Rekindling the call centre passion

Rarely has there been such a perfect example of the love-hate relationship than that of the UK nation with call centres. Consumers rely on their services, yet when it comes to making contact and engaging with a call centre, the experience can often be frustrating.

One consultancy (Bain & Co) estimated that while 80 per cent of organisations believe they are delivering superior levels of service, only eight per cent of their customers agree with them. Dr Nicola Millard, customer experience futurologist at BT, sums it up succinctly: "The contact centre is clearly broken because nobody likes ringing them and employees don't necessarily like working in them either."

Her current preoccupation is looking at ways to bring the estranged couple back together - and she predicts the increasing adoption of two emerging models.

The authority with authority

First, by giving more authority and knowledge to front line agents it is possible to turn them into advisors, who are actually able to meet the customer’s need, not just the company’s. However, this idea of mass customisation - personalisation at low cost - is highly dependent on support from 'artificial intelligence'.

Millard explains: "People need more and more knowledge in this environment. If someone is going to move from agent to advisor they need access to really effective knowledge bases to help them do their job. These knowledge bases must be able to help the agent navigate vast amounts of data without overwhelming the inevitable constraints of short-term memory. A lot of intelligent technology needs to be embedded in these systems."

Second, she believes there will be move toward a network of experts. This approach meets the customer's desire to have direct contact with a knowledgeable person who can action what it is the customer needs done. These experts might be sited anywhere in the world and anywhere in the organisation - they may even be based at home (so-called 'home-shoring').

"This model explodes the notion of a centralised centre, which is can be a bottleneck in terms of trying to solve customer problems," argues Millard, though for this approach to work it needs systems capable of highly complex skills-based routing and intelligent triage in order to link the customer to the correct expert, while taking account of expert availability and flexible working times.

The price of failure

Of course in a future customer support network, it is very likely that customers will sometimes connect with people who are not employees. Millard says: "As a company you can take two stances on web 2.0. You can either be very upset that customers are talking to other customers and not talking to you and ignore them, or you can get involved."

"Online help services and applications like BT's Hubbub enable organisations to learn what people are doing with your products and services. They can help you to learn the solutions to problems and then use those solutions to modify your own knowledge bases and enhance the service you give customers. All round, they can be very cost effective."

BT is already taking note of Millard's predictions. It has started introducing intelligent call routing to ensure calls reach the right advisor more quickly, while a data analysis tool rolled out last year to reduce complaints and proactively spot customers likely to churn is estimated to be saving around £25m per annum. In the call centres of the future, it is all about making the data work harder, not the people.