The fix is in: repairing the contact centre

Nobody looks forward to making a call to a corporate contact centre. Well, maybe shut-ins. Most of us dread it, and with good reason.You wear out your fingers navigating a convoluted, ambiguous IVR system, wait on hold for an unconscionably long time, then get an agent who is a) abrupt, b) uninterested, c) speaks poorly, d) can't answer your simplest questions or e) all of the above. Worst case: nothing is resolved, you have to call back again or wait for them to call you.The Yankee Group periodically surveys contact centre customers to find out what's bugging them. "The major reason customers are frustrated is that they don't get first-contact resolution," says Ken Landoline, the firm's program manager for enterprise research. "That's just not happening enough."Other sources of frustration? Contact centre agents don't have complete information in front of them about your relationship with their company so can't respond to all of your queries or serve all your needs quickly. Systems aren't personalized in any way - however good a customer you are, every time you call, you have to listen to the same IVR options, most of which are irrelevant to you. The contact centre is simply badly run - nobody answers, the agent is surly.As vital as it often is to ensuring customer satisfaction, the contact centre is usually the thing about your company customers hate the most. Bad experiences, all too common, can chip away at their loyalty, or drive them directly into the arms of competitors. Many, if not all, of those bad experiences, however, are preventable. New management approaches and tools, and new contact centre technologies can boost agent performance and customer satisfaction.In recent articles, we've looked at the benefits of using skills-based routing to ensure the agent who handles a call has the skills and knowledge to be able to help this particular customer, and of extending the call centre out into the larger enterprise so that agents can quickly and easily find the expertise they need if they don't have it themselves. What else can you do? No big surprises here. Pick the right agents. Make it easy for customers to reach them. Give them the information they need to do their jobs. Constantly evaluate and coach them in response to evaluations. Measure success by gauging customer satisfaction, not call hold time or average time to answer. Sounds simple, but how to do it? Here's what we found.Pick the right agentsVirgin Mobile Canada, the Toronto-based MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator), won a JD Power Award for Customer Satisfaction in Prepaid Mobile in its first year in business in 2005. A good part of that success was down to the contact centre, managed at the time by Nancy Tichbon, director of customer experience. Note the job title. Tichbon attributed her success to her people, but said that selecting the right people in the first place was crucial.The multi-step process for selecting contact centre agents at Virgin is tough and time consuming, but worth it, Tichbon said. It starts with telephone screening. Candidates who sound good then have to complete grammar and numerical skills tests online. Next, they go through personality profiling, with questions designed to determine if they have the right drive and desire. The hiring committee then analyses candidates' strengths and weaknesses and ultimately invites the most promising in for face-to-face interviews.Virgin doesn't necessarily go for the most experienced candidates. Attitude and drive are more important. "We can teach almost anyone to be a brilliant communicator or to troubleshoot a broken phone," Tichbon was quoted as saying in Call Center magazine, "but we can't train someone to have a fire in their belly for exceeding our customers' expectations."As Landoline notes, many companies put prospective agents through rigorous testing, mostly in an effort to reduce churn. Recruiting and training an agent can cost over $10,000. If the person leaves after a few months or weeks, it's money wasted. But the Virgin experience makes clear that finding the right agents also, and perhaps as or more importantly, helps ensure better customer service - and higher customer satisfaction levels.A few companies offer technology-based tools for testing prospects, including putting candidates through simulations to see how they respond. Employment Technologies Corp., a US-based company, offers a suite of tools, including the PC-based Call Center Simulation product, part of its EASy Hiring Solution. Call Center Simulation presents candidates with simulated customer situations and asks them to choose from multiple responses to a customer's query. The program automatically grades responses and generates reports.Other modules in the EASy Hiring Solution: Team Leader Readiness Simulation, to help select and develop future team leaders; e.SKILLS Simulation, to assess basic skills such as keyboarding and written communication; Call Center Fit Index, to screen out applicants likely to leave prematurely, and; Structured Employment Interview, recruitment interview plans and scripts tailored to inbound agents, outbound agents or team leaders.LIMRA International Inc. markets a similar suite, the ExSel Selection System. It in fact shares two modules with the Employment Technologies product - Call Center Simulation and e.SKILLS Simulation. But the LIMRA suite includes a couple of interesting additions. The LIMRA Productivity Index is a personality test designed to measure interpersonal and service traits that promote positive client relationships. With the CultureFit module, candidates answer questions about the kind of work environment they find appealing. It provides an objective measure of how well they're likely to fit into your office.Making connectionsMany customers simply don't like IVR systems. Landoline quotes research suggesting that 30% hang up when they hear an IVR prompt. Yet many companies, he points out, are making it difficult or impossible for callers to reach a local office or a line with a live agent. That means a big chunk of customers is left unserved.Why the antipathy to IVR? Too often it's done badly so customers expect the worst. Rather than waste time going through a probably unsuccessful process, they'll avoid it.Even the simplest design principles are frequently ignored. Research consistently shows that, faced with more than three or four IVR options, callers will hit zero to reach an operator, reducing system efficiency and making it more difficult to connect customers with the right agent. Yet companies continue to present long, multi-tier menus.There is no excuse for poor IVR system design. Advice on how to do it is easy enough to find, some of it free. Amberlight Partners Ltd., a British design consultancy specializing in "human computer interactions," offers IVR usability guidelines at its website. They seem obvious but the evidence of bad IVR systems suggests otherwise.Examples? Tightly edit IVR scripts to make them as succinct as possible without sacrificing meaning. Put the most often used options first in a menu. Make it sound natural - record all options in one take to get correct intonation. Avoid long silences of more than three seconds that might lead callers to think the system has failed. Build prototypes and test them on real customers. Make menus adaptive so callers don't follow a call routing option to a department that has closed for the day.For more radical, customer-centric guidelines, check the Gethuman standard published last year by Boston consumer advocate Paul English (http://www.gethuman.com/standard/). It's more an IVR bill of rights. Always allow callers to zero out and queue for a human operator. Give an accurate estimated wait-time. Never ask callers to repeat personal information. If no human is available, offer the option of a call back. Let callers use DTMF as a fallback in speech-based systems. Allow them to dial through or barge in. Don't disconnect callers for user errors.Not many IVR systems I've encountered meet the Gethuman certification standard.The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, a non-profit professional association formed in 1957, offers human factors design standards, including HFES 200 Human Factors Engineering of Software User Interfaces, updated last year, which the society sells to non-members for US$200. Part 4 of HFES 200 deals specifically with IVR systems. Or for about US$135, you can buy a set of IVR design guidelines developed in 1995 by the International Standards Organization (ISO) - ISO/IEC 13714:1995.One more source: the website for Ascent Group Inc., a US-based consultancy specializing in customer service operations, makes available a useful extract from its research report, IVR Improvement Strategies 2006. The extract is titled "Improving IVR Self-Service." (http://www.ascentgroup.com/research/sum_ivr.html) Consultant Roberta Fox, senior partner in Fox Group Consulting, argues that speech-based IVR technology has reached maturity and now offers a very good way to make IVR more palatable to customers by providing a free-form, natural language interface. Products are available that can interpret commands from speakers of virtually any regional dialect, she points out, something that was not possible in the past.According to Fox, speech-based systems tend to work poorly when the surrounding business rules are also designed poorly. "Initially failed because of the quality of the technology," she says. "Now the technology has caught up, but haven't gone back and improved the processes. This is a technology that is under-utilized that could really help improve ."Information pleaseBut companies need to do more than just refine contact centre front-ends with better-designed or more human-like IVR, Landoline says. They also need to personalize the customer experience.Part of that could come from the system knowing who the customer is, based on calling line ID. Just knowing basic customer information won't be enough, though. For effective personalization, the system must have a "360-degree" view, including all the customer's dealings with the company. That comprehensive view is also needed by agents to help them provide more effective service.This is a larger IT issue, not just a contact centre concern, but when Yankee Group surveyed contact centre managers last year about their biggest challenges, 78% of respondents said they were somewhat or very challenged by getting agents a 360-degree view of customers. ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software vendors such as SAP AG are starting now to make it easier, Landoline says."More and more companies are moving in the direction of consolidating and integrating databases to get a complete history in one place. It's definitely high on the to-do list for leading-edge companies."If the company knows who is calling, it can build intelligence into the front end to predict why the customer is calling and either personalize IVR menus to make it easier for the caller to get to the agent they need quickly or tailor screen pops to give agents the information they're most likely to need on the call so they can provide faster service.Examples? If a customer is calling a bank three days after receiving his credit card bill, he's probably calling about a questionable charge on his account. Give him that menu option first and pop up his credit card statement on the agent's desktop.Landoline offers a slightly different kind of example, one he's actually seen in action. When his Wall Street Journal wasn't delivered one day recently, he called and reached the usual IVR system. It asked him to give his account and phone numbers and promised to credit his subscription for the missed paper. When his paper wasn't delivered a second day the same week, the IVR system behaved differently, presumably because it knew the recent history."It was sensitive enough to realize that Ken might be upset by now and it put me directly through to a live agent who arranged to send out a copy of the paper that day," Landoline says. "That kind of personalized customer care, that kind of tool can be very helpful."Getting comprehensive customer information to the IVR system and to the agent is part of the solution. Sometimes, though, agents need more targeted information - how to solve this customers problem right now, without having to put her on hold for five minutes or transferring her to somebody else. Several vendors offer technology solutions to help contact centre managers develop knowledge bases with ready-made solutions or to help agents more quickly and accurately search existing information on the network.Knova Contact Center from Knova Software, a subsidiary of CRM system vendor Consona Corp., is a knowledge management system tailored for contact centres that can be integrated with contact management and CRM systems. It uses a variety of technologies and techniques, including adaptive search and navigation, patented auto-classification and segmentation methods, online interviews and collaborative support to help agents zero in on the information they need - either information specially prepared for their use, or already in the enterprise network. It can also learn from agent use to improve future search accuracy.Cynergy Knowledge Center, part of the Cynergy Help Desk solution from Cynergy Software Inc., provides Web-based tools for creating, searching and viewing articles, resolutions, announcements, FAQs and how-to documents.RightNow Technologies Inc. offers a comprehensive CRM solution for call centres that includes a self-learning knowledge-base module. RightNow Knowledge Base builds content based on questions customers ask and information agents provide. It uses artificial intelligence to continuously self-tune searching. And it lets users stamp content with a "freshness date" to remind subject-matter experts to review and update when necessary.Landoline says that knowledge-base tools may only work really well for customer interactions where cookie-cutter answers to standard questions tend to be the norm - in IT help desks, for example. "You definitely have to look at it by vertical market to identify where it might be helpful to agents," he says. These are just some of the tools contact centre operators can use to improve - there are plenty more. In the near future, Telemanagement will publish part II of this article, which explores the educational side of the equation, as well as how to measure success.DirectoryEmployment Technologies Corp., recruitment tools, http://www.etc-easy.com/LIMRA International Inc., recruitment tools, http://contactcenter.limra.com/Default.aspx Amberlight Partners Ltd., IVR design guidelines, www.ivr-usability.com./guidelines.htmGethuman, IVR standard, http://gethuman.com/standard/v1.0.htmlHuman Factors and Ergonomics Society, IVR design standard, http://www.hfes.org/ISO, IVR design standard, http://www.iso.org/Ascent Group Inc., consulting, IVR improvement, www.ascentgroup.com/ Knova Software, knowledge management software for call centres, http://www.knova.com/Cynergy Software, knowledge base creation tools, http://www.decima.com/Documents%20and%20Settings/Stefan%20Work/Local%20Settings/Temp/www.cynergysoftware.com RightNow Technologies Inc., knowledge base creation tools, http://www.decima.com/Documents%20and%20Settings/Stefan%20Work/Local%20Settings/Temp/www.rightnow.com

The fix is in: repairing the contact centre

News | June 20, 2007

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