01 May 2005 Features

 

Making connections

Call centres have moved on from being a means of fielding customer calls to being the heart of the whole customer relationship as more collaborative systems are deployed, finds David Bannister .

As soon as you mention call centres, people start to talk about outsourcing, and specifically about offshoring. If you’re lucky, it’ll be focused on salary arbitrage; quite often it is basically xenophobic.

Which is a bit unfortunate really, because there are some interesting developments in the way that call centres are being harnessed as a source of business intelligence and management information, for training and for new product development.

The beginning of the trend was highlighted by TowerGroup nearly three years ago, in a report pointing up the trend for call centres to become contact centres as internet and voice banking take a greater market share. At that time, the focus was moving from reducing call centre costs to realising business intelligence.

Jason Goodwin, head of customer intelligence at SAS UK, believes that by adding an analytical layer over the traditional customer relationship management software found in call centres, banks (and manufacturers) can use call centres as a way of testing their products and identifying common complaints. The lessons learnt from this sort of market testing can be used to improve existing products and as a start point for new products.

Brian Kelly, senior vice president for products and marketing at California-based service resolution specialist Kana echoes this and says that it can go further by being incorporated in the overall workflow for the organisation, so that knowledge is captured and structured in a way that allows the full team of agents to harness it in a structured manner.

Not surprisingly, given its origins, Kana focuses on the service resolution issues, which Kelly says are the heart of the issue and from which other benefits flow. “There are soft savings, like a reduction in agent turnover, but it’s about turning the call centre from a cost centre to a profit centre,” he says. “Perhaps profit is too strong a word, but certainly moving into revenue generating opportunities.”

Kana cites statistics from TD Waterhouse UK, the UK’s second largest discount broker with 350,000 investors using its phone and web-based share dealing services. It also offers some services to the customers of Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest Stockbrokers, with a range of white label products including current and savings accounts as well as cash management facilities on share-dealing accounts.

TD Waterhouse UK began by implementing Kana IQ for a four-week trial period, during which call handling time was reduced by 8 per cent, back office calls reduced by 20 per cent and the numbers of customer ‘on hold’ calls reduced by 25 per cent. The implementation also underlined the service resolution aspect of the software, which successfully provided agents with the answers they needed in nearly 90 per cent of cases.

TD Waterhouse UK has documented over 3,000 solutions for Kana IQ that even inexperienced staff can use to help customers with trading, support, and other inquiries. Darren Hepworth, vice president for TD Waterhouse’s Customer Contact Centre explains: “By providing staff with easy access to the answers they need, Kana IQ is actually helping to improve productivity, cooperation between departments, making TD Waterhouse UK an even more attractive working environment for our teams.”

Hepworth says that the broker plans to take things a stage further: “We’re constantly refining and adding to the solutions stored in Kana IQ. The next step is to take this technology and apply it to the web, so our customers can begin to find their own answers. As a result, we’ll be able to give our agents the space to focus more on more productive activities, such as sales,” he says.

According to trade body the Service and Support Providers’ Association (SSPA), only 20 per cent of the cost of customer service is actually spent talking to customers. The remaining 80 per cent is spent on identifying the solutions to their problems: escalating to other teams, waiting for and developing the responses. Meanwhile, customers are left waiting: many consider moving their business elsewhere during this time.

A similar approach is being taken by Lloyds TSB Asset Finance, (see case study, next page) which is transitioning towards the call centre being a source of outbound calls rather than a reception point as it increases its use of software from Witness Systems.

Witness focuses more on workforce optimisation than Kana, though the goal is much the same — moving from cost to profit, says Nancy Treaster, senior vice president of marketing.

The company’s combined workforce optimisation software focuses on the integration between functions, and creates a pre-defined workforce optimisation scorecard that is automatically populated with workforce management statistics, quality scores and CTI information. This allows managers to drill down to recorded interactions during scorecard analysis and investigation, allowing them to review customer contacts and gain a high-level or detailed view of how customer service actually works in practice.

This is potentially very important for the industry, as survey after survey finds that banks are failing to capitalise on selling opportunities in customer interactions. Recent research by Accenture in the US found that banks there are not marketing products and services to their customers at branches and call centres as effectively as they could. The survey of more than 500 US consumers found that bank customers visit branches often, rate customer service highly and — unexpectedly — actually want the banks to tell them about additional services they may need. The survey findings reveal that bank tellers and call centre representatives do not regularly suggest appropriate products and services.

“Banks are striving to boost sales effectiveness through a range of customer channels, but our research suggests they have a long way to go,” said John Durocher, a partner in Accenture’s Banking practice. “While they are doing a better job of targeting higher-income customers, banks are not converting those opportunities into sales as often as they should. For example, only 11 per cent of respondents have three or more loan, insurance or brokerage products with their bank.”

A similar report, conducted by Datamonitor for IBM and Siebel, found that 93 per cent of banks globally are failing to cross-sell effectively (news. page 18).

With glaring gaps like that, it would seem that there is a long way to go.