the bank says that 1,200 jobs are at risk, the unions are talking about up to 3,000 jobs potentially going. The jobs will go at an operation centre in Leamington Spa, (for about 280 positions), London will loose about 150 jobs and a call centre in Newport, south Wales, will be shut down according to an HSBC spokesman. The Yorkshire Evening Post reports that 70 of the job losses will be at HSBC's direct banking arm, First Direct.

What's particularly sad is that the Newport contact centre announced in June last year that it was creating 250 new jobs (I covered it here on the blog "HSBC creates 250 UK call centre jobs & offshore in decline") and presumably these will go as will all the existing jobs.

What is better news (and I've only seen reported discretely on the CCF website), is that the bank will be creating 200 jobs at a centre of excellence in Southampton and hopes many of the workers will re-locate.

Although the Unite union is angrily warning about the dangers of offshoring, I suspect that this is something of red herring. Most of the banks are moving IT and back-office offshore (see Lloyds TSB here or Barclays here on Finextra) and there is little sign that this will change. In the contact centre space I do detect that the march back onshore continues.

Although it is expensive to run a UK based contact centre, and the credit crunch is hurting many organisations badly, it is becoming clearer that the real problem in contact centre is broken processes rather than simply the cost of agents. Add in the brand damage that a bad move off-shore can do, and I suspect only the lower end of the market may continue with a push to offshore their contact centres. Of course, consumers can't see where their web-page was coded, so the chances are that IT will accelerate its push offshore.

Indian Call Centre Fraud and the BBC News

2009-03-23T14:03:00.007Z

The BBC was very excited about its story "Overseas credit card scam exposed " that it ran on the Thursday night news bulletin.

While they did make some good points, they played too much for my liking on the fear around offshoring. the BBC were correct to highlight that India has no equivalent of the UK Data Protection Act and that consumers dealing with an overseas call centre need to appreciate UK legislation may not apply to their data.

The problem is that the main thrust of the report was on what appears to be the theft of data (ironically enough) from the call centre of the security firm Symantec. Data theft is an extensive problem, but it's not one that just happens in India. Only last week, CCF (the UK contact centre news site) was reporting that a British Airways call centre employee had been jailed for two and a half years for data theft. Similarly CCF also reported at the start of March that a Barclays call centre worker had been jailed for obtaining money by deception.

This isn't just a recent phenomenon - this blog has written on thefts at RBS and Barclays by call centre staff (see posts "Call centre worker gaoled for data theft" and "Security, Call Centres and Fraud "). In short theft by employees is a problem in call centres, as it is in many other businesses, but it's not just an Indian problem.

Getting a good cold call ...and from a utility company too!

2009-03-19T15:18:00.008Z

I was amazed yesterday to be on the receiving end of a telemarketer's call that worked ...and from a utility company too!

I'm at home on paternity leave (hence why the last post was 24th Feb - apologies), so I don't normally get these kind of calls. I normally hate telemarkets because it is done so badly (see blog posts from last year like Banks criticised by BBC for automated calls" and "Further thoughts on outbound in the UK....." ), so I was surprised to find it done well.

This call worked because it was done by a person. A lot of outbound telemarketing is now done by pre-recorded messages now. I hate that. My view is that if you want a customer's business, then show them that you value the customer by having a person make the call. At this point, advocates of the pre-recorded outbound message point to how cost-effective it is for high-volumes and low response rates. My suggestion would be to understand and target your customers better, otherwise you're still wasting money however cost effectively you are doing it.

The outbound call was from my utility company and highlighted the difference between their offers and British Gas when it came to additional services. Now British Gas have had their customer service problems (see my post last year "The British Gas, the utility industry, customer service and consultants" for an overview of their efforts to sue Accenture over a Siebel implementation), but I've always been pleased with their service.

What the agent did on this outbound call was to highlight pricing differences that related to me and the specific type of services I needed. She then offered to send me all the details by e-mail, so that even if I wasn't prepared to sign-up over the phone, I could look through the specific offer she had worked out with me at my leisure. I was impressed, as this was what I wanted and and how I like to buy things - I don't like to sign up to things without having all the details laid out clearly. The call used multi-channel appropriately (telephone for relationship building and discussion, e-mail for presenting a detailed offer) and that was good to see.

Perhaps the previous research last year that suggested utilities were the worst call centres in the UK (see post "Are utility companies really the worst call centres? ") will need to be revisited!

More on Presence in the Contact Centre...

2009-02-24T17:14:00.003Z

A couple of posts ago (see: "Presence, Agent Availability and the practicalities of Contact Centre "), the blog was looking at presence and how it might be useful in the contact centre.

For those not familiar with the concept, presence is a concept of agent state or availability, depending on whether you approach it from the perspective of an ACD (Automated Call Distributor) or IM (Instant Messaging). The development of IP Convergence in the contact centre has brought these ideas much closer together and it's now possible to use this for customer service.

For those interested in the idea, CRMxchange have a good webinar coming up, titled "The Power of Presence for Customer Care: Buddy Lists and (Far) Beyond". You can register here, and it's presented by Ross Daniels from Cisco, who's written a couple of CRMxchange papers on the subject.

It's a subject that's well worth a look.

Google and Twitter for Customer Service?

2009-02-23T20:16:00.005Z

Google and Twitter for Customer Service?

It's an interesting idea, and one that caught my attention. Datamonitor have just produced a short (four page) report on this, and you can get from the Datamonitor website here.

I've rather liked Datamonitor's research lately (see:"More 2009 Contact Centre Predictions - Datamonitor ") and this is also good stuff.

I liked the coverage of Salesforce.com and their work with Google, but it was Twitter that really caught my attention. The idea of Twitter as a form of outbound IVR or outbound SMS appeals, and I think Datamonitor have hit on something with a lot of potential.

As I'm writing about Twitter, I'll keep this post short (I'm already way over 140 characters!) and end here.

Presence, Agent Availability and the practicalities of Contact Centre

2009-02-13T10:22:00.007Z

I was very glad that my last post ("BBC Moneybox on Speech Recognition for banking ") was so interesting to so many readers. Thank you for the feedback and comments. It's very good to see so much happening in the speech market and I certainly wasn't aware of all the projects readers mentioned, especially those in Asia/ Pacific.

One of the other areas that has had a lot of interest lately is presence. Traditionally, presence has been a concept for intstant messaging and the contact centre has focused on agent state from the ACD. This distinction is now blurring and the big instant messaging vendors like IBM with Sametime and Microsoft with OCS are getting very interested in presence in the contact centre. It was something we saw at VoiceCon last year (see post: "VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect ") and I'm sure will develop further.

Aside from the technology, there are a lot of practical issues around how presence might be manged in a contact centre environment. There is a very good article on CRMxchange by Ross Daniels from the Cisco Contact Centre Business Unit setting some of the practical considerations and how you might look to use presence as practical function, not just a neat technology:

"For many people, "presence" means the little colored icons next to colleagues’ names on the buddy list of their Instant Messaging client. Is someone available? Do they prefer to not be disturbed? This is useful, and many modern business users would be at a loss without IM and its straightforward application of presence technology.
Since presence has proved its worth in facilitating communication between business users, how can it help improve interactions between businesses and customers? One obvious answer is to provide contact center agents with an IM client that allows them to chat with fellow agents or subject matter experts outside the contact center; this gives agents an opportunity to get answers to caller questions that are outside their areas of expertise.
There are a number of potential problems with this approach, however. Who should populate the agents' IM buddy lists? If agents do it, how do they know who the best experts are for answering specialized questions? What if five hundred agents add Bill from Engineering to their buddy lists, and then twelve of them try to IM poor Bill with questions simultaneously?

Consider also the usage challenges facing an agent armed with an IM client and a buddy list. When the agent is on the phone, do they really want to have to scroll through buddy lists to find the right expert to consult with? Presuming they find one or more available experts, how will they enlist their aid? IM them sequentially, or scatter ten IM’s to ten experts and go with whoever answers first? What if the best way to address the caller's problem is to have the expert join the live call? Finally, consider that a number of contact center administrators prefer that their agents don't use IM clients at all, since internal chat can be a distraction.

While it's true that there are ways to mitigate these kinds of issues, it's also true that presence technology can do much more for customer interactions ... if we broaden our thinking...."

You can read the rest of the article on here on CRMxchange, and I do recommend it.

BBC Moneybox on Speech Recognition for banking

2009-02-09T11:13:00.004Z

I appreciate the BBC Radio's weekly personal finance program 'Moneybox' may not be something that all of my blog readers are aware of, but this week it's been looking at speech recognition and biometrics as a way of authenticating customers.

The article on their website is here and the podcast/recording is here. The reason for the interest is that two of the big UK banks say they are following developments closely and that a major Australian insurer is running the authentication in production. The story is being pushed strongly the vendor concerned, VeCommerce.

I have to feel a little bit of cynicism here. Speech recognition (and it's close cousin, speech biometrics) have been 'the next big thing' more often than I can count. It's not that this isn't good technology (VeCommerce are impressive, as are VoiceVault and a number of others), but adoption has been slow. Part of this, I feel, is that there is a big gap between what the makers of the technology are interested in and what the users/buyers seem to want. This was highlighted in the last Cisco/Dimension Data Speech survey (see here for my blog post on it). The industry tends to talk very technically, while the buyers are much more interested in customer experience. I suspect until this gap narrows, speech biometrics will remain a nice, niche technology having a vigorous debate about how successful it is as an anti-fraud measure.

Fraud in call centres is a big problem (see past posts like "Security, Call Centres and Fraud " from January last year and "Abbey National - did an IVR survey lead to a customer getting locked out their account? "), but I think speech biometrics needs to be much closer to the customer experience before it becomes more widely used.

Do I stay or do I go ...to the Cisco blog site?

2009-01-27T18:25:00.002Z

Well, dear readers, I'd appreciate your views.

My blog seems to be liked and it's been suggested that I could run it from the Cisco blog site at http://blogs.cisco.com/ciscotalk/europeancontactcentre/ . The posts up to 8th August last year have been moved across and I'll try to bring it up to date with the rest of them shortly.

The question is, do you (as my reading public) think this is a good place for the blog? Alternatively should it stay on Google's blogger? I'd appreciate your views, so please do leave comments or otherwise let me know what you think.

First of my contact centre predictions for 2009 happens - Nortel

2009-01-16T19:58:00.004Z

I'm more than slightly surprised by how quickly one of the predictions I posted last week for 2009 has come to pass (see: "My Contact Centre Top 5 Predictions for 2009 ").

Nortel's troubles have been well documented, but it was still a surprise to see the article that Nortel was filing for Bankruptcy in the Toronto Globe & Mail on Wednesday. In many ways it is very sad to see a great company that once led its industry in such trouble. Of course bankruptcy doesn't mean the immediate end of Nortel, but it is hard to see how the company could regain it's once dominant position from where it is now.

The Globe and Mail also has a good article on whether Nortel could have been turned around. I tend to agree with it's view that they probably had the right CEO in Mike Zafivorski, but they needed him earlier than 2005. The blog has looked previously at internal management excellence (see the post: "Does lack of management experience cause most contact centre problems? The perspecitve of the "Puritan Gift"") and it's telling that one of the things damaged Nortel so badly was when it ripped up its internal people development processes in 2000.

There's no pleasure in seeing a great company and once inovative get into so much trouble and my sympathy is with the staff at Nortel.

More 2009 Contact Centre Predictions - Datamonitor

2009-01-13T08:39:00.004Z

My last post ("My Contact Centre Top 5 Predictions for 2009") seems to have had a lot of interest, so thank you to all the readers who liked it.

I was sent today Datamonitor's latest contact centre reports ("2009 Trends to Watch: Contact Center Markets and Technologies", published 22nd Dec) and can recommend it. We have a corporate subscription to Datamonitor and and I've tended to like Datamonitor's research as it's focused more on the market trends and the buyers needs than on the vendors and their products. I also must admit to using them extensively in the past when I was working in consulting and needed insight into sectors of the retail financial services markets.

The report has some very good points to make about potential growth in the contact centre mid-market and around SaaS offerings. It also highlights that the super-large contact centre (so common in financial services) will probably not be driving forward technology spend in the current market conditions in the way that this segment has driven functionality in the past. I'm not sure about Datamonitor's view on the 'rehabilitation of outbound', at least for Europe and the UK. It is true that companies do want to use the outbound phone channel more proactively and better, but most to date have managed to damage their reputation with outbound (See my blog posts: "Barclays, silent calling & we've been here before..." and "Banks criticised by BBC for automated calls "). I fully agree with Datamonitor's view on the importance of business process (see my blog: "My Contact Centre Top 5 Predictions for 2009", though Datamonitor have an interesting and slightly different view) and the potential growth in contact centre analytics. I think they've got some very good insight on those subjects and I've got some interesting things to think about.

In short, I've found this Datamonitor report one of the better analyst assessments of the contact centre market in 2009 and it's well worth buying.

My Contact Centre Top 5 Predictions for 2009

2009-01-06T13:27:00.016Z

This year I thought I'd do something different to welcome the new year and stick my neck out by making some predictions. I'm often asked what I think the contact centre trends will be in 2009, and so I'll put forward what I think is going to happen.

Making predictions is always a risky business and 2009 looks so turbulent that the risks will increase. I'll have a go, but I am fully prepared that I begin 2010 with a blog post on how I got it wrong!

1. IP Contact Centres will continue to grow rapidly.
I'll start off with a relatively uncontroversial prediction. This is backed by most of the market analysts I've seen, but if 2009 proved anything, then it was that uncontroversial, analyst backed predictions could be totally wrong! The most up to date research I've seen was yesterday on Network World (see: "IP call centers will do well despite VoIP slowdown") where Infonetics' newest report had some interesting statistics. Infonetics predict the market for IP Contact Centre as growing 38% in 2008 and continued growth in 2009. The growth in 2009 could be as low as 5%, but that's still pretty rapid for a relatively mature market segment in recession. Forrester and Gartner have higher figures for growth, but I suspect they will revise them downwards as they reassess them in light of the global economic situation. Still, there is steady momentum towards Voice over IP (VoIP) in all aspects of telephony and I expect contact centre to follow the trend.

2. Fixing customer processes will be a major focus in 2009.
To a certain extent all contact centres (whether using TDM or VoIP for the voice traffic) can now do all the basic things needed, namely answer the phone and provide the agent with some information on the caller. These historically have been what technology spend has been focused on, answering the call (which is all the spend on telephony) and getting usable information to the agent (all the spend on CRM).

The problem is that telephony plus CRM has not not fixed most of the issues customers experience. What matters to customers when they call is (1) did I get my problem fixed? and (2) was it a pleasant experience. I've been interested in 2008 to see the big system integrators start to focus on process (see posts like: "System Integrators write interesting things about contact centre for the downturn!" or "Contact Centres, Process and Six Sigma") and much more focus on the customer experience (see posts like: "HSBC creates 250 UK call centre jobs & offshore in decline").

3. A major contact centre technology provider to fail/ be bought from administrators.
I'm not confident enough to predict who, but the press and blogs are providing quite a selection of possibilities. Nortel has had some rough press (see: "Nortel Drops After WSJ Says It’s Exploring Bankruptcy" and "Juniper: the big winner if Nortel goes under?") to pick just two recent articles and their financial situation is not good. There are still Nortel supporters, and I admire the optimism of the article "Don’t write off Nortel yet", but I can't say I share it. I do agree with the point the article makes that Nortel is underestimated and is still a very technically capable company and is likely to have fewer self-generated problems going forward.

Aspect may also have trouble, despite their alliance with Microsoft (see: "VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect"), but they haven't had the focus that Nortel has. They have a strong (and lucrative) product in Aspect Workforce Management but their core call centre offerings have seemed to struggle in recent years.

There is always the chance that Microsoft will buy one of these vendors (or perhaps private equity as with Siemens) but I'm not sure I see other obvious candidates. It's possible that SAP or Oracle might move in, as both have bought small IP contact centre companies in the past (SAP bought Wicom and Oracle bought Telephony@work) but that seems less likely.

4. Offshoring to decline further for front line customer service.I think it's hard to see further offshoring as going to be well received by consumers. Offshoring of call centres was perhaps already in decline for reasons of brand reputation and cost (see posts like: "HSBC creates 250 UK call centre jobs & offshore in decline ") and I think consumers will be very hostile to brands that are seen to be destroying jobs. In the banking industry this will be a particular issue, as with the banks potentially dependent on government, the views of politicians may suddenly be very important.

I think offshore for non-customer facing activities, like IT, may well go offshore more rapidly. The signs are there (see "Lloyds TSB offshores IT, not call centre ") and Barclays has been doing this for a while and I think this is an area where offshore may prosper.

5. Predictions will be wrong!
OK, this is a bit of a cheap one, but there is a serious point. In very turbulent times, the range of possible outcomes for a given set of events increases substantially.

The predictions I've made look the most probable, but I'm prepared to apologise profoundly if against my expectation, 2009 turns out to be the year of TDM offshore contact centres!

Happy Christmas & New Year

2008-12-19T17:23:00.002Z

Just a short post to all readers of the blog to wish them a Happy Christmas & New Year, and to suggest they spare a thought for all of those in contact centres who will be working over the festive period....

System Integrators write interesting things about contact centre for the downturn!

2008-12-17T17:58:00.014Z

The title says it all, but I was pleasantly surprised in the past week to see that both Accenture and IBM had written some interesting white papers on contact centre. I'm often deluged by vendor whitepapers but these are usually from the smaller niche product vendors. It's quite nice instead to see something from the big boys.

I was sent the IBM whitepaper via the Call Centres.net website. Call Centres.net is an Australian and APAC focused site, but the content is good and often worth comparing with what we see in the European market. The site is run by Dr. Catriona Wallace, one of APAC's leading authorities on call centres and she has a very good blog that's well worth reading.

What I found interesting about the IBM whitepaper was that it focuses on the customer service process. You can download the whitepaper here , as I thought that a focus on the end to end processes was one of the things that too many contact centres don't worry about. To be sure there's always a focus on the applications, but less often is there a good understanding of how the customer process flows between those applications. This is important, as process is often a greater determinant of customer experience than the capabilities of any application. I appreciate that a system integrator with a portfolio of SOA offerings might be have a vested interest here, but it's still a good study and applicable outside of the sample of Australian contact centres it studied.

The Accenture study looks at the impact of poor customer service. The idea that poor customer service leads to loss of customers and loss of revenue makes sense but has been challenging to prove. Their findings are that,

"...Service again ranked above price as a global driver of customer churn, according to Accenture’s fourth annual study on customer service satisfaction, titled “High Performance in the Age of Customer Centricity.”

The study is based on a survey of more than 4,100 consumers in eight countries across five continents. Through the survey, consumers provided feedback about customer service across the full range of customer service channels, including use of the telephone, e-mail, corporate websites, mail, online chat and on-premise services.

In total, two-thirds (67 percent) of respondents reported moving their business to other companies as a result of poor service in a variety of industry sectors, up from 59 percent of respondents in last year’s survey. Underscoring the sharp increase in consumers switching business providers is an overall erosion of customer loyalty. Half (50 percent) of respondents in this year’s survey reported that they switched providers in multiple industry sectors during the year, taking an average of $4,000 worth of business with them, by their own estimate, each time they took business elsewhere."

That service is more important than price for customer retention should come as no surprise, but it is nice to have experience supported by research.

The challenge is what this means for business. It seems to me that there is a strong case being made here that investing in customer service in the downturn is likely to be more profitable than an across the board cost cutting program. I found it interesting that outsourcing was (at least in the IBM study) only one way of fixing service issues and that approaching outsourcing from a purely cost reduction point of view was likely to fail. Outsourcing to fix process problems (either BPO or BTO) seemed more likely to succeed and the Accenture study provides the evidence for how that might show up on the balance sheet.

Finding good news in contact centres

2008-12-08T09:42:00.005Z

I know it's boring if I begin every post with a regret that I haven't had much time to blog, but it's true and it's why the posting frequency has dropped so much.

The news these past few weeks has been particularly gloomy, so I thought I'd look for something more cheery than most of the economic reporting.

The first story that caught my eye was "Call centre leads to 500 new jobs" on the BBC. Amidst all the gloom (and persistent stories of offshoring), comes the news that an Indian telecommunications firm, Tech Mahindra, is opening a 500 seat call centre in the North East of England. Very good news for that part of England, as that is the region where the failed bank Northern Rock was located and so there are good contact centre staff to be had there. It's also an illustration that offshoring was only ever sensible when there was an effective labour arbitrage to make it worth while. I suspect also that it supports the views of Sramana Mitra and her controversial article "The Coming Death Of Indian Outsourcing" in Forbes (covered on this blog at: "Indian Outsourcing, is it in decline? "). In some ways a decline in outsourcing is probably a good thing for Indians as it means that the country is getting richer and adding more value than just competing on cost.

Another story I liked was in Finextra and was "Bank of Montreal plans move to green call centre". In its own quiet way it is a useful corrective to the popular/media view that all banks are in meltdown. I liked Bank of Montreal when I worked with them (as I also liked Scotiabank) and it's good to see that they're both being green and managing to keep their contact centre going.

Congratulations to Cisco's own contact centre team

2008-11-28T17:33:00.005Z

I've been finding it really hard to get the time to blog lately. Some of this has just been the amount of travel. It's not been the sort of long-haul air travel that really makes things difficult, just the general travel you get when you have a customer facing job.

Fortunately, one of the reasons I don't have more travel is the role played by Cisco's contact centre (called the CIN - Customer Interaction Network). Although we're known for having a contact centre product, we're less well known for having a very capable multi-media, globally integrated contact centre for our own customer service and support operations.

It was therefore very good to see our contact centre team recognised at on the 18th and 19th November, at the UK's Customer Contact Association (CCA) annual convention in Edinburgh. Cisco was won the Best Organisational Influence category, which is aimed at recognising organisations that have demonstrated excellence in understanding and responding to customer needs through innovative measurement methods.

Obviously we're delighted with this recognition and it's very encouraging to see that how we use our won products is regarded as worth recognising within the industry.

Abbey National - did an IVR survey lead to a customer getting locked out their account?

2008-10-30T07:55:00.008Z

This blog sometimes flirts with the idea of news, rather than just comment, and I couldn't resist this story. I saw it today in the Scotsman (though it's also more detail here in the Daily Mail).

In brief a Mr. George Bates, a 23 year old Abbey National customer, phoned his bank to arrange an overdraft. He claims to have found that the operator was rude, unhelpful and with a heavy Asian accent that was difficult to understand, so at the end of the call he used the automated post-call survey to register his displeasure. A lot of banks use IVRs (Interactive Voice Response Systems) for this as it suits the "push 1 for...., push 2 for...." type of menu that an IVR provides. Anyway, Mr. Bates pushed ones and twos for low scores and finished his call.

When he called back the next day his problems began. He couldn't access the phone bank with his password, the ATM swallowed his card and when he got into his branch he found his identity had been changed from the 23 year old Bristol carpenter he is, to that of a 33 year old Ugandan divorcee. His direct debits had also been cancelled and he was incurring bank charges for missed payments. Abbey have now apologised and offered £200 compensation, but Mr. Bates is still unhappy.

There are some lessons from this story worth pondering.

The first is what price does a bank place on its reputation? I've blogged on this before (see: "Are call centres so bad they hinder business?" or "Barclays, silent calling & we've been here before... "), but contact centres can damage an organisation's reputation very quickly. It seems a mystery that such an important part of a customer's experience of an organisation should be managed as a cost centre and yet other functions that drive reputation and brand (e.g. marketing or PR) should be seen as investments or necessary expense.

The second is that while it's admirable that agents should be given continuous feedback on their performance, they really should not be able to take revenge on customers who score them poorly. There's a whole set of issues here, from the granularity of the feedback given to agents to the level of access to customer data that agents have. Supervision, audit trails and analytics might also be points to think of here in terms of how organisations control agent behaviour.

The third and final point is that the public do not much like offshore contact centres. This is an image that the offshore industry has acquired and has not managed to shake off. I'm sure that had a British call centre worker done this the story would have been much less newsworthy, but as it's an Indian call centre (and Abbey have five UK call centres and only two Indian ones) this fits a lot of popular myths about the offshoring industry.

There may be a view that "all publicity is good publicity" (and you certainly couldn't buy the press coverage this story is getting), but I suspect that Abbey will want to change the way it runs its contact centres as they will not want their reputation damaged in a credit crunch that has hurt the reputation of UK banking so much.

Are call centres so bad they hinder business?

2008-10-22T20:41:00.006+01:00

I was struck today by an advertisement for Swiftcover.com that I saw from the train. I know customers often don't like call centres (especially offshore ones), but this advertisement seemed to be targeted at those allergic to the whole idea of talking.

Now Swiftcover.com is part of Axa, so this is not an organization without call centre expertise. Nor is it strictly a web only player, as they have been very innovative about developing a mobile phone channel for insurance sales. Clearly there is a demographic out there who hate the idea of call centres so much that they'd rather use the web.
To a certain extent poor experiences from call centres are to blame, but that may not be the whole story. One big change in the retail insurance market is the rise of web aggregators, such as confused.com. These players don't have contact centres either, but they do pull together large chunks of the insurance market in their comparison tables, and make it very hard for insurers to differentiate themselves by brand. I would suspect that although swiftcover.com may be targeting a demographic less than keen on call centres, they are also trying to drive traffic direct to their website and not have a comparison site in the way.
Of course contact centres still have a major role to play, doing what they are good at. Web sites are ideal for simple or generic quotes. Complex matters, exceptions and assessments of options are still done better as a discussion with a person. For that the contact centre is ideal as it allows an insurance agent to cover business without geographic restriction. Using a human contact centre agent as a data entry mechanism into the quotes system (as some insurance contact centres have done) has never been a good use of resources. Skilled advice at the end of the telephone is extremely valuable and it is there that contact centres can help companies differentiate themselves and their brand in an increasingly competitive market.

Despite the credit crunch, still call centre growth at Barclays

2008-10-14T16:31:00.004+01:00

An interesting story on Finextra that Barclays are to create over 200 new call centre jobs in Liverpool.

A lot of reasons why this is interesting. On is that with the credit crunch it's good to see that the world hasn't ended and that banks are still going about (some) of their usual business. The other aspect that I thought interesting is that these are primarily outbound agents.

The blog looked at the problems Barclays has been having with outbound in my last post (see "Barclays, silent calling & we've been here before... ") and I suspect that Barclays was determined to get this fixed. I know in my last post I was dubious about how important reputational risk was. I have revised that judgement, and I'd now say 'reputational risk is really important if you upset voters and there is a chance the government may become your largest shareholder'. I know Barclays has so far not needed any assistance from the UK government, but I can see that it would be tactful (as well as good business) not to fight with Ofcom or any other government body in the near future....

Barclays, silent calling & we've been here before...

2008-09-27T22:35:00.004+01:00

So Barclays, or at least Barclaycard, have just been fined the maximum Ofcom (the UK communications regulator) can manage for making silent outbound calls. The story is well covered here on Finextra.

What is perhaps more surprising is that the maximum fine is £50,000 and that even in a credit crunch this is not going to inconvenience Barclays hugely. There is the argument of reputational damage being a punishment and the media have done well highlighting the story (see "Regulators stuck in a fine mess" in the Times today, for example for really hostile coverage of Barclays) or BBC Business News leading with the story on the day the fine was announced.

Unfortunately I don't believe that reputational risk alone is enough. Finextra mentions that Abbey National, Complete Credit Management and Carphone Warehouse have all been fined for breaching the silent calls rule and that's just for starters. The frequency of these stories of outbound calling making life painful for consumers and damaging brand suggests that reputational risk isn't working.

In July I wrote about the BBC highlighting the use outbound calling by UK banks for debt recovery ("Banks criticised by BBC for automated calls "). It might be an effective way of collecting debt (I've got no evidence one way or the other) but even if it does little for your reputation, the impact of the fine seems low compared to the potential value of a recovered debt.

I've blogged a lot on outbound as it's the area that makes people most aware of and most dislike call centres. As a result, I suspect that outbound calling in the UK is an industry that will soon be dead. The details are in posts like: "Abbey National fined £30,000 by Ofcom & the future of Outbound in Financial Services" or "Outbound, an explanation of the technology" and "Outbound - industry reputation, branding and regulation", but from the feedback I've had, the irritation outbound causes is still not well understood in the industry and the industry is not adapting.

This may though be irrelevant as the number of consumers registering with the Telephone Preference Service suggests that consumers are making their views clear and are making themselves increasingly difficult to reach.

UK Contact Centre Expo Day 2

2008-09-17T21:57:00.006+01:00

It was a good day in Birmingham today at the UK Contact Centre Expo.

My impression was that this year's Contact Centre Expo was smaller than last year's, but it was still a good show. I got very positive feedback on the presentations at the Cisco stand.

We had some of our partners; JAMIP, British Telecom, Cable and Wireless and Dimension Data presenting on how they use the Cisco Contact Centre portfolio. These were short, punchy ten minute presentations and as I say, they seemed to be well received by the audience. It generated a decent number of leads, so that is always good news.

Otherwise, there were a few interesting things at the show. I was interested in the Teleopti stand. I've blogged on them before (see "Workforce Management - Part 2 Vendor Selection
"), as their one of the interesting European Workforce Optimisation vendors. One of the issues with workforce management tools is that one size (American) does not fit all and Teleopti were stressing that their solution had "change management with union involvement, full support for European labour laws, different types of employment and annual hours of work". I'm not sure what Teleopti is like to use, but it does seem to be addressing a significant area for European contact centres.

It's also interesting to see who are the offshore providers at the show. This year Bangladesh had a big stand as did Egypt. I was interested to learn more about Bangladesh as I've not seen them before. Egypt had a very good stand and seemed an interesting option. For the French market there has always been North Africa as a relatively near pool of lower cost language skills (see the post: "Offshoring and mainland Europe "), so it will be interesting to see if Egypt could fulfill that role for the English speaking market.

Otherwise I was interested to see the Contact Babel stand. I'm going to be interested to see their research as it looked like it had a lot of good detail on the state of the UK contact centre market.

All in all, a profitable day.

UK Call Centre Expo

2008-09-16T09:21:00.004+01:00

Today the blog is going to be up to the minute and topical.

I know the blog normally comments on things at leisure, and quite a lot after the event sometimes, but today and tomorrow is the UK Contact Centre Expo in Birmingham.

I will be there tomorrow as I find it one of the most useful shows for the UK and Irish market. There's always a danger at these shows that it ends up with vendor talking to vendor with perhaps the odd consultant in the mix, rather than being relevant to the end users.

I tend to find that although there's a bit of that at the UK Contact Centre Expo, it's one of the better shows for providing some value. The Expo's program tomorrow, for example, has some good sessions on customer strategy and workplace culture. Most importantly, they have real contact centre managers presenting on their strategies and experiences. There will also be a chance to see some of the latest trends in offshoring, outsourcing and so on.

I'm very hopeful tomorrow will be a good day and looking forward to it.

CRM - a way of banks gaining business in a recession?

2008-09-05T13:46:00.005+01:00

I'm always suspicious of vendor surveys but this survey from SAP, reported on Finextra, rather caught my eye. It's entitled "European and Middle Eastern banks look to invest in CRM" and focuses on how banks are focusing on CRM to differentiate themselves from the competition.

To a certain extent this is obvious. It's hard to compete on interest rates alone, and most banks don't want to be in the position where they do. Brand is another differentiator, but a great brand with lousy customer service is hardly a way of retaining customers. Given the cost of customer acquisition and the that banks know a lot about their existing customers, it makes sense to manage the relationship better to get more value from your existing customers.

Simply managing a customers relationship well has long been a selling point of banks like HSBC's First Direct operation (see post: "The contact centre agent experience - First Direct" and "HSBC creates 250 UK call centre jobs & offshore in decline"). What's always surprised me is that while bank's have talked a lot about the importance of the customer relationship, very few have really focused on it. The report does highlight some of the challenges but I suspect that these are going to get increasing focus.

One of the problems with CRM applications in banking historically has been that it has been seen as a call centre application (maybe rolled out to branch sometimes) and as a solution in its own right. Of course the reality is that the application is only one part of the solution and the processes that go round it and the quality of the agents that use it are perhaps more important. Perhaps even more important is what the CRM application is integrated to. For example, linking CRM with a marketing spend tracker can provide all sorts of insight as to how effective marketing is, but is rarely done.

I suspect that as the economic climate gets tougher, the banks that know their customers better will be able to make better lending decisions with what credit they have. They will also be able to target their most profitable customers most effectively. The call centre is key here as it is likely to be a strong determiner of the bank's brand perception, its ability to reach its customer base and its ability to take advantage of sales opportunities when they arrive.

Effectiveness of CRM as a measure of a bank's future success? Well, there are probably dafter metrics floating around at the moment, and I wouldn't be surprised if we see a strong correlation.

I'm back.... and there's lots to post on but so little time!

2008-09-04T12:03:00.006+01:00

I'm back & posting and apologies for the gap.

I did feel that if I was going to have a vacation it should be a proper one by European standards. I know my US colleagues get by on only a few days per year, but I do think a proper break is at least two weeks and that more is usually necessary to fully recharge batteries.

There is of a considerable irony here. I'm talking about extensive holidays, but most contact centres have to work at least shifts and many work 24x7 for nearly 52 weeks a year. For agents on predominately low wages, even in Europe, holidays are not particularly generous. I've touched on this a little before (in posts like "Is cost a contact centre issue or a symptom?"), but I do think there's a lot more to be said about service quality and the value placed on agents.

It's certainly a topic of CEO relevance (I had a brief post on "CEOs of BT, the Royal Mail and Corel discuss telephone customer service" back in June) and as business conditions get tougher I expect to see more focus on customer service as a differentiator. Hopefully we won't see pure cost cutting at the expense of the contact centre and future business, but I suspect it will depend on how competitive markets are.

I was also interested in a couple of stories from Australia. While obviously not a core focus of a European blog, the Australian market is useful as an indicator of some trends that might affect Europe. Call Centres.net had a good story on "Staff stability lures centres into suburbs" describing how contact centres were moving out of the CBD in order to reduce rent and (more importantly) increase workforce stability. It's interesting that in Europe this is a trend I would not expect to see. Here I think we will either have the remote location (for very low cost) or the city centre location (for large pools of labour with public transport links). I discussed some of this in the post "City Centre Call Centers - A European quirk?" but I think it may be worth a revisit as I didn't really consider suburbs vs. city centre as an issue.

There's lots more to talk about, like the first customer shipment of Cisco's new Contact Centre Enterprise release 7.5, which has some interesting new capabilities for distributing call centre functionality around the enterprise. Calabrio also announced compliance with Avaya contact centre, again an interesting move. I will try to cover all these over the coming weeks.

The blog is on vacation for two weeks

2008-08-01T19:55:00.002+01:00

I have to apologise about the frequency of posting over the last few weeks. Year end has left me very little time to blog and the posting has not been as often as I would like.

This is a European blog and this is August, so I'm off on vacation like most of the rest of Europe.

I will be back by late August and I expect posting to resume then at a much higher frequency.

It's time again for the Cisco/ Dimension Data Speech Survey

2008-07-23T22:27:00.003+01:00

I thought last week that I'd get more time to blog this week. Looks like I was wrong. I'm still planning on writing this post on homeshoring, but it may be tomorrow while I'm waiting at the airport before I get the chance.

In the meantime, it's worth mentioning that it's time again for the Cisco/ Dimension Data Speech Survey. This got lots of interest last time round (see my past post: Dimension Data/ Cisco Speech survey ) and the results were widely viewed webinar on CRMxchange (still available for viewing when I checked today). The survey highlighted the difference between what vendors think and consumers think of speech automation. Vendors, for example, tend to underestimate why consumers will accept automation (such as to avoid offshore). They also overestimate things like the ability of speech automation to partially meet callers needs and underestimate its ability to meet all needs for some callers.

If you're interested in participating, please do, and you can take the survey here. Results will be made available to all those who participate.

Cisco on customer interaction - homeshoring post to follow

2008-07-15T12:19:00.005+01:00

I was going to write an analytical and thoughtful post on homeshoring. This is the emerging trend of basing contact centre agents at home, rather than at an office or sending the work overseas. This has great attractions for employers who need contact centres working split shifts or need to access labour that can't necessarily commute to an office.

Unfortunately, I haven't really had time (hence the recent gap in posting). So this great piece on homeshoring may come tomorrow or even Thursday. In the meantime, Cisco has posted up a couple of videos on customer management on their 'Techwise TV' site and they're worth a look. I know 'Techwise TV' is more noted for it's offerings on switching, routing and networks but it's good to see the focus shifting onto the customer and business.

Customer Service:
From Calls to Contacts

Each video is about 60 mins long and you need to register to see them. The one I've highlighted will be shown on July 24th and there is also a customer experience webcast from 2006 that sets out some of the basics.

Channel in Financial Services

2008-07-02T15:16:00.007+01:00

One blog I've been reading lately is Dr. Catriona Wallace's blog (Your Call) that covers the Asia-Pacific contact centre market.

She had a good post on 24th June looking at the consumer use of channels in Australian and New Zealand banking. Her research suggests that at least for Australia and New Zealand:

"... there are distinct differences between the BFI consumers and consumers from other industry verticals. For example, there is almost equal preference for BFI consumers to use the internet as first channel of preference as their level of preference to speak to a live attendant. In all other industry verticals the primary preference is to speak to a live attendant. About 9 in 10 BFI consumers are happy to use self service technology for simple transactions and even 4 in 10 are happy to use self-service technology for complex transactions. We just don't see this level of orientation around consumer self-service in other verticals."

She also highlights how demographics like gender and age also have a big impact on how consumers choose channels when dealing with their financial services provider.

I feel it is also well worth looking at is culture when looking at consumer's choice of channel. In Europe I believe channel preference is driven as much by culture as it is by vertical or by demographics. The last very detailed research I've seen on the subject was Forrester writing in 2004, but the differences are clear.

Asked which channel consumers would use to first contact their bank for a service issue, there were huge contrasts between countries. In the UK 72% of customers would use the telephone channel as their first option compared to only 26% of Italians picking up the phone. Branch showed a similar degree of huge variation, 91% of Spanish would go to a branch as their first action but only 59% of Dutch would go. However, 15% of Dutch would e-mail their bank as their first action (remember this was in 2004, today it's probably higher).

These cultural differences highlight how different the role of the contact centre can be. What in one country is a strategic channel for voice traffic in another is a minor channel for e-mail or remote support.

The acceptance of self-service in Financial Services is also interesting. I've posted previously on the Dimension Data/ Cisco Speech survey but this has focused only on speech acceptance for English speaking countries (including Australia and New Zealand). It might be interesting to extend that and see if consumer acceptance of self-service extends to other cultures. Alternatively, it may be that a lot of people phone up to check their bank balance and their priority is to get the answer quickly rather than from a human.

The one thing that I would stress is that despite cultural differences, is that as a vertical financial services has the most complex set of consumer channel usage however the consumers choose to use those channels.

A Friday video - Cisco's call centre of the future

2008-06-27T08:29:00.006+01:00

My previous videos have been well received (see "Embedded Call Centre Video" and "For a Friday - Contact Centre, video and the call centre movie") so I suspect that it's time for another one. It's also Friday and that's a good enough reason for a less serious post.

I was very interested to see that one of Cisco's promotional videos is up on YouTube. This is n illustration of Cisco's vision of what call centre could be: video enabled, integrated around the enterprise, seamless inbound and outbound and full multi-media.

In fact, the view from one of the experts in Cisco's product house is that almost all of this contact centre vision could be achieved today (though not all of it are yet products), give or take the robot dog.....

HSBC creates 250 UK call centre jobs & offshore in decline

2008-06-25T10:28:00.008+01:00

After a week off sick there's been a lot to blog on.

I was interested in the Finextra story "HSBC creates 250 call centre jobs". The interesting thing for me is that these are onshore jobs. HSBC has always had onshore operations but has also been one of the firms that has pushed call centre jobs to India. The onshore operations have tended to focus on high quality customer service (see past posts like: "The contact centre agent experience - First Direct") whereas it's always been my suspicion that cost is the primary motivation for the Indian operation.

I'm not against either cost saving or offshore, I just have strong reservations that India for lowest possible cost is a sensible customer service strategy. If offshore is an appropriate option, I've tended to look at South Africa ("Offshore - why I would go for South Africa over India"). I know there are issues with South Africa as well (SA Telecom and crime being two of the big ones), but the cost savings and availability of English are strong factors in that locations favour.

HSBC is also just part of a larger trend back onshore. Earlier this month Orange announced that it was moving 500 call centre jobs back to the UK from India, but at the same time was shedding 450 onshore administrative jobs. This is very similar to what Lloyds TSB did last month, when it decided to offshore its IT rather than its customer facing operations (I covered the story here on the blog or here on Finextra).

In short, I think the trend for customer service to go offshore has almost come to an end but administration, back-office and IT might all go offshore to a much greater extent.

CEOs of BT, the Royal Mail and Corel discuss telephone customer service

2008-06-20T14:03:00.005+01:00

I have tonsillitis this week and this is the first day I've really been able to get anything done. It also means that my post the week will be short.

What I have been doing while ill is listening to the radio. There was a very good discussion on customer service earlier this week on BBC Radio 4's business program "The Bottom Line".

What I found interesting was that it had the CEOs of two of the UK's biggest company's, British Telecom and Royal Mail (both of whom who have customer service issues). In the discussion both CEOs wanted to focus on concepts like 'customer lifecycle' and 'customer experience' (not that they used those terms), but they kept being brought back to the issue of how they provided basic telephone service.

Not rocket science, but further proof of the importance of doing the contact centre basics right and worth a listen. You can download the podcast here.

Aviva (Norwich Union) and the offshore market

2008-06-09T11:53:00.004+01:00

The decision of Aviva (Norwich Union) to cut 1,800 jobs is a story making most of the national press and Finextra this morning.

This is on top of the restructuring announced in 2006, which would shed 4,000 UK jobs. Of these, 1,000 were call centre workers whose roles would be replaced by offshore call centres.

Interestingly, this time it is not the call centre that is being expressly targeted as a cost centre. For starters, 500 of the job losses announce this morning are in IT. This to me seems to be part of the trend that saw Lloyds TSB a few weeks ago offshore its IT rather than its customer facing operations (I covered the story here on the blog or here on Finextra).

My impression is that the need for high quality customer service is being recognised as a differentiator while the focus on cost is shifting to more back office areas. In UK insurance, I suspect also that the arrival of the web insurance aggregators (confused.com , go compare.com, etc...) has really hit volumes and margins in the direct web channel. By contrast, the telephone channel is less affected by these new players and may be a way for insurers to preserve margin and brand.

It may also be the time that the contact centre gets recognition in the wider enterprise for its ability to deal direct with customers and stops being a cost centre.

Merchants Contact Centre Benchmarking study for 2008

2008-06-09T11:09:00.007+01:00

One report that it always of interest to managers of customer facing operations is the annual Merchants/ Dimension Data contact centre benchmarking report.

This year's has just been released for download (link here) and the published version will be available at the end of June.

There are two big points of interest to me. The first is that now 31% of all inbound transactions are completed by self-service. This is primarily IVR (15.5% of the transactions), followed by web self service (13.7%) with speech self-service and web co-browsing with an agent making up the balance. Ten years ago, 90% of transactions required an agent to complete, so this represents a significant cost improvement.

The second is that CRM systems have not delivered some basic functions. Ten years ago the benchmarking study found that 39% of organisations had a single view of customer for the agent to work with, today the figure is 34%, despite massive subsequent investment in CRM. This will not come as a surprise to anyone who has dealt with a bank recently, but it is a damning statement on the performance of CRM.

The self-service metrics, though are a great cause of hope. Although IVR and its menus of "press 1 for...., press 2 for...." are widely hated if done badly, there are signs of it being done really well. I was in a presentation from Lloyds TSB a few weeks ago and they reported that their self-service channel regularly achieved very high customer satisfaction scores. The reasons for this is that it is well designed, does what it intends to do well and doesn't try to unduly force customers to use it for complex transactions. It can also be used for a simple post-call survey (the sort that takes 15 seconds so the survey doesn't cause customer dissatisfaction itself), which gives the bank a near real-time view of how customers feel about that interaction.

Interesting to see that despite the hype, it may be IVR and speech self-service that are bringing benefits while CRM is lagging.

Phone Banking vs Facebook banking

2008-06-05T07:08:00.007+01:00

I was very interested to see two good stories on Finextra today.

The first was that around half of Facebook users want to be able to bank through Facebook. The second was that 91% of British adults had concerns about fraud on their phone accessible bank accounts.

It seems to me a pretty bizarre set of contradictions. Facebook is a very nice application, but I'm pretty dubious that banking through it is a good idea. There are issues over some of the Financial Services advertising (see the BBC "Facebook users warned about ads") and I'm not convinced that data privacy issues are fully resolved, or in line with the standards set by banks (again the BBC with "Facebook 'violates privacy laws'" and "Facebook faces privacy questions"). It may be that as Facebook matures these issues will be resolved to everyone's satisfaction, but I know many remain dubious about entrusting their details to an organisation that has already had to apologise for how it has used them.

By contrast voice technology is far more mature and security concerns should be on a different level. There are weaknesses but they are more to do with processes than the underlying technology. A good example was the case I covered at Barclays (see "Security, Call Centres and Fraud") where there was nothing wrong with the technology, but the processes were not as robust as needed to be against identity theft. At this point (although the research is funded by Nuance a speech technology vendor) I'm inclined to agree with the article that speech recognition and biometrics could make a difference where pass words have been stolen or an identity otherwise compromised. Certainly it had the potential to make a difference in the Barclays case.

The scary thing about Facebook is that if a Facebook banking application were to be compromised, the chances are that the fraudsters would have access to so much personal information that any future identity recovery could be very difficult. By contrast the telephone channel at least offers the prospect that even if your identity was stolen you would only be authenticated by who you are, not what you know.

Banks criticised by BBC for automated calls

2008-06-03T00:46:00.008+01:00

I'm working in San Diego this week, but over the weekend I was sent an interesting story.

The BBC Radio Money Box program has been investigating the use of automated outbound calling by UK banks to chase bad debts.

Some consumers claim that this had led to them receiving up to eight calls a day and Privacy International is arguing that this potentially constitutes harrassment. I can see how this is especially frustrating if the calls are chasing a family member no longer resident at that address.

Lloyds TSB, Natwest/ Royal Bank of Scotland and Halifax Bank of Scotland all use these systems to some degree but say they would not call that often. They say they follow the guidelines laid down by Ofcom, the UK communications regulator and (in the example of Lloyds TSB) they would not expect to call more than perhaps four times and not for more than four days in a row.

To me, this just seems another case of the bank's shooting themselves in the foot. I wrote about the ineffectiveness and decline of outbound calling last week ("Further thoughts on outbound in the UK.....") and while automating the calls might make it cheaper, it hardly makes it more popular. This only adds to thoughts I've had in posts like: "Abbey National fined £30,000 by Ofcom & the future of Outbound in Financial Services" that outbound calling is gets the industry a bad name.

I appreciate fully that banks need to chase bad debts (and some consumers appreciate reminders). However with Ofcom looking to release new, almost certainly tighter, regulations on these outbound systems in June, this may not be the best time for the banks to have poor public relations.

P.S. If any reader requires a guide to call centre outbound technology, this past post provides it: "Outbound, an explanation of the technology"

P.P.S.

From feedback, I realise I probably didn't set out the two big problems with this form of outbound clearly enough.

The first problem was reasonably well stated, that multiple calls to an individual may construe harassment.

The second, slightly more subtle point, is that a phone number doesn't necessarily map to an individual. It's quite easy to think of scenario where two parents have children either living at home or using the home address while they are at university. In these circumstances, potentially informing whoever answers the phone that another family member has a credit problem strikes me as a significant breach of privacy.

Software archaeology, financial services and the contact centre

2008-05-30T14:18:00.010+01:00

There's an interesting (and brief) post on Grady Booch's IBM blog that got me thinking. Grady Booch, for those unfamiliar with him, is an IBM's Chief Scientist for Software Research but perhaps more importantly developed UML (Unified Modelling Language) and was very influential in the development of Object Orientated programming. I've seen him through my time at IBM and through the BCS (British Computer Society) and I find he always has something interesting to say on IT.

His particular post this week was on the first signs that 'software archaeology' is emerging as a discipline. I think this is long overdue as alongside Enterprise Architecture, management of legacy software is one of the biggest challenges in modern IT.

I've met this challenge regularly when working with financial services customers and it's been well documented (see Silicon.com on the subject last year). The financial services industry was (and is) a sector that understands how IT can bring efficiency and so adopted automation early on. The problem is that today this can mean an environment of very mixed and some quite elderly systems. What makes this challenging is that as business requirements change, an elderly system than ran quietly on its own in a corner might now need to make it's data available to other systems. Even more challengingly, in an SOA type of architecture it may not be easy to predict which combinations of systems they might be.

It's at this point that the project team usually discover that the documentation for the legacy system is incomplete and that most of those in the organisation who could have helped fill in the gaps have taken early retirement. This means that ripping it out and replacing it is not possible. One option is to bring back these retirees as consultants but this expensive and often not practical. The other emerging option is to do some software archaeology to understand what processes and dependencies are actually in the legacy code.

This has been one of the major challenges I've found in the financial services contact centre. The agents, often young or from a non-IT background, expect either a Microsoft Windows type desktop or a shiny, new Facebook style web 2.0 interface. Instead, they find themselves learning from scratch how to deal with OS2 or 3270 terminals and green screens. This has big impacts on agent productivity and training costs. It's also a long way from the type of technology I was blogging on in: "The future of contact centre - Google, Salesforce, Skype & Microsoft".

Unfortunately, though, if the business logic for something like a life insurance policy is embedded in legacy code, and there is no documentation, then that system has to be kept running. As long as there are customers who could make claims (and that's potentially a 30+ year horizon for life insurance), then the organisation has to be able to manage them under the Ts&Cs of the policy and that means keeping the system as it is as there is no other truly reliable source of the information.

It may not be an expected outcome of software archaeology, but one of the big benefits it could bring is for the call centre agent in financial services. A more easily integrated desktop and presentation layer would help agents find the information they need far more easily. I've seen agents in one bank running three monitors each (and having to type out each piece of information the customer gave them three times to get it into into each system) because they couldn't integrate the various system interfaces.

Software archaeology may initially be focused on the back-end and legacy, but could become very important for the contact centre.

Further thoughts on outbound in the UK.....

2008-05-27T12:25:00.009+01:00

I'm back from a week's holiday today and I'm catching up on all the news while I've been away.

On article that caught my attention was from the Times on 17th May. The business columnist Sathnam Sanghera had a rather good full page article on outbound call centres.

What I found interesting about it was that so much on call centres is written as the call centre industry talking to itself. There's nothing wrong with that (this blog does it quite a bit), but an outsiders perspective can be a necessary wake up call.

The article describes how he went to a training course for outbound telephone sales agents. A familiar enough idea for those in the call centre industry, but a strange world to outsiders. As a business person, (and one who has hated receiving cold calls) Sathnam was amazed that the industry was viable, writing:

"According to a survey published by the Direct Marketing Association last year, telemarketing accounted for just 5.5 per cent of all UK direct marketing - a decrease from 7.9 per cent in 2005.

Moreover, the hit rate for this ever-shrinking band of telemarketers is tiny. The survey reported that only 3.5 per cent of people have ever responded positively to a telemarketing call, while one Xerox salesman recently interviewed in a US newspaper said that he made 55 cold calls a day which resulted in one sale a week - a success rate of 0.36 per cent.

In other words, the industry is on the brink of dying, and is being kept alive only by the possibility of a rare positive response.... "

This confirms some of my suspicions, that badly done outbound calls have damaged the industry badly. I've written a little on this before in posts like: "Abbey National fined £30,000 by Ofcom & the future of Outbound in Financial Services" or "Outbound, an explanation of the technology" and "Outbound - industry reputation, branding and regulation". From the feedback I've had, the irritation outbound causes is still not well understood in the industry, though the number of consumers registering with the Telephone Preference Service suggests that consumers are making their views clear.

Of course for some industries, other issues will lead to the death of outbound cold calling. For example, in this age of identity theft it is unlikely that many consumers will want do business with a cold call that claims to be from their bank and wants to the consumer to provide information to verify their identity.

Outbound by consent (e.g. "let me call you back at a convenient time") may have a strong future, especially in Financial Services, but I suspect the Times is right and outbound as cold calling is dying.

Lloyds TSB offshores IT, not call centre

2008-05-16T13:35:00.004+01:00

An interesting article on Finextra about Lloyds TSB offshoring 450 IT jobs.

What it makes it interesting is that Lloyds TSB has opted not just to keep its contact centres onshore, but create new contact centre jobs onshore.

I've covered this in past posts like "Onshore still growing - Lloyds TSB" but it makes clear that if customer service is important, then onshore has a lot of attractions. Interestingly, I was in a presentation from a senior Lloyds manager on Wednesday and he was explaining that the contact centre (especially the self-service part) is very well regarded by their customers.

The bigger issue here is whether you view contact centre as a cost or part of your brand. I've talked about this before (e.g. "Is cost a contact centre issue or a symptom?"), but it's an issue that still isn't well understood. My view is that if part of your organisation is going to interact with customers regularly and represent you to them, then managing that part as a cost centre is not sensible. If consumers form their impression of you from direct experience, then vast amounts of marketing spend will struggle to overcome that.

The British Gas, the utility industry, customer service and consultants

2008-05-15T13:21:00.007+01:00

I've been really struggling to get time to blog this week, which is a pity when there has been so much to comment on.

The blog has looked at problems in the utility industry before (see posts like: "Are utility companies really the worst call centres?") , so I was most interested to read in the Times on Monday. There one of the lead business articles was that "British Gas fights Accenture over billing". British Gas has been notorious in the UK for it's customer service issues, (see for example: 'British Gas's 29th appearance on BBC Watchdog, October 2006'), so it is interesting to see that they regard Accenture as responsible.

The Times explains further that:

"Centrica [the parent company of British Gas] hired Accenture to provide the new billing system seven years ago.

It was to bring together the records of British Gas's 12.5million gas and electricity customers on to one platform capable of handling 250,000 meter readings and 200,000 bills a day.

The £317million fee would come from the £397million of savings that British Gas expected to obtain from the project.

Centrica claims that, after a number of glitches, in March 2006 Accenture guaranteed a software upgrade that would work. Centrica argues that, instead, the system continued to struggle and generated a high level of “exceptions” - billing issues that required manual intervention.

Centrica also claims that Accenture failed to provide adequate computer hardware and did not integrate the system properly. The energy supplier formally notified Accenture that it was in breach of contract in February 2007.

A British Gas spokesman said: “An independent analysis of the billing system has concluded that Accenture was responsible for fundamental errors in the design and implementation of the system. British Gas has been left with no option but to pursue legal redress against Accenture.”

In the past year, since British Gas fixed the system itself, complaints to Energywatch about the supplier have fallen 85 per cent, the spokesman said."

I should make clear that Accenture deny the allegations strongly, saying in the Times:

"Accenture vowed yesterday to fight its corner, stating: “We are confident, based on the facts of the situation, that this claim is baseless and without merit. Centrica is only trying to shift the blame for a situation it created.” "

It's obviously impossible for outsiders to know where the blame sits, but I think a few general conclusions can be drawn.

The first is that agents will not deliver good customer service without the right information. This may seem obvious, but the technical challenge of delivering information to the agent, and doing so in a usable form, should not be underestimated.This isn't just a user interface design (though that is critical) but it's also a data integration project and probably a process re-engineering project.

The second is that consultants have to be used with caution, and they in turn have to be prepared to have some tough conversations with the customer about what can realistically be delivered. I've covered this in more depth in the post, "Does lack of management experience cause most contact centre problems? The perspecitve of the "Puritan Gift"", but I think the criticism of management 'generalists' is usually a valid one. There is a clear role for the traditional definition of consultant, an individual hired at senior level to provide deep subject matter expertise in area such as IT or finance where managers may lack deep knowledge. I'm much more ambivalent about the idea of bringing in consultants to run things as running things (even complex change programs) should be a competence of the company's existing management. Where Accenture and British Gas sit in all of this is obviously for the lawyers to decide.

The final conclusion is that the contact centre really does matter. How British Gas is perceived by customers and the market will be partly determined by this case and partly by what customers now experience when they deal with the company.

A little more on Onstate and contact centre over the web...

2008-05-08T10:46:00.008+01:00

I got quite a response to the article on Onstate.

One of the interesting things was a case study of Onstate being used at B4 Consulting. I found it quite interesting, as to me it illustrates the similarities with how organisations have bought Webex for web conferencing and in future they might buy contact centre.

B4 Consulting (an SAP implementation partner) used skype already for internal use and extending it to the support centre was a relatively logical next step. What I thought was very interesting was that the support users want is primarily chat with a voice capability and hence agents with both capabilities. The convergence is a natural one in a Voice over IP (VoIP) environment. Crucially for the call centre instant messaging is all about states (use ready/ user not ready) which is exactly what the call centre has long managed with the agent ready/ not ready state being a critical requirement for voice traffic.

Skype may or may not be the voice platform of the future as there are other options, for instance Yahoo's recent deal with JaJah for the voice element of instant messaging, and IBM's Sametime telephony announcment at VoiceCon present individual users and Enterprises with interesting options.

The one thing that is clear is that voice and instant messaging are going to get much, much closer together in the contact centre.

The next generation of contact centre?

2008-05-06T11:12:00.008+01:00

I wrote a couple of posts ago about what might be the future of the call centre in "The future of contact centre - Google, Salesforce, Skype & Microsoft".

I was very interested to find from feedback that I had perhaps been too modest in my predictions. I'm grateful for feedback that introduced me to Onstate. Onstate describes itself as the "New generation of call centre" and "the call centre for skype".

The idea is that you buy Onstate (or start using it on a free trial basis) as completely web based call centre. There's no need for any on-premises hardware (at least that's the pitch) and users can be added and removed relatively easily. In short, it's a bit like Webex, a web conferencing solution that works on a similar basis. The strength of Webex is that it can be bought at a departmental or on-demand level without the need to go through central IT and this has made very easy for business users to bring it into their businesses. This business model is also why Webex was acquired by Cisco last year, as it complements very strongly the idea of the network as a business enabler.

I'm not sure yet that the Webex business model will work so well for contact centre. Some of my hesitation is that key requirements (like call recording) isn't available. This isn't to say that it won't be in future, but it's absence will put off some prospective customers. Onstate does offer some very good features; reporting looks very user friendly and I do like the integration of chat and voice.

In short, I suspect Onstate is perhaps showing the future well ahead of where Google has got to. In many ways Onstate is taking 'software as a service' (SaaS) and VoIP (Voice over IP) to the logical next level and integrating the two. Interestingly, the founders of the company are ex-Cisco and ex-Geotel, so have a lot of experience of being at the leading edge of the contact centre. Geotel, for those who don't recognise the name, was bought by Cisco in 1999 and created the product that is now known as the Cisco ICM (Intelligent Contact Management). The Cisco ICM was one of those products that changed the industry, as it was a way of distributing calls between call centres with no limitations of geography or region. It makes it no great surprise to see ex-Geotel people in another highly innovative project.

It may not be fully mature yet, but I think Onstate is a clear pointer towards the future of the contact centre.

Online banking and contact centre

2008-04-28T15:47:00.003+01:00

An interesting article on Finextra today with statistics that one third of UK web users bank online. Apparently the most popular sites are Lloyds TSB and Royal Bank of Scotland.

What is interesting for me is that in the UK at least, the web channel and the phone channel are still some way off converging. You might argue that this is natural, as the web (used at home for transactions with lots of detail) and the phone (used anywhere for real time interaction) are different both by function and nature.

I think this rather misses the point. Imagine that one of these web users sees a serious error or a suspicious transaction. Is it likely that they will e-mail and wait for the bank to respond? Or will they pick up the phone to get an instant response?

By contrast, some of the European banks have experimented with web and contact centre integration. Rabobank's youth banking website offers instant messaging (via MSN) or e-mail with 'Yvette' their chatbot. They also offer a skype button on most pages for a free click to call and a link for skype downloads. I've talked about this a little before (in posts like "Skype, contact Centre and Banking") but I do see this as one of the likely trends of the future.

I've yet to see anything equivalent from UK banks, but I suspect that customers pressure will start to force them to offer these services.

The future of contact centre - Google, Salesforce, Skype & Microsoft

2008-04-25T19:38:00.007+01:00

A lot of interesting announcements in the last two weeks.

Firstly, Google announced a link up with Salesforce.com. I can see the logic, as explained by both companies, that this way embedded google apps in salesforce.com would allow users to switch data between (say) a google spreadsheet and a salesforce customer application.

What I find interesting about this is if Google and Salesforce were to integrate Google's emerging communication offerings, as that would start to be a contact centre on a wholly SAAS basis.

Microsoft seemed to respond to this by announcing that Microsoft Dynamics CRM would be available in as an online offering. It is priced more aggressively than Salesforce.com ($44 per user for Microsoft vs. $65 per user at Salesforce.com) but otherwise it seemed to me to have no clear advantages over Saleforce.com and both were less functional than the offerings from Siebel and SAP.

All of which was very interesting and shows that where Salesforce.com lead, the rest of the CRM industry is following rapidly.

I mentioned in the first paragraph that if Google and Salesforce were to integrate Google's emerging communication offerings, as that would start to be a contact centre on a wholly SAAS basis. The google communication applications are an interesting collection of functions, there's Google Talk for instant messging and voice, and Google Mail for e-mail . Helpfully, if peer to peer voice isn't quite enough for you, then Google Pack for your computer includes the option to have Skype. In other words the raw functionality to build a web based contact centre is there in Google and if the idea's occurred to me, then you can bet it has occurred to Google.

It will be interesting to see when we start to see contact centre telephony as a SAAS offering, as this may be closer than many people assume.

Call centre worker gaoled for data theft

2008-04-15T11:17:00.007+01:00

An interesting article on Finextra about the recent theft at a Royal Bank of Scotland call centre.

This isn't the first, and certainly won't be the last, example of security breaches from staff. There's been a lot of recent focus on the risks of external attack and how biometrics can help deal with this but the internal threat has been neglected. I've posted on the external attack on Barclays ("Security, Call Centres and Fraud"), when fraudsters stole the identity of their chairman for a credit card application, and there's been some good posts on Finextra (see "Biometrics - what's that all about then?" by Dave Griffiths and "Who's in your Wallet?" by Jarvis Kandik both last month).

In fact, inside threats are perhaps as serious as the risk of external attack. In 2006 HSBC lost £233,000 after it's Indian call centre suffered inside attack (here for the BBC report). Last year the BBC also reported how HSBC and HBoS had been targeted by an organised gang which both penetrated the banks and laundered the proceeds of their crimes.

An internal threat is nothing new - fraud from dishonest employees is something that banks have had to deal with almost from the start of banking. What is new is the level of the threat and its organisation. As an example, Strathclyde Police (who cover the west of Scotland where many call centres are located) believe that organised gangs have infiltrated perhaps one in ten of the call centres there (full report here).

In the end, as I've argued with biometrics, the criminals will be beaten by process, not technology point solutions. If the defences against external attack are strong, then criminals will seek to get on the inside. The correct response is not to strengthen the exterior with biometrics (though I'm not sure biometrics do strengthen it), but instead to make sure that staff are vetted, exceptions or unusual activity is identified and monitored and good management is in place.

Process is not terribly exciting, but it will be the element that determines whether technology defeats criminals or not.