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Call Centers: What's New, What Matters
CEM at Call Centers
Mr. Paul Ward
Vice President, Customer Experience, YourMusicOn
G-CEM International Partner (US)
www.Pkward.com
This article is exclusively written for G-CEM.
There's no question that call centers are the ugly duckling of marketing. If you're using them to sell, then you can bet they are one of the least welcome expressions of your company, with calls coming at dinnertime with those manipulative scripts. If you're using contact centers to provide customer support, you can also be sure that a good number of the calls are generated by customers in a very bad mood. And companies haven't much liked them either. As APQC (previously known as the American Productivity & Quality Center) said in a recent report (The Customer-Centric Contact Center: A New Model), "customer service was viewed as a required offering. But because it did not generate revenue, it was considered a necessary evil."
With such negativity surrounding call centers, I'm pleased to say that some of them are doing better and better at resolving problems and handling cross sales and up-selling. And, in fact, they are increasingly being viewed as a key defense to defection, and a tool to improve customer loyalty.
"The conventional, transaction-based contact center is going the way of the pay phone: fast disappearing," says Sam Bloomfield in the trade magazine Multichannel Merchant. Mr. Bloomfield points to the technology improvements that have helped basic call center management, including a richer set of customer data given to customer service representatives. He claims, however, that the shift is as much a change in corporate culture. "Companies are not satisfied with simply reducing costs; they expect to use this powerful channel for customer communication to improve their return on the investment they make in the call center." As much as customers like us would want our call center experiences to be humane, helpful and fun, companies do have to take a look at their return.
A key component to new call center technologies is text analytics, in which calls are recorded and automatically transcribed into text for later analysis. The great thing about text analytics is that it's pretty good technology; it can transcribe calls fairly well, and create a database for companies to answer such question as:
1. Are our customer service representatives (CSRs) saying the right things? This goes beyond using scripts as a way of making calls more efficient and effective. In some businesses, especially health care and financial services, CSRs must deliver important compliance information, and must behave in a way that doesn't put the company at risk of fines.
2. Are our customers talking about competitors? If so, which ones?
3. Is there a new competing offer we didn't yet know about? If so, what is it?
4. Which customer interactions were stellar, and which were awful? Such information can be mined to determine which CSRs are doing a great job, and which kinds of customer situations are just plain difficult to resolve.
Clearly this information helps businesses make a case for more advanced call center technology. But there's a bigger context in which to assess one's call center strategy.
Moments of Truth
There's no question that the phrase "moment of truth" has taken on a life of its own in the business management circles. The reason, however, must be restated. If a customer is at a crossroads with his or her relationship with a company, then there may well be a moment when you save that relationship, sometimes even turning a disgruntled customer into an advocate, or destroy it. In either case, money is involved. Wouldn't it be great if CSRs knew what the total lifetime customer value of a caller was? This might help them understand the level of effort required to resolve a customer's problem. And, in fact, you can deliver this kind of information to CSRs. Bloomfield sums it up nicely: "Ultimately, consumers provide the reason and revenue that drive all of a retailer's activity. If organizations embrace this concept, they will realize that greater value and return is embedded into sound contact center operations and their investments will begin to increase."
But there's more to it than just recognizing the money at stake with a bad call center experience. CSRs are responsible for resolving the issue in a branded way. Sometimes this branding is something as simple as emphasizing the company's appreciation for the customer in the script. "I'm glad I was able to help you today. XYZ Company appreciates your business, and the time you took to call us about your issue." But this is just the bare minimum, in my view, of creating a branded call center experience.
Framing the Customer's Experience
There are three key components to a touchpoint, and any company has to be clear about each component before they roll out a new process. Call centers are no exception.
1. Associations
2. Values (can include cultural values)
3. Attributes
The easiest one to figure out - at least when defining baseline performance - would be the attributes of call handling that the company desires. These include problem-solving and escalation, scripting, training, and quality monitoring, as well as the resulting metrics: time to answer, first call resolution, abandonment rates, and so on.
The challenge is making any of these basic call center attributes brandable. Will your customers remember the call as being at least acceptable, and in addition, as featuring characteristics of your brand personality? If this question stumps you, then dig deeper. It's one of the first elements of potential differentiation for you.
Let me give you an example to kick start your imagination. Who says that the interaction with the CSR begins and ends with the phone call? Think about other possible ways of beginning and ending it.
Amazon.com, after years of hiding their toll-free support number - and getting lots of heat from customers by doing it - now allows you to click from their website to a form where you input your number. Then someone from Amazon's call center calls you - usually pretty quickly.
Kyle Slattery, an Amazon customer, said this in comment to an article about Amazon's new ways with customer service: "I used this a couple of months ago and it worked perfectly. I got a call within about 10 minutes."
Ponder this a moment. Mr. Slattery was pleased to get a phone call back within ten minutes. But imagine his mood if he had had to wait on hold for ten minutes. Or even five minutes!
The key take-away is that you can use customer psychology to your advantage. You can redefine - reframe - the nature of the interaction to actually make people happier, even though they're waiting longer to resolve a problem.
Incidentally, such a technique can be easily load-balanced at the call center, and CSRs can have customer information up on the screen in front of them, ready to engage the customer in a way that reflects the future value of the relationship. Everyone's happier, more equipped and more efficient.
As for the end of the interaction with the CSR, consider email. Part of what makes your call center touchpoint less than optimal is that the call is over when the problem is solved. This gives your CSR no time to establish rapport separate from the problem at hand. An email, however, sent sometime after the call, can reinforce positive things about the company and its relationship with the customer. It can help balance out any lingering frustration the customer might feel.
This also gives you a chance to reinforce any associations you want people to have with your brand. Let's say you're returning something to Bluefly.com, the online retailer specializing in overstocked and discounted luxury clothing and accessories. If I were to advise Bluefly.com on how to finish the call on the return, I would suggest they end with a simple quiz: "When you wear your Bluefly clothes, is it casually, at the office, or when you go out at night?"
It almost doesn't matter what the answer is. Just asking the question reinforces how Bluefly fits into the customer's life. On the other hand, I'd advise Bluefly.com to do even more personalization on their site. At its size and with its business model, it can afford to be more intimate in their customer relations than their biggest competitor, eBay.
The goal is to reinforce the unique quality of Bluefly's brand. Bluefly might say they offer affordable luxury without compromises. That's true. But in the spirit of outcome-based value propositions, we'd want to define why this even matters. And the fact is that people who buy luxury products enjoy them for various reasons including quality, self-esteem, and the admiration of others. A CSR with information on the customer's favorite brands has an opportunity within the script to reinforce one or more of these reasons. "Prada just had a new show in Milan. Did you see it on YouTube?" "Michael Korrs had three dresses on the Oscar red carpet." "Did you know that Ferragamo shoes are still hand-sewn? I saw a demonstration last week and it's amazing how skilled those workers are."
Cultural Values
Recently I participated in a webinar with Electronic Arts, which described their rollout of RightNow as a key tool in improving their global call center operations.
In the webinar, the question was asked whether different cultures expected differing levels of customer service on the phone. The answer: Asian customers are more demanding. So, the processes and training that work for a North American customer may not work for a customer in mainland China.
The point cannot be emphasized enough: cultural values matter. Here in the United States, the idea of outsourcing call centers to countries such as India or the Middle East has raised political frustration. Some Americans, when the CSR has a foreign accent, will start off the service call with a prejudice. There are many ways of handling this as a company, but the first step is to recognize that the phenomenon exists and to have a plan.
Don't get me wrong, it's not all about prejudice. Cultural values also provide an opportunity to connect better with customers.
Emotion Matters
Gallup recently published an analysis of a series of surveys, as well as work it has done with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain, and concluded, essentially, that people get emotional about brands they love. While that seems obvious, the consequences are huge. First, if you can identify what you need to do to generate emotional loyalty, you'll be able to manage a path to greater brand value. Second, if you know the emotional state of your customer, you can add that as an additional datum to supplement the transactional and other data you keep in your CRM system.
In call centers, companies are increasingly doing just that by using voice analytics. The idea is simple: record the conversation in its entirety, use advanced analytics to determine the emotional state of the customer, and act on that information in ways that benefit the company. Typically, voice analysis is used to:
1. Determine the emotional content of the call to help the CSR deal more effectively with the situation
2. Mark the call record as worth later study, in particular to train other CSRs on how to deal most effectively with difficult callers
3. Detect "customers" trying to defraud the company
Levin tells a great story in his article about how this works. "Thanks to such advanced 'emotion-detection' technology, companies like Wisconsin Physician Services Insurance Corp. (WPSIC) have been able to save their fair share of distressed policy holders. For instance, one WPSIC customer - very upset over high premiums - recently lost his cool with the agent he was speaking with and hung up. The center's emotion-detection tool (NICE's Perform product) captured the caller's pain and shot off an email alert to the agent's supervisor." The supervisor called back the customer and successfully resolved the problem.
A competitor to NICE is CallMiner, which has a lot to commend it, including its ability to search massive amounts of voice data in just seconds. And of course it also has analytics, reporting and the ability to plug into CRM systems. There are other systems, from smaller to larger, and the one that's right for you will depend on the scope and nature of your needs - particularly your strategic needs.
There are future applications in voice recognition that boggle the mind. I'm talking with a company now on how to use voice recognition to revolutionize their service model. Ultimately, the goal is to apply emotional information to processes that make customers happier, make for better call centers - and sometimes even to detect criminal behavior.
Closed Loop Customer Centricity
APQC said recently, "The contact center must be strategically integrated with the rest of the corporation for customer centricity to be a successful 'way of life.' This road to integration is rocky at best." A lot of companies have found this strategic view essential. In telecommunications - the cell phone market in particular, which I wrote about in a previous GCCRM article - you usually find a bunch of people frantically trying to sign up more subscribers, and another bunch of people in the call centers dealing with really unhappy subscribers. The disconnection is obvious. If you stop those people from being unhappy in the first place, then they won't switch, they'll say nice things about you to their friends, and your business will boom. But, typically, the reasons for complaints were not getting to the people who put together the offering.
The call center data is potentially very rich. And the richer the data about customers, the more opportunity a company has to build more value, through resolving customer issues, escalating more effectively and appropriately given the customer's value, and through rethinking processes that have failed the client. You need to mine that data, and great call centers do just that. Greg Levin said, in Tactics of Truly Customer Centric Centers (Customer Management Insight), "GE Capital Solutions is one such center. Its Reporting and Analytics team - once a mere reactive entity serving purely a reporting function - today is a powerfully dynamic group dedicated to mining critical contact information and using it to drive improvements to existing processes, procedures and programs, as well as to successfully launch new ones."
Ultimately, the goal for a call center is to relate to prospects and customers in ways that build value for the company. To do this right, the company has to chip in, too. Financial types need new metrics. Demand-generation staff, R&D, suppliers and partners need to be alerted to key issues that affect them. The better organized you are around what really matters to customers, the more likely it will be that the call you get will be from someone emotionally attached to your brand. And that's like money in the bank.
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About the author
Paul is a strategist providing customer relationship management (CRM) and customer experience management (CEM) consulting for growth-focused enterprises. Currently VP of Customer Experience at a new high-tech consumer startup. He leads management strategy seminars in Asia, Europe and North America.
Paul is a graduate of the TRIUM Global Executive MBA program (ranked #3 globally by Financial Times) through London School of Economics, NYU-Stern, and Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC). His studies took place in Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Paris, New York, and London. As part of TRIUM he also studied with Hong Kong University of Science & Technology and in Sao Paulo with Funda??o Dom Cabral [FDC]. Currently head of the TRIUM alumni steering committee, Paul is organizing events in Shanghai, Florence, San Francisco and Paris. He lectured at Cornell University on Internet trends, social networks and the impact of the Web on economics and globalization. He also lectured at American University (Washington DC) and Robert H. Smith School of Business (University of Maryland, USA) on customer experience management, competitiveness and brand equity. Paul is also the editorial board member of CRM Today.
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