HSBC redundancies and their call centres

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.

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

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.

HSBC creates 250 UK call centre jobs & offshore in decline

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.

Financial Services Branches, IP and Contact Centre

One of the blogs forums I read regularly is Finextra, the financial services community forum. The UK financial services sector is such a major user of call centre technology that this is an excellent place to explore the environment that contact centre technology needs to interact with.

A good example is Michael Goldman's post on extending IP convergence to branch. His perspective is not that of the technologist (who have long argued for this) but that of the business person looking at processes and customer experience. I'm pleased to see that he's in favour of more IP convergence, but it's a different perspective from the technology vendors.

It's an area that I'm very interested in as consistent service across channels means (re)-joining the branch and contact centre. I say 're-joining', because historically the branch did manage the telephone channel and it was in response to consumer needs like 24hr service and the difficulty of queuing calls at branch that led to banks to moving the telephony channel from the branch to a centralised service point. This also allowed innovations with 'branchless' and single channel banks, like First Direct in the UK, long before the internet.

Technically, delivering contact centre functionality to branch (where appropriate) is very interesting as it allows a business a lot more flexibility in how it constructs the customer experience. It's an area where Cisco has perhaps a slight advantage from the scale of our IP Telephony deployments, but where Genesys, Nortel and Avaya also have interesting developments. It's probably a subject for further posts as something I'm doing a lot of work on at the moment.

UK Agent Attrition

An interesting article on silicon.com about UK contact centre agent attrition increasing for the 5th year in a row.

I actually wrote a post on the survey (and HSBC's response to agent attrition) last week "The contact centre agent experience - First Direct", but the silcon.com article has a good quote from the analysts Contact Babel.

"Steve Morrell, principal analyst at ContactBabel, said in the report: "The lack of growth in agents' salaries is certainly a major factor in producing high levels of attrition. Businesses should be working to move low-value interactions onto web and phone self-service channels, and to use the savings created to pay higher salaries to their agents. This will attract and retain high-quality staff, a move which will immediately and permanently benefit both the business and the customer base.""

All very much thoughts this blog has been discussing in terms of moving from call centre to contact centre and making contact centre part of a multi-channel strategy. I'm not sure, though, this will necesaarily translate into higher UK salaries as I see high-skill offshore like South Africa being a significant factor in the market.

I've always stressed the importance of moving to converged IP because it makes managing multi-media in a multi-channel environment so much easier. Silcon.com aren't making the connection as explictly as I do, but they do produce the quite interesting statistic that:

"...pure IP infrastructure will be commonplace in most UK call centres within the next two years, with 41 per cent of respondents saying their operations will be fully IP-architected by the end of 2009.
Currently only 17 per cent of call centres have an full IP infrastructure, with a further 28 per cent using a hybrid IP/TDM network."

I suspect that one of the other big drivers to IP (besides multi-media management) is the ability to virtualise across borders. I know this is a message Cisco has pushed strongly, and I think it's the right messge for many enterprises. This is especially true in Europe where the continuing integration of the EU offers many opportunities to distribute work more efficently and more widely. Agent jobs (especially in areas like e-mail, where language skills and accent are not so crucial) will go to areas where the work represents a higher salary and on-shore will be left with higher skill, higher value agents.