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!

Axa to create 600 new UK contact centre jobs

A piece of good news reported on CCF, "AXA to create 600 jobs". I was particularly interested to see that these jobs are onshore in the UK.

The blog has looked at Axa contact centres before, at least the Swiftcover bit of the business) in the post "Are call centres so bad they hinder business?", so it's good to see that another part of Axa has more confidence in the power of customer service.

It's one of those things where the insight comes from the detail. The part of Axa creating these jobs is Axa Helathcare, and the part with the aversion to call centres is Swifcover who specialise in motor insurance. These are very different business, with different margins, expectations of service and complexity.

I've written on this a lot before, but Axa encapsulates this neatly. If the service required is simple, move it to the web. If it's complicated and a brand differentiator, then think about onshore and service quality as higher priorities than simple cost to serve metrics. It's noticeable that this contact centre will not just be onshore, but be in Kent (not the traditional lower cost contact centre areas of the North of England or Scotland). Presumably the ease of access to London and Paris, as well as access to high quality labour from a large catchment area influenced the thinking.

The view of automate or keep it high-quality isn't just my thinking, more authoritative writes than me have covered this, such as Sramana Mitra and her controversial article "The Coming Death Of Indian Outsourcing" in Forbes (covered on this blog at: "Indian Outsourcing, is it in decline? ").

I can see strong value in offshoring some back-office functions (see "Lloyds TSB offshores IT, not call centre"), but I do believe that if customer service is to be valuable, then it needs to be done with quality agents who understand the environment the end customer is in. This partly why I do see roles for countries like South Africa (see: "Offshore - why I would go for South Africa over India"), but I struggle to see a role for countries that try to bid for customer service business on a cost basis.

Still very good news in the current economic environment to see jobs being created.

Nortel - the misery continues

I was very sorry to see the story on the Register of "Nortel Confirms Fire Sale - and shrinking revenues" . It is a dreadful situation for the employees to be in and not much fun for their existing customers either.

I was particularly struck by the short paragraph towards the end mentioning that Nortel employees were to demonstrate outside parliament over their dissmisal without notice or redundancy payment. This has been reported on the UK contact centre sites (see for example "Ex-Nortel staff lobby Parliament" on Call Centre Focus), but I'm surprised that none of the mainstream news organisations have featured it more prominently. It seems very harsh, if reports are accurate, that staff lost their jobs with no notice while at the same time the administrators approved executive multi-million bonus payments.

I appreciate that the troubles at Nortel are no surprise, and even this blog had problems at Nortel as one of its predictions for 2009 (see "First of my contact centre predictions for 2009 happens - Nortel"), but there's no satisfaction in seeing the what's happening.

I think this story will run and run, as while at the moment we're looking at the 229 staff who are demonstrating over the administrators actions, the pension fund will be the story soon. There's not been much since January when the size of the pension fund deficit was revealed (apart from this story in March in the Guardian "Nortel pension fund deficit rocks state lifeboat"), but the pensions will affect perhaps 43,000 people or more. If the administrators Ernest and Young think that there are problems now, it could be nothing compared to what happens if there are any issues with the pension fund.

FSA (finally) determines offshore call centres a risk

I seem to hear the sound of a stable door being shut, and long after the horse has bolted.

The FSA seems finally to have realised that offshore call centres can constitute a risk in financial services. This is not to say all centres, but that offshore centres managed and compliant only to local standards may not protect consumer data that well. Indeed they may be in countries where the law does not recognise most cyber crime or where it is unenforceable.

This isn't news to anyone in the industry, but the FSA has been remarkably relaxed about this until now. It has amazed me that if the data was in the UK it had to be managed securely and comply with what the EU demands, but if the same institution took the data offshore, then the FSA took little interest.

It's perhaps best quote the report in the Financial Times, as it sets out all the issues very well:

"The FSA found that all firms it visited had a high staff turnover rate and a need for constant recruitment, which was seen as a key financial crime risk given the continuing infiltration of financial services firms by organised criminals seeking to obtain sensitive customer data.

In a number of firms the FSA also found that staff vetting procedures were "inconsistent" and did not apply to all staff, which increased the risk that firms may inadvertently take on a person with a criminal background.
The FSA also found that some employees had provided the financial services call centres with false CVs.
The regulator said: "We were informed that fake CVs, inconsistent references and previous employers being reluctant to provide references were common in India."

On top of this, the FSA also said staff training was "generally poor" and urged firms to do more to ensure staff are equipped to identify and report potential financial crime risks.

An FSA spokeswoman said the review was aimed at helping firms understand how having an offshore centre affects firms responsibilities. She added: "Whatever security processes or compliance measures you apply to your business in UK, firm must makes sure those standards are also being applied to the business elsewhere.""

The thing that amazes me is it has taken so long to get to this position. This blog has covered some of the failings in onshore contact centres (see "Call centre worker gaoled for data theft" or "Security, Call Centres and Fraud", for example) and the BBC has highlighted a number of examples in the offshore area (see "Indian Call Centre Fraud and the BBC News"). It's been an area of huge consumer concern and one of the focal points of the opposition to offshoring.

I still believe offshoring has a role to play but it has to be done in a way that complies with UK security standards and where the threat is no greater than onshore. It is no use getting customers to check a waiver box agreeing to their data being handled outside of the EU and thinking that is an end to the matter.

This also highlights one of the great fallacies in offshoring, that it is just a cheaper way of delivering a call centre with the value proposition of "your mess for less". I've long argued that offshoring for cost reasons only is a mistake (see "The comming death of Indian Outsourcing" or "Onshore, Offshore & Internet Resilliency" for examples) and that offshoring for cost has significant risks in areas outside of security such as brand perception and customer experience..

Longer term, I think offshoring still has great potential for businesses who want to provide 24hr customer service through a follow the sun model, but this story is another nail in the coffin for those who see outsourcing as a cost saving.

Design and the Contact Centre

It's a hectic week, which is why I haven't had a chance to blog until now about the radio program I heard on Sunday night.

I was listening to the BBC's "In Business" program and it was one of those thought provoking epiphanies. The program was focused on how design should influence business and there's a good summary on the presenter's blog.

Now, design is something that manufacturers think about for products, but how many contact centres consider it? When we think of customer experience, it tends to be owned (if at all) by the marketing department. Yet, as Peter Day's program makes clear, customer experience could be tackled by designers equally well or perhaps better.

A brief think about Apple and their design led approach suggests that there might be a lot of merit to this approach. I would argue that Apple is not that technically superior to most of its competitors (though it is very good), but that Apple are light years ahead of the competition in looking at design as a way of driving the whole customer experience. Yet until Apple started getting serious market momentum, most of IT was led by a marketing based approach to features and functions.

What really interests me is what would happen to the contact centre if it were to take a design led approach to it's functions. I think it's something I should spend more time thinking about. IT seems to tie in very well to two other subjects dear to the blog's heart, brand and process (see posts like: "Barclays, silent calling & we've been here before... " for brand and "System Integrators write interesting things about contact centre for the downturn!" for some thoughts on process).

In the meantime, though, it's off to catch the 6am flight to Edinburgh.

Another outbound call that worked for me.....

I think it's like buses, you wait for ages for one and then two come along at once.

In the same way, I've complained about poor outbound calling for ages, and then have received two good outbound calls. The last one was from my utility company (see blog post: " Getting a good cold call ...and from a utility company too! "), this one was from my television provider.

Again it was a smarter offer than most cold calls. It offered me something I'd been thinking about doing (upgrading my package to watch the British Lions vs. South Africa rugby union test series) but I probably wouldn't have got round to doing. Instead with a bit of a nudge and quite a bit of a discount, I did.

I'm not sure if this was good use of analytics to identify customers by interests, but it was a well timed call with a good offer. Not rocket science, but still something beyond much of the witless automated outbound dialling that goes on in the UK market.

Happy holidays - and bad news on jobs

It's time for the Easter break across most of Europe but, welcome as a holiday is, the news on jobs stays grim.

For every story like that of Sallie Mae returning offshore jobs (covered on the blog earlier this week in the post "Sallie Mae - Customer service or protectionism? "), there is another side.

The BBC is reporting that T-Mobile is looking to offshore 500 UK contact centre jobs to the Philippines. This comes in the same fortnight that the UK CCF site reported that Virgin Media was looking to shed 150 jobs in its Nottingham Telesales operation.

Compared to the massive job losses reported at the banks (e.g. 9,000 at Royal Bank of Scotland) this may not seem much, but 650 call centre jobs is significant and the losses seem to be steady. All we can hope for is that things look a bit better after the Easter break.