Google Nexus - the need for a contact centre

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....

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

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!

Channel in Financial Services

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.

Oracle Whitepaper on European Contact Centres

There's an interesting whitepaper from Oracle on European Contact Centres available for download, though you do need to register your details to get it.

It's good to see research focused specifically on the European market (as opposed to the US) as customer behaviour is significantly different. It's also a good sized survey of 1,500 consumers and 250 contact centres so I'd hope that interviews were weighted so as to be representative.

The key findings are mostly no great surprise:

· Despite almost unanimous acknowledgement of the importance of keeping customers happy, more than half of European consumers do not judge customer service operations to be effective.
· Consumers’ principle complaints include enduring long call queues, having to continually repeat their queries to different members of staff and receiving inconsistent answers.
· Contact centre managers view better quality of information and staff training as the two prime requirements for improving customer service.
· More than half of businesses have no plans to introduce a self-service portal - despite a clear preference among customers for using the internet to resolve queries.

I was interested in the last point, as voice portals, internet portals and the convergence between the two is something that I'm very interested in and am seeing a number of businesses exploring. Interestingly, the research shows that 71% of European consumers preferred the internet for interacting with a business and that email was identified as the second most popular
channel of interaction with a general preference of 60%.

The UK is probably the exception here, as I still see a preference for UK consumers to use the voice channel, but that ties in with what I've been seeing in mainland Europe. I've talked about it a bit in previous posts such as "Last week in Germany", but e-mail is a significant channel for mainland European contact centres. This is especially true as a channel for complex interactions and for initiating what will then become a multi-channel interaction. This an area where IP Convergence and Voice over IP for the contact centre is hugely important for bringing channels and communication mediums together for consistent customer service.

Last week in Germany

I didn't have much of a chance to write last week as I was in Germany and very busy with meetings. I like Germany a lot and was very interested to be in Munich for the first time.

Germany is an interesting example of a country where most businesses understand that they cannot compete on cost internationally. Instead, they have to compete on the value and innovation of their products. I've written previously on how that weakening dollar is causing problems, (notably for the Canadian contact centre industry "Why Canada might illustrate some coming European Contact Centre trends"), but the impact on euro area businesses is also significant.

You might think that while Germany would be affected by lower manufacturing work moving to lower cost locations, service would not move as well. The German language is spoken primarily in high cost countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) and without high quality language skills telephone service is difficult.

The reality, though, is slightly different. Telephone service is important, but e-mail is also of importance. Internet and branch are major channels for German organisations to interact with customers and so the remote service route for these channels can be as much e-mail as traditional telephony traffic. Although Voice over IP and Skype have generated interest, most German organisations I've encountered are most interested in small to medium contact centres with significant e-mail capability. The important thing about e-mail is that as the interaction is not real time, and so it could potentially be off-shored to an agent with much more limited German than would be appropriate for a voice call.

In a market dynamic like this, the only way to compete is not on cost of agent but on value and draw on manufacturing for lessons. In manufacturing automation has been reducing the number of workers per task since the industrial revolution and service industries are heading that way. Automation and pre-scripting for e-mail responses makes an agent much more productive, as does blending voice and e-mail so agents can manage both. In the same way that production lines reduced the demand for craftsmen, so service management can be industrialised. At a more strategic level quality of service is a brand value, so competing on reputation means the quality of the agent can be important as a brand value for what it tells customers about your organisation.

I've written a little about the industrialisation of service previously in the "Contact Centres, Process and Six Sigma", and I suspect it's a subject I need to cover in more depth.

A good case study on Contact Centre World - Danish Rail

It was good to see that Danish Rail is one of the case studies newly available on Contact Centre World. The site does require registration, but the case study is well worth a look.

I'm recommending it partly because it's as an example of Cisco technology, and partly because it is a good example of how a number of contact centre business objectives can be enabled by technology. In the case of Danish Rail, it was the need to improve service while reducing cost and managing increased traffic.

Interesting points include how Danish Rail both consolidated their call centres (from eleven to three) and virtualised the remaining sites. Consolidation and virtualisation are not always seen as activities that can be run in parallel, but this is a good example of how it can be done and what the benefits are. Another interesting aspect of the case study is that Danish Rail are quite advanced with their management of e-mail and the case study discusses how they are looking at managing a growth in e-mail traffic from 15,000 e-mails to 65,000 e-mails per year.

More generally, as a comment on the European market (and at the risk of a sweeping generalisation), I've found that many of the leading technology adopters are based in the Nordic countries. I've mentioned this before ("How Call Centers vary across Europe"), but it's no surprise that the region that is home to Nokia, Ericcson and a host of other high-tech firms is a leader in technology adoption.

Google - the next player in contact centre knowledge management?

I was looking through some material about Google Docs today as I'd been asked if any of it might be relevant to a customer I was working with.

The thing that stuck me was that while Google Docs probably weren't suitable (yet), the implications of the Google's search capability could be quite profound in the area of contact centre knowledge management. There's been speculation that Google could go in this direction for a while (see, for example, the UK technology site ZDNet writing in 2006) and obviously if knowledge management is seen as a search function then Google is an obvious answer.

Importantly, knowledge management in call centre is not just a search function. It can be about information categorisation, business processes and making available information other agents have learnt from experience. Yet none of these are things Google can't do or won't be able to do in the near future. Furthermore, the Kana and eGain type of application with a separate knowledge management database and proprietary approach to knowledge classification looks in danger of being made redundant but web 2.0 ideas like wikis and the ever increasing use of XML tags for data.

Despite this, I'd still recommend clients to look at knowledge management applications as a solution for specific issues. Where they white-label the contact centre for example (so agents handle many different processes depending on which brand they are representing) or where web-chat or e-mail is a consideration and knowledge management can provide an element of scripting and agent assistance. In these examples though, knowledge managment is providing more value than just a searchable repository.

Google isn't there yet, but I would not be surprised if knowledge management experienced the same trends as the rest of the application sector and a bout of consolidation.

Offshoring and mainland Europe

I have to admit that most of my discussion of offshoring has been around the UK and Ireland experience, in posts such as: "Offshore - why I would go for South Africa over India".

Today I saw some research in TelecomPaper, "Spanish call centre staff numbers to fall 4% in 2007" that looked at the impact offshoring to Latin America was having on the Spanish market. This might seem a startling percentage drop for a single year, but there's some good insight on this at TMCnet giving figures from ACE, the Spanish call centre trade association. Part of the reason for the percentage shift is that compared to the UK or Ireland there are not that many call centres in Spain. In 2006, the number of call centers outside of Spain serving the Spanish market rose from 9 to 20, but more than 225 call centers remained in Spain. As TMC comments, and the UK's experience confirms, Latin America might win business initially on price and cost of labour, but they will have to meet quality expectations if they want to keep that business.

Of course, like India for UK companies, the physical distance between Spain and Latin America creates management difficulties. These aren't technology difficulties (an IP network can let you route calls anywhere in the world) but rather relate to the challenge of flying managers out and keeping expats overseas to manage the offshore operations. Interestingly, here the French have a distinct advantage. With much of North Africa having some French, many French companies have located in Morocco. This has the huge advantage of only being a few hours flight from France and in the same timezone. As long ago as 2005, Africa Investor had identified Morocco has having 55 French call centres with 6,500 employees. Today, numbers are harder to come by, but with major companies like France Telecom and SNCF having Moroccan operations and a dedicated annual trade show (SICCAM), the local industry looks fairly robust.

In other parts of Europe language will probably prevent widespread offshoring for voice (even in eastern Europe, German is not that widely spoken, for example), but I think e-mail may be another story. Without the need for a high standard of both accent and fluency, the non-time sensitive aspect of e-mail may lend itself to offshore management, but that is probably another post.

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.

e-mail in contact centres, process driven or response driven?

One of the interesting things I'm seeing around e-mail in the contact centre is debate on how to manage it.

With a phone call, things are relatively straight forward - you answer it. You might need to queue it, or gather some intelligence for routing but fundamentally you are talking about something that is real-time and a synchronous form of communication and contact centres handle that well.

By contrast, e-mail is not real-time and is an inherently asynchronous method of communication. It can be answered at an agent's convenience and an agent can handle multiple e-mail sessions concurrently. Furthermore, the agent can be given a lot of prompting and guidance (even scripting) from knowledge sources to help them respond. Furthermore, the text based nature of the medium makes it much easier to integrate content into other applications.

To date, most of the focus on e-mail management for the contact centre has come from specialist players like Kana and eGain. These applications provide the necessary functionality for e-mail, usually provide chat and often web co-browsing. My personal preference is for the eGain suite (and not just because Cisco OEM parts of it), but for Genesys users Kana has a number of attractions, not least that execs at one have often worked at the other. In my view the first phase of e-mail management is almost over and the niche vendors are starting to align with the CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) vendors. This may be quite a loose alignment (e.g e-Gain and Kana can be paired with a whole range of CTI applications), but none the less the debate is largely over as to whether e-mail should be managed as a stand alone application or integrated with the telephony control application.

The second phase that I suspect to be just beginning is the debate whether the CTI or CRM system manages e-mail. Most CRM systems today have an e-mail capability and try to integrate e-mail with the wider CRM process. By contrast the CTI systems focus on the process of finding the right person to answer the e-mail, getting it there and monitoring how long the agent takes to write the answer.

I suspect that both approaches will prove complimentary, but there is sufficient overlap to make it unclear as to which application will eventual dominate the e-mail space.

Ofcourse, there is a wildcard in the form of SOA. If it becomes more prevalent as an architectural approach in the contact cnetre, then talking about applications 'controlling' functionality will be redundant. But SOA would be a third phase and although I see signs of the foundations being laid now, it is not yet a reality.