UK Call Centre Expo

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?

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!

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

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

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

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

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.