The annual Cisco & Dimension Data Speech survery 2009

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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!

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

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!

BBC Moneybox on Speech Recognition for banking

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.

Merchants Contact Centre Benchmarking study for 2008

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

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.

Latest Gartner Magic Quadrant on IVR & Speech Self-Service

A good article on the Speech Technology Magasine Website setting out the details of the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for IVR and Self-Service ( titled the "Magic Quadrant for Interactive Voice Response Systems and Enterprise Voice Portals, 2008." and available from Gartner here).

I was quite please to see that the Microsoft Speech Server was dropped from the Magic Quadrant as I've never found it a relevant offering for the European Contact Centre. I've gone into the details of this previously (in "Technology firms, Europe and speech recognition" and "Speech Market Share"), but the main reason is that if you don't offer speech in European languages, you will struggle to sell in the European market.

It was also good to see Holly Connect getting onto the magic quadrant. I've seen a bit of them in the European market and their network based IVR/ self-service solution looks interesting for those who would like their self-service hosted by a network carrier. They're an Australian company in origin, so I wouldn't be surprised to see them push further into Europe and Asia-Pacific.

Otherwise, the Magic Quadrant has the usual firms in the leader's segment, Genesys, Avaya, Cisco, Intervoice and Nortel. For the full details (I won't duplicate them here) best to look at
the Speech Technology Magasine Website or buy the report Gartner .

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.

For a Friday - Contact Centre, video and the call centre movie

I feel there is the opportunity for a serious discussion about video in contact centre, but Friday is probably not the time to have it. The growth of 3G for mobiles and video calls on Skype make video very relevant for any discussion of the future of the contact centre. I believe video is an inherent part of the move to voice over IP. If you can send packets of voice across a network, then sending packets of video is a logical next step and restricted more by bandwidth limitations (which are ever reducing), than it is by technology capabilities.

I've touched on video before in "SOA - bringing CRM, telephony and business together? part 2, voice portals", especially with reference to the Cisco Voice Portal but video deserves a deeper discussion than most people have time for at the end of the week.

I'll write more about managing video at the start of next week and instead introduce you to "Call Centre the Movie". It's a film with no intention of taking itself, outsourcing or call centres seriously, but it is important because it has shaped perceptions of the industry, it has won a number of awards (e.g. here at the 2005 Riverside International Film Festival) and it has a very significant internet presence as any Google search will show. You can see the trailer here on Youtube .

If that 30 seconds has whetted your appetite, then the full movie (all 12 minutes) is here.

What I find interesting about this movie is how well it shows that consumers understand offshore service as being driven by cost. Whether you like the movie or not, it does summarise very neatly a lot of public perceptions the call centre industry has to deal with.

Security, Call Centres and Fraud

Fraud, especially around identity theft, is one of the hot topics in the UK at the moment.

Obviously, the UK government department HM Revenue & Customs losing the data of 25 million people has made it a more commonly discussed topic than it was before. Then this week, anyone in the UK who still didn't think loss of personal data was serious now has the example of Jeremy Clarkson to consider. Clarkson (a television show host & newspaper columnist) was so sure that the impact of lost data was over-exaggerated that he published his bank account number and bank sort code in his weekly national newspaper column, claiming that there was nothing to fear. As is now reported, he did have something to worry about. One of the readers of his column used his details to set up a monthly £500 direct debit from his account, as the charity the British Diabetic association is one of the many organisations that does not require a signature when setting up a direct debit.

All of which is jolly good knockabout fun, but risks obscuring a more interesting and more serious story (and one more relevant to the European Contact Centre blog).

Also this week, in a less reported story, an identity fraudster managed to persuade Barclays call centre to issue a credit card to an existing customer called Marcus Agius. This identity fraudster then used the credit card to withdraw £10,000 pounds from a Barclays branch. The more startling point of this is that Marcus Agius is not any customer of Barclays but is the chairman of the bank and has been on the board since September 2006.

I'm not surprised that a call centre agent didn't recognise the chairman by name (though alarm bells should perhaps have rung when he found at the employer during the application process!), as new or junior staff may not be very interested in executives at that level. The two things that do stand out for me in the Barclays case are that firstly the card could be applied for and sent out to an address that was (at best) open to interception and (at worst) totally different from that used normally by an existing customer of the bank. The second is that security measures like passwords failed completely to verify the applicant.

Now you may assume that in a call centre environment verification will always be a problem when a physical signature can't be presented and you can't see the face of the applicant. This is not the case.

I've written previously about Natural Language and Automated Speech Recognition (for example "Speech market share - the role of non-European languages"), and identity verification by voice is a natural extension of this technology. The problem with passwords is that they verify what you know, not who you are. Should what you know not be only known to you, then that knowledge ceases to become verification as to who you are.

Voice prints, or similar techniques of deriving a unique identifier from a voice, offer a much better way of verifying identity. I've mostly had experience with IBM and Nuance in this field but lately I've been very taken with the approach of VoiceVault. VoiceVault do seem to have taken a purer security approach to the problem of voice verification and I rather like that. There do seem to be significant variations in how each vendor approaches the verification problem and so far (though this is early days), I've been very interested in how the different approaches produce results. All of these potentially work with voice portal technology (though I'm primarily interested in applying them with CVP, the Cisco Voice Portal).

The big advantage of voice portals is that they provide an environment where applications can be combined and hence you can have layers of security. So for example, it's unlikely that speaker verification alone would be adopted, even if it could achieve 99%+ rates of verification. Instead, a combination of password, speaker verification and other measures could be deployed relatively easily in a portal environment to provide layers of security. That way even if one security measure is defeated others are likely still to work.

Would speaker verification alone have been enough to prevent the Barclays situation? I doubt that it would have prevented the situation by itself, but it could have highlighted the anomaly of the situation to the agent, and could have triggered further security checks and processes. In the end good processes will provide the security, what technology can do is enhance them and make it harder for them to be defeated.

Dimension Data/ Cisco Speech survey

I'm in Frankfurt this week and it's always good to catch up with colleagues and partners.

I mentioned the Dimension Data/ Cisco survey on Speech automation in a previous post ("For a Friday - why are contact centres so disliked?"), but it was good to hear today Tim Pearce, one of the survey authors present the findings.

You can find the Dimension Data/ Cisco survey on CRMxchange as a webinar and it's worth watching.

The big thing for me is the difference between what vendors 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. Some good research and well worth a look whether you implement telephone automated service or are considering it.

SOA - bringing CRM, telephony and business together? part 2, voice portals

It was a big subject that I tried to cover last Friday ("SOA - bringing CRM, telephony and business together? part 1") and of necessity I only covered it a high level, despite the length of post!

The main point to take away was that SOA can (in theory) be done at a number of levels in the contact centre. In theory, starting at the back end with SOA process choreography or data model rationalisation is as valid as starting at the front. In practice, though, starting at the front with either the agent desktop or the voice portal is much easier.

There's a number of reasons for this, but the main ones are risk (the voice portal technology is relatively proven compared to some other SOA approaches in call centre), scope (self-service can start with a relatively finite number of services) and benefits (even small increases in automation can lead to big cost savings).

The portal works for the voice channel in the same way as a traditional browser based portal provides a view for the internet channel. Obviously information has to be presented differently (sequentially for voice compared to concurrently for web) but the concepts are the same. In this environment it makes a great deal of sense to componentise services (such as identity and verification) and then make the same service available to web and voice channel. The benefits of a common ID&V service are not just efficiency from the re-use of code, but also a consistent customer experience, a consistent process regardless of channel and a better security system with easier management.

In my view Cisco Voice Portal (CVP) is the leader here with Genesys and Avaya not too far behind. It's not a view Gartner share but I feel they didn't fully appreciate the value of some of the deployment options CVP provides. A real strength of CVP is that it offers both centralised and distributed deployment options, allowing a business to provide self-service locally (in a branch or retail outlet) and thus queue calls at the edge of network before routing them anywhere in the enterprise that they want. Alternatively, there is option to deploy CVP in the datacentre or at the call centre. Video is another area of CVP strength. While video calls may be some way off for the mass market, a CVP based video call centre called Significan't is up and running here in the UK so that deaf and other sign-language users can access government services via a video based call centre.

I also find the Cisco tooling (which was Audium) very good for service creation and suited to SOA development as it is based on the Eclipse platform. This is not unique to Cisco (Avaya Voice Portal also uses Eclipse as its development environment) but the combination of CVP deployment options and open standards works well for the clients I've worked with.

In short, if you are going to bring SOA into the contact centre environment it makes a lot of sense to start in area of discrete functionality that can be re-used in other channels and to do so with a product which gives you the most deployment options.

SOA - bringing CRM, telephony and business together? part 1

It's a Friday, so perhaps time for thinking a bit further ahead.

One of the interesting things about the contact centre (and before that call centre) is that it has three areas that have rarely had more than a passing acquaintance with each other. By areas I mean the the three core functions of telephony (so that you can deal with customers remotely), CRM (which here means the delivery of data and interactions, rather than a specific packaged application) and business process (which is what the contact centre is built to handle and why customers call).

Traditionally self service, or IVR (Interactive Voice Response unit) has high-lighted this separation. It is probably more familiar as "...press 1for..., press 2 for...., etc..." and is the source of enormous customer frustration. This is mostly because it has come from the telephony world (which focused on scalability, responsiveness, routing, etc... ) rather than the IT or business world. As a result traditional IVR tends to be good at managing telephony but rather poor at integrating with CRM, business processes or being customer specific. Similar disconnects between needs and functionality can be highlighted in CRM or all those manual work-arounds in business processes.

It's into this world that SOA enters.

For those not familiar with IT trend, SOA stands for "Service Orientated Architecture". The idea is to build IT systems out of small components of functionality ("services") that can be put together by business processes to perform tasks. These services are not applications as we know them (though they could be) but are much smaller units of business functionality, such "calculate mortgage interest rate" or "identify & verify customer" and can be used by many different functions. These components can be part of existing applications (which increases efficiency from re-use of existing IT) or even come from third parties outside of the enterprise.

In call centre SOA has arrived first (and perhaps surprisingly) in the self-service environment of voice portal. A key factor was that the development of IP convergence meant that voice could be manged in the IP protocol world of the IT industry. A voice portal is not the the traditional IVR unit and from the proprietary telephony world. Instead is more part of IT and can be thought of an internet portal that presents information by voice rather than by speech. The SOA part of this is that if you have services for any channel (branch desktop, web, etc...) then you can present them in the voice portal. So for example, if you greet customers with a personal message when they log into your web site (e.g. "Welcome Mr. Smith, your most recent order shipped this morning"), the voice portal lets you do the same for the telephone channel. It also lets you present information both on a personalised basis and dynamically, which can dramatically increase your customers' use of self-service.

What voice portals are forcing is a coming together of telephony and CRM and SOA is the most sensible architecture for doing so in a way that aligns with business processes. Cisco, Avaya and Genesys are the clear leaders for voice portal, but in my next post I'll try and explain how things like tooling and service management make for big differences between what the vendors offer amd are critical to being successful with an SOA approach.

Speech Market Share

A few days ago I wrote a post entitled "Technology Firms, Europe and Speech Recognition" that was really rather well received. In it I made the rather obvious point (to me anyway) that if you don't offer speech recognition in local languages, you are going to stuggle to get it adopted.

One thing I should have mentioned (and didn't) was that despite their limited languages both IBM and Microsoft had gained significant market share in overall speech shipments, at least according to Gartner's figures for 2006. The highest growth was from Telisma with over 200% growth. Worldwide IBM was looking at around 50% growth and Microsoft had growth respectably in the teens.

Of course, worldwide is not so useful when no languages is truly worldwide. More relevant for this blog is EMEA, where Gartner see Nuance, Talisma and Locquendo as the big players. Interestingly, EMEA is the only region (out of North America and AP) where IBM was not one of the top three vendors. I think this still proves my original point that language support is critical to getting market share, but perhaps I'm underestimating the power of brand and salesforce.

For a Friday - why are contact centres so disliked?

I suspect that by the time you've read the title, you have already begun your list! You may also have decided that it's so obvious it's not worth writing about.

I'm sure you already have:

• Being stuck in a queuing system
• Not being able to speak to a human
• Not getting any help when you do get a human being
• Cold calling
• Dealing with people who don't speak your language

...but I'm not actually that interested in a list of gripes, however long and valid. These are symptoms rather than causes. What I'm interested in is why do companies spend money on contact centres, if all the contact centre generates is dissatisfaction?

Now the cynics will cheerfully say that I've not understood what's going on, and that companies are only interested in having the appearance of customer service, and are not interested in the reality unless it is cheap. I would argue that customer service is seen to be failing because it has not managed to keep up with changing customer expectations or what the rest of the business expects contact centres to do. There is some truth that customer service is seen as a cost centre and a necessary evil in some organisations but I would argue these organisations are passing up on a lot of opportunity.

The first thing is that today's contact centre is a world away from the relatively simple functions that the first call centres were set up to do. For example, in banking the first call centres provided balance enquiry answers or specialised in an individual product. Today the simple functions (like balance enquiries) have moved to the web or the telephone self-service environment and everything that is left for the contact centre is complex. Many organisations have not appreciated that if their contact centre traffic is going to become increasingly complex, then agents need the systems that can handle them. Too often I see a very basic CRM system and some link to a legacy back office system as the agents' main tools. Knowledge databases, the ability to ask an expert, workflow and all sorts of other things that could help the agent are often not present.

Secondly, and a pet gripe of mine, is that a lot of telephone automation is done badly. Being presented with nine options to choose from at the first menu, and then many more as you work down a menu-tree hierarchy may help with call routing but it is an expensive way of irritating your customer. This is especially true if none of this information is then passed to the agent so that when you finally speak to a human, you have to start everything again. With the current voice portal technology being mature and stable, most organisations should at least look at moving away from the ugly aspects of the traditional IVR (Interactive Voice Response unit). Rather than working in the menu-tree world of IVR, a voice portal works like a portal (or web browser if we're not being too fussy) in terms of how it presents information. A voice portal uses Java and vXML, web technologies, to present information rather than the proprietary environments of IVRs. What this means is that even if you don't want to provide speech, a voice portal can still provide a far higher standard of customer service than the traditional IVR and generally do so at a lower cost.

Incidentally, if you are interested in speech automation for voice portals then I'd encourage you to look at the Dimension Data/ Cisco survey on CRMExchange. There are some very interesting points that highlight how users can be much more enthusiastic about speech self-service than most IT organisations appreciate. It also highlights how users' priorities and expectations can differ from those of the implementing organisation and how you can tackle some of these to have a higher level of customer acceptance. The more customer acceptance means not only a lower cost to serve but also the more usable information you can capture.

For many organisations the contact centre represents an opportunity to learn more about customers and better understand how they interact with the company. Relatively simple things, like marketing campaign response tracking can pay significant dividends as can analytics on the data the contact centre generates. Again, as an example, working out which is your most troublesome product for which demographic is information that can help improve both marketing spend and product design. These are areas of significant spend and the better the customer experience the more information you are likely to be able to gather.

In short, contact centres often aren't delivering a good user experience because their technology has prevented them adapting as fast as their customer's requirements have changed. In turn the business has often not understood the value of the call centre and so has not invested.

In short if you're on the receiving end of really bad service, remember "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately accounted for by stupidity", consult Dilbert, the ultimate authority on disfunctional organisations and take your business to an organisation that understands the value of customer service.