Abbey National - did an IVR survey lead to a customer getting locked out their account?

This blog sometimes flirts with the idea of news, rather than just comment, and I couldn't resist this story. I saw it today in the Scotsman (though it's also more detail here in the Daily Mail).

In brief a Mr. George Bates, a 23 year old Abbey National customer, phoned his bank to arrange an overdraft. He claims to have found that the operator was rude, unhelpful and with a heavy Asian accent that was difficult to understand, so at the end of the call he used the automated post-call survey to register his displeasure. A lot of banks use IVRs (Interactive Voice Response Systems) for this as it suits the "push 1 for...., push 2 for...." type of menu that an IVR provides. Anyway, Mr. Bates pushed ones and twos for low scores and finished his call.

When he called back the next day his problems began. He couldn't access the phone bank with his password, the ATM swallowed his card and when he got into his branch he found his identity had been changed from the 23 year old Bristol carpenter he is, to that of a 33 year old Ugandan divorcee. His direct debits had also been cancelled and he was incurring bank charges for missed payments. Abbey have now apologised and offered £200 compensation, but Mr. Bates is still unhappy.

There are some lessons from this story worth pondering.

The first is what price does a bank place on its reputation? I've blogged on this before (see: "Are call centres so bad they hinder business?" or "Barclays, silent calling & we've been here before... "), but contact centres can damage an organisation's reputation very quickly. It seems a mystery that such an important part of a customer's experience of an organisation should be managed as a cost centre and yet other functions that drive reputation and brand (e.g. marketing or PR) should be seen as investments or necessary expense.

The second is that while it's admirable that agents should be given continuous feedback on their performance, they really should not be able to take revenge on customers who score them poorly. There's a whole set of issues here, from the granularity of the feedback given to agents to the level of access to customer data that agents have. Supervision, audit trails and analytics might also be points to think of here in terms of how organisations control agent behaviour.

The third and final point is that the public do not much like offshore contact centres. This is an image that the offshore industry has acquired and has not managed to shake off. I'm sure that had a British call centre worker done this the story would have been much less newsworthy, but as it's an Indian call centre (and Abbey have five UK call centres and only two Indian ones) this fits a lot of popular myths about the offshoring industry.

There may be a view that "all publicity is good publicity" (and you certainly couldn't buy the press coverage this story is getting), but I suspect that Abbey will want to change the way it runs its contact centres as they will not want their reputation damaged in a credit crunch that has hurt the reputation of UK banking so much.

Are call centres so bad they hinder business?

I was struck today by an advertisement for Swiftcover.com that I saw from the train. I know customers often don't like call centres (especially offshore ones), but this advertisement seemed to be targeted at those allergic to the whole idea of talking.

Now Swiftcover.com is part of Axa, so this is not an organization without call centre expertise. Nor is it strictly a web only player, as they have been very innovative about developing a mobile phone channel for insurance sales. Clearly there is a demographic out there who hate the idea of call centres so much that they'd rather use the web.
To a certain extent poor experiences from call centres are to blame, but that may not be the whole story. One big change in the retail insurance market is the rise of web aggregators, such as confused.com. These players don't have contact centres either, but they do pull together large chunks of the insurance market in their comparison tables, and make it very hard for insurers to differentiate themselves by brand. I would suspect that although swiftcover.com may be targeting a demographic less than keen on call centres, they are also trying to drive traffic direct to their website and not have a comparison site in the way.
Of course contact centres still have a major role to play, doing what they are good at. Web sites are ideal for simple or generic quotes. Complex matters, exceptions and assessments of options are still done better as a discussion with a person. For that the contact centre is ideal as it allows an insurance agent to cover business without geographic restriction. Using a human contact centre agent as a data entry mechanism into the quotes system (as some insurance contact centres have done) has never been a good use of resources. Skilled advice at the end of the telephone is extremely valuable and it is there that contact centres can help companies differentiate themselves and their brand in an increasingly competitive market.

Despite the credit crunch, still call centre growth at Barclays

An interesting story on Finextra that Barclays are to create over 200 new call centre jobs in Liverpool.

A lot of reasons why this is interesting. On is that with the credit crunch it's good to see that the world hasn't ended and that banks are still going about (some) of their usual business. The other aspect that I thought interesting is that these are primarily outbound agents.

The blog looked at the problems Barclays has been having with outbound in my last post (see "Barclays, silent calling & we've been here before... ") and I suspect that Barclays was determined to get this fixed. I know in my last post I was dubious about how important reputational risk was. I have revised that judgement, and I'd now say 'reputational risk is really important if you upset voters and there is a chance the government may become your largest shareholder'. I know Barclays has so far not needed any assistance from the UK government, but I can see that it would be tactful (as well as good business) not to fight with Ofcom or any other government body in the near future....

Barclays, silent calling & we've been here before...

So Barclays, or at least Barclaycard, have just been fined the maximum Ofcom (the UK communications regulator) can manage for making silent outbound calls. The story is well covered here on Finextra.

What is perhaps more surprising is that the maximum fine is £50,000 and that even in a credit crunch this is not going to inconvenience Barclays hugely. There is the argument of reputational damage being a punishment and the media have done well highlighting the story (see "Regulators stuck in a fine mess" in the Times today, for example for really hostile coverage of Barclays) or BBC Business News leading with the story on the day the fine was announced.

Unfortunately I don't believe that reputational risk alone is enough. Finextra mentions that Abbey National, Complete Credit Management and Carphone Warehouse have all been fined for breaching the silent calls rule and that's just for starters. The frequency of these stories of outbound calling making life painful for consumers and damaging brand suggests that reputational risk isn't working.

In July I wrote about the BBC highlighting the use outbound calling by UK banks for debt recovery ("Banks criticised by BBC for automated calls "). It might be an effective way of collecting debt (I've got no evidence one way or the other) but even if it does little for your reputation, the impact of the fine seems low compared to the potential value of a recovered debt.

I've blogged a lot on outbound as it's the area that makes people most aware of and most dislike call centres. As a result, I suspect that outbound calling in the UK is an industry that will soon be dead. The details are in posts like: "Abbey National fined £30,000 by Ofcom & the future of Outbound in Financial Services" or "Outbound, an explanation of the technology" and "Outbound - industry reputation, branding and regulation", but from the feedback I've had, the irritation outbound causes is still not well understood in the industry and the industry is not adapting.

This may though be irrelevant as the number of consumers registering with the Telephone Preference Service suggests that consumers are making their views clear and are making themselves increasingly difficult to reach.

UK Contact Centre Expo Day 2

It was a good day in Birmingham today at the UK Contact Centre Expo.

My impression was that this year's Contact Centre Expo was smaller than last year's, but it was still a good show. I got very positive feedback on the presentations at the Cisco stand.

We had some of our partners; JAMIP, British Telecom, Cable and Wireless and Dimension Data presenting on how they use the Cisco Contact Centre portfolio. These were short, punchy ten minute presentations and as I say, they seemed to be well received by the audience. It generated a decent number of leads, so that is always good news.

Otherwise, there were a few interesting things at the show. I was interested in the Teleopti stand. I've blogged on them before (see "Workforce Management - Part 2 Vendor Selection
"), as their one of the interesting European Workforce Optimisation vendors. One of the issues with workforce management tools is that one size (American) does not fit all and Teleopti were stressing that their solution had "change management with union involvement, full support for European labour laws, different types of employment and annual hours of work". I'm not sure what Teleopti is like to use, but it does seem to be addressing a significant area for European contact centres.

It's also interesting to see who are the offshore providers at the show. This year Bangladesh had a big stand as did Egypt. I was interested to learn more about Bangladesh as I've not seen them before. Egypt had a very good stand and seemed an interesting option. For the French market there has always been North Africa as a relatively near pool of lower cost language skills (see the post: "Offshoring and mainland Europe "), so it will be interesting to see if Egypt could fulfill that role for the English speaking market.

Otherwise I was interested to see the Contact Babel stand. I'm going to be interested to see their research as it looked like it had a lot of good detail on the state of the UK contact centre market.

All in all, a profitable day.

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.