Category Archives: Call Center

Outsourcing your call center? Be careful it doesn’t hurt customer satisfaction

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We speak to many companies that have outsourced some or all of their call center operations. The economic benefits usually appear as expected. But there is a downside: Customer satisfaction can deteriorate.

Watch out for a drop-off in customer satisfaction

Analyst Jon Arnold wrote recently:

Outsourcing the contact center provides economic and operational benefits, but along with that often comes depersonalization. Once out-of-sight-out-of-mind creeps into your contact center, that’s an invitation for customer satisfaction drop-off – and that could easily offset the earlier mentioned benefits of outsourcing.

That drop-off can have a big impact

The recent Customer Experience Report explains why small decreases in customers satisfaction can have a bigger impact than you’d expect:

Customer service is still the number one reason consumers recommend an organization, more than products or price” and “Word of mouth is the number one influence on consumers’ purchasing decisions (76 percent), followed by customer reviews and online feedback at 49 percent.

Fonolo can help

If you are a company that has gone down this path, we think Fonolo can help quickly and easily. By adding Fonolo to your site, you get a new front-end to the call center and you get direct control of how the call options are presented to your callers. Best of all, you don’t have to change anything with your outsourced provider. (In fact, they don’t even need to know!) In addition to fine-tuning the naming and placement of calling options you can set up post call surveys to find out exactly how your customers feel and what aspects of the interaction are causing grief.

Join us for an upcoming webinar on reducing your call center costs

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I’m thrilled to report that our next webinar will focus on ROI!

Normally I’m the first one to extol the technical virtues of using Fonolo – how we can add visual navigation, virtual queuing, pre-call questions, etc. without requiring any integration at the call center (this is the engineer in me).

But what our customers really want to know is … how can Fonolo save them money and provide a postive ROI?  So here’s a great opportunity to find out – join us on Thurs Apr 28 at 2 PM EDT.

Fonolo ROI: How adding a visual interface to your call center can reduce costs and delight your customers

Here’s a brief summary of the event:

Does your call center suffer from aggravating phone menus, long hold times, transfers between agents, or repeating info unnecessarily? If so, then these flaws are leading to frustrated customers, increased handle times, unresolved calls, and potentially millions of dollars in added costs.

Until now, fixing these flaws has required costly and time-consuming upgrades to call center equipment. Fonolo offers you a new way forward.

Fonolo’s cloud-based approach works completely independently of your call center infrastructure, which means speedy setup and no deployment costs. By adding a visual interface to your call center, Fonolo can reduce misnavigation, add virtual queuing and collect pre-call information. The bottom line: You will watch your call center costs go down, and caller satisfaction go up.

Join us for our upcoming webinar were we will share our best practices on maximizing your call center’s dollar and how Fonolo provides positive ROI rapidly.

 

Your hold times (and other dirty laundry) are on Twitter right now

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Hold times have always been a closely guarded secret of the industry. Companies still don’t publish them in any official sense. Occasionally the press will investigate and report as Time Magazine did at the end of 2010 (See Shai’s post “eBay scolded for long hold times”.) However, Twitter is bringing a new form of real-time accountability to this game.

A fun experiment

Here’s a fun experiment: go to http://search.twitter.com and type “on hold with”. The results that you will see aren’t exactly “hard data” but you can quickly get a sense of which companies are doing well by their customers and which are not. This is a real-time always-on scoreboard for your company’s efforts.

A new accountability

If you run a call center, this means that you have a new form of accountability. It means that hold times are no longer just an internal metric that eventually has an impact on customer satisfaction. The connection between the two is now much faster. Will prospective customers see complaints about hold time when they do a search on your company name?

How to fix it

If you don’t have a big budget for new agents (and not many people do these days) then virtual queuing is the answer. There are a few solutions out there today to choose from, but if you are looking for something that is inexpensive and requires no changes to your call center infrastructure, Fonolo’s Hold-For-Me service is ideal. Check it out and feel free to contact me if you want a free trial.

Remember this great quote:

… a sore neck and a sweaty ear do not a happy customer make.

– Jessica Sebor, Mar 2010, The 2010 CRM Service Awards

 

The ubiquity of multi-site call centers

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I wrote on my blog recently about the prevalence today of multi-sited call centers. My guess is that nearly every company with significant call volume (>100 million calls/year) is multi-sited to some extent.

“Multi-sited” typically means that the company runs multiple call centers or that it outsources some of its calls to a 3rd party. I extend the definition to also include companies that outsource all of their calls to a 3rd party because, from my vantage point, it leads to the same issues. Being multi-sited has a large impact on the customer experience because it impedes innovation and optimization.

Being multi-sited impedes optimization

Being multi-sited impedes optimization simply because it is very hard to coordinate changes across multiple sites. Even before multi-site situations became popular, there was often an organization schism between the people running the call center and the people close to the business objectives of customer satisfaction and improving revenue. Thus even simple changes like changing an IVR prompt that is clear need of fixing become difficult to synchronize.

Analyst Jon Arnold wrote recently:

In these scenarios [multi-site operations] one of the biggest challenges faced by enterprises is providing a consistent experience across all locations.

Being multi-sited impedes innovation

On a larger scale, this issue impedes innovation because 1) It is rare for any two call centers to be built on identical technology and 2) There are no standards for interoperability between call center equipment. The result is incompatible proprietary systems which means that call centers have to fall back on the lowest common denominator functionality. The following quote says it all:

Most midsize to large contact centers are based on complex and unstable architectures that integrate many disparate technologies into distinct, unique and costly combinations of components … [even] acquiring an IVR system from vendors such as Avaya, Nortel Networks and Genesys does not ensure tight integration with those companies’ ACD or CTI products.

– Yankee Group, “VoIP and Lower TCO will Drive Adoption of Hosted
On-Demand Contact Centers”, April 2006

Fonolo to the rescue

Fonolo is particularly well suited for a world of multi-sited call centers. That’s because the product lives “outside” the realm of the call center equipment. We like to think of it as a layer above the call center implementation that gives a new level of control to the business owners, without requiring any changes to the call center infrastructure.

 

The future of the call center is a visual interface

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We have believed for several years that the rise of the smart phone is driving the call center towards its next major leap forward.

More smartphones, more mobile apps

All the data we’ve seen continues to support this:

All this adds up to support the premise that more and more calls will originate from a smart phone via some form of click-to-call or tap-to-call approach. What does this mean for the call center?

The future of the call center is a visual interface

The smartphone is going to drive the next generation of call center experience and, most notably, will drive it towards a visual interface. To understand why,  consider the context of the customer when he calls in the call center. For the last decade a growing fraction of callers have been in front of a web browser when placing a call. (In talking with a large bank’s retail group recently, we heard that a third of their callers are on the website when they place the call.)

Now combine that with the growing number of callers that are on a smartphone. The sum of those two will soon be, if not already, a majority of callers. And what’s special about those two contexts? In both cases, the caller has an interactive visual interface at his disposal. That interface, if used properly, can vastly improve the calling experience while reducing the cost for the company. Fonolo makes it possible and, more importantly, easy for any company to do just that.

A tremendous opportunity for the call center

More than anything else, this is a big opportunity for companies with a call center. The incredible power in the smartphone can fix many of the frustrations that currently plague the calling experience: menu navigation, waiting on hold, data entry. But only if that power is used.

The hidden cost of misnavigation in your call center

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What is misnavigation?

A call is considered misnavigated if a caller connects to the wrong agent to handle the request. This can be the result of the user misunderstanding the IVR or simply “zeroing-out” for some other reason. In any case, the first agent has to assess the call, inform the caller that he needs a different agent, perform the internal transfer, log the call and then rejoin the queue. These extra steps add significantly to the overall handle time.

The cost

To calculate how much misnavigation is adding to the cost of your call center, you need to get: 1) Your misnavigation rate, 2) Average time it takes for an agent to handle an internal transfer 3) Average cost of agent time. This figure will then help you put it all together:

The impact of misnavigation

I go through this calculation with companies all the time and it is part of the Fonolo ROI calculator. If you would like to know more, feel free to contact me

But that’s only half the story

There is another cost to misnavigation: frustrated customers, decreased loyalty and lower Net Promoter Scores.  A study conducted by Kingston Communications, shows the level of frustration with phone menu navigation. Respondents were asked what annoyed them most when calling customer service lines: First place (54%), was “overseas staff”. Second place (22%) was “the need to navigate automated responses”.

Can you afford not to give your callers a better alternative?

Success of Google’s Click to Call shows an important trend for call centers

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Google’s click-to-call ad program, which started only a year ago, is generating “millions of calls every month” said a Google SVP Jonathan Rosenberg. That quote came from a post by Greg Sterling called “A Year Later Even Google Surprised By Success Of Click-To-Call”.

People want cross from browsing to calling

How does this relate to Fonolo and your call center? It is more evidence that people have a strong desire to “cross channels”. That is, they want to cross from browsing to calling. While Google’s program is aimed at off-site marketing (via AdWords) the same applies to converting people who are on your site.

Especially in a mobile context

This is especially true of mobile users. Whether they are browsing your site via a mobile browser or using your custom mobile app, giving them an efficient way to connect with your call center is critical.

Since smartphone penetration continues to grow rapidly, the impact of doing so is going to get greater and greater. Sterling asked Google exec Surojit Chatterjee about this and the response was that the product is available around the world but that call volumes “follow the growth of smartphones.” Exactly as you would expect.

Your mobile site needs to include smart phone calls

If you’ve spent the time to design a mobile version of your site, and you haven’t given users an intelligent way to cross to the voice channel, you are missing opportunity. One of the great things about Fonolo is that, once implemented, it works on your regular site, your mobile site and even as part of your mobile application. (Some demos here.)

 

Why are your customers still waiting on hold?

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Waiting on hold is consistently one of the top complaints about phone-based customer service. One way to eliminate hold time is to hire enough agents that one is always available. Of course, this is cost prohibitive for most companies! Another way is to implement a virtual queuing (VQ) solution. Shai has written a great series of posts on our VQ offering, Hold-for-Me, on his blog. See, for example:

There are some great cost-savings arguments that support the case for VQ. (I’ve been spending a lot of time working through these scenarios with prospective customers.) But I believe the best case for it is the uplift in customer satisfaction. In today’s hyper-connected world, delivering a superior experience to your customer is something that echoes quickly and has long-lasting impact. I just came across this quote that sums it up nicely:

… a sore neck and a sweaty ear do not a happy customer make.

– Jessica Sebor, Mar 2010, The 2010 CRM Service Awards.

eBay scolded for long hold times

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Time Magazine took eBay to task last week for long hold times, and other matters, complaining that eBay had disconnected some of its toll-free lines. The auction giant has recently made an effort to offload call volume to a live chat offering, seeking to lower costs. Although the company promised that wait times for a chat session would be “under five minutes”, the reporter recounted a much different experience:

[I] tried the online chat on three different occasions on three different days with delays of one to four hours to reach a rep.… I had time to cook dinner, eat it, do the dishes, vacuum my apartment and rifle through TV channels — only to find I was still number 30-something in the slow-moving online queue.

Reversing course?

On the phone front, Chad O’Meara, vice president of global customer service, admitted that “low volume buyers and sellers do not currently receive telephone support” except for a few site categories. But it looks like they’re reversing course on this thing. O’Meara then said that they plans to ramp up the call center with additional agents offer phone service to all customers by the end of 2011.

A lesson to be learned

What’s the lesson? There is no substitute for a live conversation with a real person. Yes, it is expensive. For a company built on the low-cost platform of online self-serve, I’m sure it’s painful to look at the costs of phone support. But ultimately, that’s the way to earn and keep high-value customers.

Luckily, there are other ways to cut down on the costs of call center operations.

  1. Give people a way to connect directly to the type of agent they need and skip the phone menus. Avoid “zero-outs” and other misnavigation that makes it frustrating for callers and more expensive for the call center.
  2. Collect what information you can before the call and pass that on to the agent. Nothing lowers costs faster than reducing the time an agent spends on a call.
  3. Make the experience as pleasant as possible – virtual queuing and post-call surveys are a great way to do that. Happy callers lead to quick calls. Plenty of data backs that up.

The good news is that Fonolo can do this for eBay or your company, and it doesn’t take much to set up.

Read the full story here: On Hold at eBay: Customer Service Lines Go Dead

Recent press coverage over the virtual queuing debate

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As a follow up to my last post on virtual queuing, here is some coverage on the topic from the last month…

Focus.com

One of the biggest challenges facing any contact center is minimizing the hold time for callers… Sirius Satellite Radio wants to be as customer-friendly as possible to attract new subscribers … If you visit their Contact Us page, you’ll notice a text box [saying] “Don’t wait on hold. Select an option below, enter your phone number and we’ll call you back.” … The company providing this capability is Fonolo, a Toronto-based startup…Virtual queuing really is win-win technology, as it makes contact centers more productive and effective, and it addresses a major shortcoming of the end user experience.

Read full article here.

InsideCTI

It’s a world of cloud computing, Web 2.0, and smartphones. Savvy entrepreneurs are looking at Virtual Queuing in a different light and making it sexy again. VHT, LucyPhone, and Fonolo all aim to improve the customer service experience, but there is clearly a distinction. I believe it is this: Is the solution right in front of the user? If not then I’m afraid it’s part of the problem, especially in a today’s world where user experience is being transformed.

Read full article here.

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