Category Archives: Customer Experience

Multi-site call centers make multi-channel communication even harder

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The challenges faced today by the executive in charge of customer service are very different from what they were ten years ago. Since I spend most of my days talking to these executives I have a front-row seat to the dramatic change that is happening in the industry.

The success of the call center used to be measurable with a few key metrics: Average hold time, average handle time, cost per call, first call resolution, etc.  But today the dominant challenge is how to manage the different communication channels: Web, phone call, email, chat and social media. In particular, it can be very tricky to keep the experience consistent across those various channels.

Consistency is a big challenge

What makes those challenges even tougher is that, for a company with large call volume (>10m calls per year), it’s a good bet that the call center is multi-site to some extent.  Being multi-sited makes it harder to achieve consistency because it impedes both innovation and optimization. Read Shai’s recent post on this for a great overview.

In [multi-site operations] one of the biggest challenges … is providing a consistent experience across all locations…  A hosted contact center environment provides a centralized platform from which to do that, and is more flexible than premise-based solutions that can be difficult to manage across multiple sites, regions, time zones, broadband reliability, communications protocols, etc.

– Jon Arnold, Industry Analyst

Fonolo can help

One of our goals at Fonolo is help provide a consistent interface. Behind the scenes, our system automatically stays in sync with your IVR, so all the business rules that are tied to that system are propagated to the visual interface on your website (click-to-call) and your mobile app (tap-to-call). If you want to find out more, drop me a note.

Fonolo fixes the dreaded “data pass-through” problem

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Our mission at Fonolo is to fix common aggravations with the call center experience. One common aggravation is the “data pass-through” problem. You may not have heard this phrase before, but you have surely experienced it. Whenever you are asked for information by the IVR and then asked for the same information again by the agent, the culprit is broken data-pass-through.

Why is it so common?

Fixing this integration point seems like an obvious investment for companies to make. Clearly the time required for agents to collect account numbers (or other “call attached” data) has a real cost. As does the aggravation of customers that answer the agent’s request by saying: “I just punched in my number! Why don’t you have that information?”

The problem usually arises because 1) the company is running multiple call centers; 2) it is rare for any two call centers to be built on identical technology; and 3) 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” Yankee Group, April 2006.

Fonolo to the rescue

Fonolo can fix this problem because it lives “outside” the realm of the call center equipment. With our visual interface the caller can enter information before the call and it gets delivered to the agent, regardless of the way the call center is built.

Pre-call questions

You can find out more here.

 

Kids these days…

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We all know that poor customer experience will send your customers packing. If your target demographic is the 18-25 year olds, then you have an especially tough challenge.

From CustomerManagementIQ:

Purdue University conducted a study on 18-25 year olds and found 100 percent of customers who were unsatisfied with their call center experience said they would refrain from purchasing from the company again. For all other age groups the number dropped to 63 percent. Call centers should consider this a call to arms. Gen Y’ers expect their customer service encounters to mirror the speed, agility and simplicity of their smart phones, iPods and flat screens. But so far the call center industry has failed to do so.

Read the full article.

 

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.

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

 

Will cloud-based call centers fix the experience problem?

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One of the major trends in the world of contact centers is the move to a fully hosted approach, aka “call center in the cloud”. Gartner predicts that by 2013, at least 75% of customer call centers will use a form of Software-as-a-Service in their call centers.

This trend mirrors the transition that many other enterprise systems have undergone. (e.g. using Salesforce.com for hosted CRM). The economic arguments are the same ones that were used for those transitions as well: remove the burden of maintaining hardware and software, replace CapEx with OpEx, benefit from more regular upgrades. The call center has been slower to make this move compared to other services because of the need for tight coupling with agents, but now the trend is in full swing, as evidenced by the success of companies like Five9, LiveOps and others.

Will the cloud bring us better customer experience?

I’ve often noted the poor customer experience delivered by the average call center. Will a move to the cloud alleviate the flaws? In some ways yes. Because the upgrade cycle on the hosted system should be faster, various flaws that are caused by legacy lock-in should be alleviate.

Premise-based contact centers will be hard pressed to keep up with the latest tools, let alone innovate with new applications of their own… [And] as we move further along the spectrum towards… the case for hosted solutions gets stronger for contact centers…

– Jon Arnold, Industry Analyst, Building the case for hosted call centers

Partly cloudy is no good.

However there is a catch: The improvements will only be seen if the transition to the cloud is 100%. I suspect most companies will move their call traffic incrementally in which case, this is just another version of the multi-site problem. As I’ve written before, having multiple call centers leads to flaws like inconsistent experiences.

Where does Fonolo fit in?

Fonolo makes it easier to add a hosted call center to your mix. That’s because Fonolo is really a layer that sits on top of the call center infrastructure, and works independently from it. Fonolo provides a clean, flexible visual interface to your call center operation that becomes part of your website or mobile app.

Once deployed this interface continues to work smoothly regardless of changes to your call center. That means you can make the decision of in-house vs. out-sourced or on-premise vs. hosted based on economic factors, and not worry about the consistency of experience.

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?

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

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