In the next few years, companies in most industries will be moving their existing low-tech call centres from back office support centres to the front-line of the enterprise.
In this migration, the call centres are being outfitted with the latest in high-tech hardware and software in both voice and data applications. In addition, the focus is moving from only telephone calls to all forms of customer access including email, fax-mail, kiosk and the Internet. Other multimedia customer "touch points" are evolving rapidly in direct response to the customers' demand for access to business-critical information.
Driving this call centre development is the growing awareness that managing customer relationships is a key driver to bottom-line profits. Today's customers greatly value timely accessibility. In fact, the vision of the 'access centre' of the future is to allow customers access to information:
- at any time
- from anywhere
- in any form, and
- for free
This ease of customer access is fast emerging as the critical element of global business strategy. In the not too distant future, customers will deal preferentially with those companies that are deemed to be the most accessible.
Potent weapon
According to research conducted at Purdue University, over 50% of customer interactions will occur through the call centre and the Internet by the end of the year 2000. Fuelled by tremendous advances in the integration of telephone and computer technologies, the call centre has the potential for being the company's most potent weapon for maintaining long-term customer relationships.
For many companies, global competition has reduced products to mere commodities that are difficult to differentiate through features, functions, or price. Having reached parity, where price and quality are the 'table stakes' of doing business, the paradigm shift is definitely towards customer accessibility.
World class call centres are already rising to this challenge, acting as the single point of contact for most customers; as the 'lightning rod' for customer interactions, if you will. For example, General Electric, the world's second biggest company (after Microsoft) has thousands of products spread across more than 80 industrial sectors, but only one phone number to ring if a customer has a problem, whether that problem be with a jet engine or a light bulb.
Customers today are a sophisticated and demanding bunch: they want 24 hour a day accessibility seven days a week. 68% of people say they leave a supplier because of ‘poor customer service’. At Purdue, we looked further into those who leave because of poor customer service, and found that, in over 50% of these cases, 'poor customer service' in fact meant poor accessibility. (Source: Jon Anton, Purdue University).
So, of the total number of customers who stop using a company's products because of a bad service experience, over 50% do so because the company is not accessible enough for them.
Poor accessibility
Perhaps 50% of call centres in the USA are doing a lousy job at delivering the levels of accessibility customers now expect. Purdue University's annual benchmarking survey (Link: Research Reports section of our eResearch Store for more info.) provides evidence for this and makes it clear that most support technology in call centres is developed piecemeal as 'band aid' solutions. But, there is a clear move to re-tool or, better, re-engineer the supporting technology that underlies call centres to upgrade them into real customer access centres.
The technology
So, where do you start? First, you need to identify your customer 'touch points' - how the customer comes into contact with you. At Purdue, we have identified twenty-three such touch points, from face-to-face to the telephone on through Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) to e-mail and so on. For each of these media you have to build the case on a cost per transaction basis that needs to be worked out machine-to-machine, in the case of most touch points, and person-to-person in the case of the face-to-face contacts.
At a higher level you need to build a universal agent approach into your infrastructure that enables you to handle any type of incoming communication - whether telephone call, email, self-service kiosk (e.g. ATM machine) or whatever - on any issue and integrate your corporate information in such a way that representatives in the customer access centre have access to answers.
Trends in Access Centres
| From | To |
| Calls | Transactions |
| Call Handling | Caller profiles |
| Voice | Cyber calls |
| Agent productivity | Agent profitability |
| Proprietary data | Shared data |
| Access Centre | Enterprise Centre |
| Personal service | Self-service |
Copyright Dr Jon Anton, Purdue University
Knowledgeware
So now we are seeing software workbenches that can merge information coming in from different customer access points. The software should also be able to arm your customer service representatives with answers. The capability now exists for a representative to type the customer's perception of the problem into a window, with the software then telling them how many possible solutions there are to that particular customer inquiry.
The representative talks the customer through each one and tells the computer when they hit one that works. This approach, known as knowledgeware, enables the computer to house and grow its own knowledge base and use this to generate ideas, refining its knowledge as it is used, since each interaction adds to the knowledge base. The representative, meanwhile, can concentrate on interacting with the customer.
Middleware
Perhaps the most critical and undervalued segment of your technology infrastructure as you move towards enterprise-wide access to information is likely to be a layer of software known as middleware.
When it comes to integrating corporate information from disparate databases that were not necessarily designed originally as compatible data sources, middleware can provide the magic key. This middle piece of the technology is currently unfashionable, known by technology vendors, rather unflatteringly, as the 'plumbing' that enables information held in different formats to be integrated and presented to the call centre agent in a consistent format.
Middleware acts as a smoothing layer or bridge across databases, breaking your people out of scenarios such as "I'm sorry, that information is in our sales ledger and I do not have access to that database from here"; the kind of scenario that frustrates customers and sends them elsewhere.
Tracking
As we should all know by now, technology deployment without an awareness of the business processes the technology is fulfilling is a recipe for failure, so another element you need to deliver total accessibility is the ability to track your agents’ technology usage.
Again, the capability exists now to track a representative as they navigate through a screen. Every action can be captured as a datapoint - who is calling, the nature of the query, where the representative went to find the answer and so on. This ability to track gives you the 'process piece' you need as part of the jigsaw that makes up total accessibility. Several major vendors now specialise in this specific customer contact-tracking arena, more popularly known as Customer Interaction Management.
Awareness
But, the answer to total accessibility does not lie in the technology alone. Technology capability, generally, far exceeds our ability to use it. The real genius in building accessibility is how to properly apply these various pieces of the whole, and this demands business awareness of opportunities.
Here's an example of the difference awareness of the importance of access can make: a printer manufacturer's call centre was performing well, so the Chief Finance Officer thought. The abandonment rate was 14%, so 86% of callers were getting through successfully. But, when my students at Purdue began researching the 14%, or 6,500 calls per month, that did not get through, a different picture emerged.
The students called a sample of them (the callers who had abandoned) to ask what they had done. They found that 38% had sent their printer back because of the unanswered calls. We calculated the value of the direct returns, added to that the market damage caused by these customers telling others not to buy from that company and found that the 14% abandonment rate, which had been acceptable to the company, was costing $5 million. That is the business consequence of a lack of customer accessibility.
Building relationships: an example
A true access centre builds relationships with customers and enables their comments to change the enterprise itself and what it does. Step One is to get the customer to constantly tell you what he or she wants. Step Two is to act on that.
An example is the customer-designed hand drill. A customer called the access centre of a leading manufacturer of power tools and asked how they could hold the drill straight enough to be sure they were drilling holes at the right angle. Because the company was serious about acting on customer comments, this comment was fed through to the product development department.
The result? A handheld drill with a bubble spirit level built in. In other words, the company brought an innovative product to market inspired by customer needs. The call centre provided the medium.
ACCESSIBILITY impacts IMAGE impacts REVENUE
Increasingly, ease of accessibility impacts your organisation's image, which, in turn, impacts revenue. Evidence for this causal link can be seen in the annual CLEO awards - the advertising industry's equivalent of the Oscars.
An analysis of the awards in recent years by my students at Purdue shows that there is a drift away from an emphasis on product features in advertisements towards service and accessibility.
Organisations emphasise how easy they are to do business with in their commercials, focusing, for example on 24 hour, 365 day a year accessibility and, in one case, suggesting you check the speed of response of the company's helpdesk before you buy their product.
Accessibility can provide the 'WOW' factor that people talk about as differentiating a great organisation from an average one. We recently finished a study at Purdue that showed your organisation's image leads revenue by around one year. In other words, initiatives that improve your image among your existing and potential customer base tend to work through to revenue gains over a twelve month period.
The reason accessibility has become the new strategic weapon of differentiation is that ease of customer access leads to the shift in image that impacts revenue.
Conclusion
Today's organisations need to develop a customer-access focus, by which I mean an arrangement of people, process and technology that leads to predictably positive experiences at all customer "touch points".
By developing your call centre into a fully-fledged customer access centre you can use it to build relationships with your customers that will, in turn, drive revenue and profits. The causal link through which access builds customer loyalty is that customers will come to rely on you.
To accomplish this you need:
Firstly, to get your technological tools in place, as outlined in this article
Secondly, ensure the software infrastructure within which these tools operate is in shape. Almost inevitably this will involve deploying the smoothing layer of infrastructure technology known as 'middleware'
Thirdly, ensure you have great people using the technology; people who empathise with customers and delight in the responsiveness the technology allows them to deliver.
Great people are often seen as the defining factor in customer service delivery. But, great people, without the technological backup outlined in this article will simply not have the enterprise-wide access to information needed to deliver what customers want
Integrating information resources energises the enterprise to serve customers better - good customer service agents tell us they actually feel joy in front of a screen that delivers great accessibility because they love how much they can offer the customer and the job satisfaction that it delivers.
Developing these three areas of investment will give your organisation the three-point landing (rather than a one-wheeled approach) needed to develop an image and reputation for great customer access.
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