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.

A Friday video - Cisco's call centre of the future

My previous videos have been well received (see "Embedded Call Centre Video" and "For a Friday - Contact Centre, video and the call centre movie") so I suspect that it's time for another one. It's also Friday and that's a good enough reason for a less serious post.

I was very interested to see that one of Cisco's promotional videos is up on YouTube. This is n illustration of Cisco's vision of what call centre could be: video enabled, integrated around the enterprise, seamless inbound and outbound and full multi-media.



In fact, the view from one of the experts in Cisco's product house is that almost all of this contact centre vision could be achieved today (though not all of it are yet products), give or take the robot dog.....

HSBC creates 250 UK call centre jobs & offshore in decline

After a week off sick there's been a lot to blog on.

I was interested in the Finextra story "HSBC creates 250 call centre jobs". The interesting thing for me is that these are onshore jobs. HSBC has always had onshore operations but has also been one of the firms that has pushed call centre jobs to India. The onshore operations have tended to focus on high quality customer service (see past posts like: "The contact centre agent experience - First Direct") whereas it's always been my suspicion that cost is the primary motivation for the Indian operation.

I'm not against either cost saving or offshore, I just have strong reservations that India for lowest possible cost is a sensible customer service strategy. If offshore is an appropriate option, I've tended to look at South Africa ("Offshore - why I would go for South Africa over India"). I know there are issues with South Africa as well (SA Telecom and crime being two of the big ones), but the cost savings and availability of English are strong factors in that locations favour.

HSBC is also just part of a larger trend back onshore. Earlier this month Orange announced that it was moving 500 call centre jobs back to the UK from India, but at the same time was shedding 450 onshore administrative jobs. This is very similar to what Lloyds TSB did last month, when it decided to offshore its IT rather than its customer facing operations (I covered the story here on the blog or here on Finextra).

In short, I think the trend for customer service to go offshore has almost come to an end but administration, back-office and IT might all go offshore to a much greater extent.

CEOs of BT, the Royal Mail and Corel discuss telephone customer service

I have tonsillitis this week and this is the first day I've really been able to get anything done. It also means that my post the week will be short.

What I have been doing while ill is listening to the radio. There was a very good discussion on customer service earlier this week on BBC Radio 4's business program "The Bottom Line".

What I found interesting was that it had the CEOs of two of the UK's biggest company's, British Telecom and Royal Mail (both of whom who have customer service issues). In the discussion both CEOs wanted to focus on concepts like 'customer lifecycle' and 'customer experience' (not that they used those terms), but they kept being brought back to the issue of how they provided basic telephone service.

Not rocket science, but further proof of the importance of doing the contact centre basics right and worth a listen. You can download the podcast here.

Aviva (Norwich Union) and the offshore market

The decision of Aviva (Norwich Union) to cut 1,800 jobs is a story making most of the national press and Finextra this morning.

This is on top of the restructuring announced in 2006, which would shed 4,000 UK jobs. Of these, 1,000 were call centre workers whose roles would be replaced by offshore call centres.

Interestingly, this time it is not the call centre that is being expressly targeted as a cost centre. For starters, 500 of the job losses announce this morning are in IT. This to me seems to be part of the trend that saw Lloyds TSB a few weeks ago offshore its IT rather than its customer facing operations (I covered the story here on the blog or here on Finextra).

My impression is that the need for high quality customer service is being recognised as a differentiator while the focus on cost is shifting to more back office areas. In UK insurance, I suspect also that the arrival of the web insurance aggregators (confused.com , go compare.com, etc...) has really hit volumes and margins in the direct web channel. By contrast, the telephone channel is less affected by these new players and may be a way for insurers to preserve margin and brand.

It may also be the time that the contact centre gets recognition in the wider enterprise for its ability to deal direct with customers and stops being a cost centre.