Switch Hack

If you didn’t catch this week’s Cutting Edge program on Call Centre misery, check out the Times article here.

Phone Rage made a valiant attempt to show the often neglected side of the call centre story, but largely missed the point.

Indeed, the brutal fact is that call centre agents have to endure frustrated customers – this may never change. The program certainly highlighted our long held opinion that call centres, (increasingly referred to as contact centres as consumer preferences shift from simply voice to a wider range of email, phone and Internet channels as a means of contact) have the power to transform relationships that brands have with their customers.

However, the program missed the opportunity to make an important point, namely that today in customer service it’s all about RESOLUTION - thereby achieving closure for the customer. To do this brands must use their contact centres to help them understand why the customer was calling, and not just adopt language to pacify them…but this is almost like sticking a big plaster over the bigger issue of why was the customer frustrated in the first place!

All the customers featured in the program were united in the fact that they just wanted their issue resolved. Having to repeat themselves, being passed from pillar to post, enduring endless queues, all merely contributed to the core issue – be it a missing phone or an incorrect bill.

Of course it’s important the agents are able to empathise with customers - that’s why our agents undergo listening psychometric to profile their listening style to match them with the brand project they will be most successful on.

But the main learning to be had from the program must be that contact centres are now a fact of life and they have proven themselves profitable, convenient and essential parts of the brand DNA. The onus now is on the organisations themselves to use the contact centre to listen to WHY their customers are calling and evolve their practices where possible to improve customer perceptions – perceptions which typically are formed before the contact centre becomes involved!

The program compounded the fears that all too often contact centres concentrate too much on the traditional measure of how quickly a call is answered, over the more important measures of resolution and customer satisfaction.

For further discussion on this post please visit the Call Centre focus forum.
 

Today’s consumers demand better access to the companies from which they buy goods and services. So it’s not surprising that the communication channels between consumers and brands have a far more important role in determining customer satisfaction and loyalty than they ever have had before.

With the emergence of the commercial aspects of the Web over the past ten years, touch points between companies and customers have come to include corporate websites and email as well as the telephone.

Research between 1999 and 2001 showed that many companies were slow to respond to electronic customer enquiries, with half of all businesses taking more than five days to respond – if indeed they responded at all.

This pattern has not improved in recent years. 78 per cent of British consumers report that they have been disappointed by a slow response to customer service email enquiries, and the average consumer is only willing to wait 24 hours for a reply. Customer expectations regarding their ability to reach suppliers have meant that communication channel management has become a far more important focus in CRM.

Consequently, communication problems have become a more central factor in explaining customer disloyalty, especially if part of larger failures to meet customer expectations. Unresponsiveness, for example, has been identified as a key indicator of ‘service encounter failures’ in customer service switching studies.

In light of the importance of electronic correspondence between businesses and customers in CRM and our understanding of customer loyalty/disloyalty, The Listening Company commissioned research to uncover current consumer perceptions and experiences with electronic and traditional communication with UK businesses.

1,000 participants aged 18 and over, from across the U.K were interviewed in October 2007.  TLC conducted the research  with analysis performed by Dr Alain Samson researcher at London School of Economics.

The report focuses specifically on current customer usage, attitudes and experiences with online messages and email, alongside more traditional marketing channels, such as the telephone and white mail. The results of the report provide information about customer communication preferences, how well companies are able to meet customer expectations, and proposes the implications for companies that do not live up to those expectations.

Summary of Findings

UK consumers prefer to contact online businesses by telephone rather than email. However, women tend to give higher priority to using the phone for both sales and service enquiries than men.

In contrast to consumer expectations, waiting times experienced for telephone enquiries is 113% higher than that desired by consumers (average of 7.2 vs 3.4 minutes). The difference is 81% for electronic messages (average of 25.8 vs 46.7 hours). Finally, traditional mail is 42% slower than wished for by consumers (average of 4.7 vs 6.7 days, with older people expecting a quicker service)

While consumers find it very easy to locate email information on company Web sites, three out of ten people find it difficult to find telephone numbers or mailing addresses on the Internet.

63% of UK consumers say that they have made a purchasing decision on the basis of inadequate response times for either telephone, email or mail queries. Looking at separate communication channels, the figure is particularly high for telephone communication (53%), but significantly lower for both mail and email (about 38% each).

Consumers with higher demands about email response times have not based significantly more negative purchasing decisions on speed of response, indicating that the effect of slow email responses on consumer behaviour is pervasive. For telephone enquiries, on the other hand, consumers with greater patience (i.e. expecting to wait longer) are 12% less likely to have made a negative purchasing decision due to a long wait or lack of response.

British consumers perceive personal information as being significantly more secure when given on the telephone (58.1%) than either on the internet (50.7%) or through the mail (51.1%).

Click here to download the full report

I recently phoned my bank to garner information on various mortgage options.

After a lengthy discussion (with the bank’s call centre) it appeared that there was a selection of about five mortgage products that appeared appropriate for my needs. The shock came when I asked for the literature to be emailed through to me and was told there were no email facilities available.

Imagine having to work for a business that ties your hands behind your back while no doubt demanding various sales conversion rates. On further investigation, it appears that many call centres still only use one or two mediums of communication rather than the full ambit of phone, email, web, sms, letter fax and video.

When you think about it it is rather odd as consumers have been using multiple channels of communication for some years now in every day life. So it would be reasonable to expect any organisation selling to you to be doing so on your terms.

At the moment and in the foreseeable future, the market for financial products (mortgages and loans to you and me) is getting tougher - by all accounts the mortgage lending business is at the point of collapse. This means that every aspect of customer communication will be required to operate fully in the battle to find, win and keep customers in this market.

I went to test drive a car last month – an experience I’d been looking forward to for some time. Everyone had been telling me the car I had in mind was THE car to get and the write-ups all supported their entreaties.

The marketing guys had certainly done their work as I had already pretty much bought into the dream. It was therefore, quite a surprise when my local dealer didn’t seem to really want to sell me the product. The person who was “selling” to me was so inept at building up a rapport or answering my questions, that I became completely turned off the product and consequently decided on another brand.

I am gob smacked that a prestigious company that spends so much money developing an exclusive brand, can be so nonchalant about matching up to expectation, letting down the people who have actually made an effort to engage with their products. It’s the same situation with call centres when businesses spend millions of pounds on “above the line” marketing but then skimp at the point where they are actually talking to their clients and prospective customers!

It’s worth remembering just how important customer advocacy is. People really do talk to each other about their experiences – just as I am here. Not only did I feedback my experience to the original advocate of the stricken brand but I also re-counted my experience to more than a handful of people. Interestingly, this case in point converted me to a different category of car, as I changed my mind and bought a different brand  altogether. It ended up being a case of cheap promotion for the other seller and a customer relations disaster for the company I had eagerly approached.

You really can’t service customer needs without effective communication.

If an enterprise really understands how to send out the right message using the right communication medium at the right time, it will dramatically increase its revenue, reduce its operating costs and increase its word of mouth advocacy by making many customers happy. This is why multi- channel marketing techniques (such as TLC’s EPI applied via its call centres) can play such a significant role in improving the prospects of a business.

One dimensional communication relies on a once-only opportunity to transmit a message, whether it is an entreaty to buy or an attempt to resolve an issue. This is often very complicated and certainly not the way we conduct most of our day to day communication. If we want to build up a relationship with a particular someone, it is done over time and the quality and timing of the communication is pretty crucial. Building relationships in business is no different.

An effective communication normally consists of a series of interactions demonstrating a mutual understanding , then arriving at a mutually satisfactory conclusion. Thus, if you are running a proactive sales campaign the conversion rate from one channel in isolation will be significantly lower than if the channels were combined to deliver a series of interrelated communications. For example, we have found that the intervention of using web chat on a website can increase conversion rates by over 100%.

Let’s take the example of the travel industry:

A potential client might browse the web to investigate a holiday destination and then check out flights and accommodation on the web. At some point they will want more information, on such things as quality of available hotels for example. So, they need to be able to open up communications by email or phone. The respondent will want to communicate with someone who has both good knowledge of the products and has the skills necessary to retain their interest. Ideally, such an agent should also be able to respond with email, phone or with via another channel such as SMS and then sustain a dialogue using whatever medium is preferred by the customer.

Once the transaction is completed, a welcome letter may be dispatched thanking the new client for their business, providing factual details about the trip along with useful information about the holiday location which should all come across in a personal manner.

Just before the holiday an email can be sent acting as a reminder of the holiday details along with any relevant information for the trip on jabs, visa, passport requirements or similar. After the trip a questionnaire can then be emailed back to the client, followed up with a phone call to iron out any possible issues that may have been relayed. The business now has a valuable profile of the new client and other holiday opportunities can be sent to them via a mix of email  and/or brochures combined with SMS prompts.

This simple transaction involves a multitude of individual communications across a number of channels which work to create a complete transaction and to establish a long-term relationship. The transaction needs to be delivered via an all encompassing system that can be used to create an audit trail of the communications and a holistic view of the customer. This in turn generates a greater understanding of what works for each individual.

I think that when people talk about the emergence of new channels they miss the big point:

It is the seamless, integrated use of channels to deliver multiple communications that add up to a successful transaction which makes the difference, not the use of each communication channel on its own. It’s not surprising that an unsolicited SMS promoting a single product will have a very low response, but as a follow up to another conversation once a relationship has been established it becomes a very important channel linking various communications together.

It is inevitable that offline and online disciplines will merge and businesses will start re-organising their plans to accommodate this. Mobile marketing is a case in point; a single use of SMS or call to mobile can be useful but if combined in a multi-channel strategy which takes into account the wider functionality of the application allowing the use of phone, sms, video, web, then it becomes a very powerful application with which to communicate in a professional yet personal manner. If it is just used as a platform to conduct single channel campaigns the returns will be lower and the consumer is more likely to be turned off by what seems a more mechanical and impersonal approach.