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!

More on Presence in the Contact Centre...

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?

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

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

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?

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

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.