What new (and not-so-new) technologies are finding their way into contact centres, and how are they making things better?
Contact centres have often been early adopters of new technologies, and there’s a lot of high-tech wizardry going on behind today’s contact centre that aims to reduce customer service costs and make customers and staff a lot happier.
Multi-channel contact centres
Customer interaction management systems encompassing the traditional call centre functions plus support for e-mail, Web chat, co-browsing, and so on “offer a lot of potential” according to Brian Prentice, senior research analyst, Web and collaboration strategies service at META Group. However, vendors are not reporting a big uptake of such products.
One issue is the relevance of features to the specific problem being addressed. For example, the ability to remotely control a caller’s PC may be a big advantage for a technical help desk.
“On the outbound side . . . the key focus is on voice and e-mail, and e-mail is of growing importance,” he says.
Some vendors take a different view. Point solutions are giving way to unified systems, says Pramod Ratwani, vice president Asia Pacific at Concerto Software (Asia Pacific). Even though such systems may provide all the functions needed by the call centre itself, integration with back-end systems such as CRM, ERP, and data warehouses is important. “It needs to tie in very well . . . or benefits are lost,” he says.
David Wynham, senior account manager at Concerto distributor Lake Corporation, says EnsemblePro’s integration means one database, one set of business rules, and one user interface, which makes implementation “dramatically faster” and ongoing management and maintenance easier and cheaper. Furthermore, “the reports make sense” even if they combine data across interaction points, which can be a weakness when separate applications are tied together into a system.
Tony Hollings, contact centre strategy manager at NEC Business Solutions says that while his company had been offering multi-channel contact centre systems for a couple of years, 80 percent of its sales are still voice only. What has changed is that clients now realise the need to integrate e-mail and other channels and even if they aren’t doing so from the outset, they are planning a staged rollout of those additional features.
Mark Sellars, Professional Services Manager, POINT Australia, agrees about the importance of consistency across channels and integration with other systems. Choosing modular, scalable, supportable, and extensible components is key, he says.
“Modularity allows you to carve what can be seen as an insurmountable undertaking into tactical tasks, for example concentrating on internal customer service processes first then moving to sales and marketing as the solutions mature.”
Audio analysis
One problem with using surveys or callbacks to measure customer satisfaction is that only the very happy or unhappy provide feedback, according to Sean Forbes, vice president of marketing and chief strategist at RightNow. His company has developed a patent-pending system for detecting the level of emotion expressed in a voice call or Web interaction (in any of 15 languages) and routing the contact accordingly. For example, someone searching a knowledgebase might stay in a self-service system for several attempts at finding an answer, but an agitated inquiry might be diverted immediately to Web chat for assisted service. RightNow’s software applies the same algorithms across all channels, says Forbes. “Solutions emerging now apply AI to detect emotions across all channels . . . and can handle different customers differently,” he says.
RightNow also has a proprietary “self-learning” technology to sort even very large knowledgebases without human interaction. This keeps costs down, while maximising the likelihood that the most relevant items will be returned as the answer to a query.
The software can even be used in conjunction with speech recognition and synthesis to provide self-service access to a knowledgebase via phone. RightNow’s speech partner SpeechWorks has implemented such a system internally, and Forbes expects customer demand for this capability to pick up in a year or two.
“The analysis of audio is not an exact art,” says Haydn Faltyn, national business manager at Dimension Data, but it is possible to automatically measure stress levels by analysing amplitudes and frequencies, and to identify keywords in a conversation. The latest software of this type is production quality, he says.
“Picking out sensitivities and hot spots is the key,” says Faltyn. It’s not just a matter of seeing how well an individual agent performs, but of identifying trends in customer response. For example, a major news event such as last summer’s bushfires may change the way your script is received. Marketing departments usually react faster to such events than contact centres, but such systems provide “automatic trend spotting and feedback to the business to invoke change,” he says.
Incidents in individual calls can also be handled. One rule could be that a call is flagged if the agent and customer talk simultaneously for more than three seconds, so a supervisor can review the conversation and trigger a callback to placate the customer if necessary.
A different kind of audio analysis is emerging as a solution to the problem of positively identifying callers. PINs and passwords are hard to remember and easily overheard, and personal data such as date of birth or mother’s maiden name are so overused that they offer little security. Speaker verification is a biometric technology that authenticates the caller’s identity by using the unique characteristics of their voice. According to Clive Summerfield, manager, government services, at VeCommerce, speaker verification is convenient, secure, and cost-effective. Banks and other organisations in Europe and North and South America are already using the technology, he says, and “with the rapid growth in identity fraud . . . it is really only a matter of time before speaker verification becomes a widespread reality for the banking and finance industry.”
Self-service
“People are using self service more and more,” says Archie Wilson, vice president Asia Pacific at FrontRange, especially in business-to-business situations. FrontRange has over 550 large corporate customers, and “in the last four or five months we’ve really seen self-service take off”. Although a self-service facility can be a real money saver, expenditure freezes were blocking implementation, but corporate wallets are beginning to open again. If things aren’t going well for a business, it won’t spend at all. That’s the case for about 20 percent of companies, he estimates, but other Australian companies and local government authorities will consider projects that show a return on investment within three or perhaps six months.
This has led to “a move away from humongous installations” to addressing specific pain points such as excessive call abandonment rates with point solutions. For example, password-reset requests account for around 55 percent of IT help desk calls, so a system that can automate the process provides “a straightforward and compelling value proposition,” says Wilson.
Self-service systems seem to run into problems when they are implemented solely as a cost saving exercise. Prentice suggests the best results are achieved where self-service delivers extra value to the customer as well as improving agent optimisation. He pointed to the example of US investment manager T Rowe Price, which used IVR to increase the call completion rate by 9 percent (if customers do not complete calls, it is almost certain that most of them have not been satisfied). The company is looking to have 90 percent of calls—typically balance enquiries and the like—handled automatically, freeing agents to handle high-value calls.
Ratwani agrees, saying that the combination of self and assisted service is necessary for cost effectiveness and satisfactory service. Self-service reduces the use of agents’ time and gives customers more flexibility and reduces their costs (especially in a business-to-business context), but it should be personalised and must always provide opportunities to engage with an agent.
Customers don’t want self-service when they have a problem, he says, suggesting that the important thing in those circumstances is getting the call to the right agent so the problem can be solved on the first call. “Technology won’t solve all the problems,” he says.
Sometimes a blend of automatic and agent-managed is appropriate. Hollings points to e-mail systems that generate draft replies on the basis of keywords found in the original enquiry, but agents check the answer really addresses the question before the replies are sent. More advanced systems are capable of determining the context of words, which improves the quality of interpretation, but a human check provides quality assurance without taking much time. System-generated e-mails also ensure consistency of style and content.
Always-on broadband Internet connections are less common in regional areas than in the capital cities, so it is more inconvenient for customers in those areas to augment their Web browsing with a phone call if they run into problems. Hans van Pelt, general manager IT and communications at Regional Express (REX) says Web chat and co-browsing facilities are very useful for providing good service in this situation.
“I’m dead against the concept of self-service for call centres,” says van Pelt. Booking an airline ticket is more emotive than ordering a taxi, so most people expect good, personal service and the rest use REX’s Web site. Also, “we get too many calls just asking for a price” so REX needs agents to ask for the order, he says.
Despite van Pelt’s antipathy towards self-service call centres, he is a big fan of providing self-service via the Web. The FAQ on the REX site handles around 1000 inquiries a week, and “if they [all] rang the call centre I’d have a problem,” says van Pelt, ”I couldn’t take another 1000 calls a week without having to take on more staff.” Companies should provide a consistent experience across their call centre and Web site, he says.
Clayton Moulynox, business development manager at systems integrator and support provider evolveIT also has mixed feelings about self-service. Companies are coming to expect a degree of self-service as shown by the success of online package tracking, so he intends to allow clients to log service requests via the Web and to access the evolveIT knowledgebase by the middle of the year. But he’s clearly wary of the problems that may arise if clients’ staff attempt to fix complex issues themselves. And whereas hardware and software vendors see clients’ problems as a cost, they represent revenue for a support firm.
Self-service using speech recognition seems popular with the public. A recent US study by Gartner Custom Research reported 84 percent of respondents were satisfied with their experience of speech recognition systems. Ninety percent said they would be more or equally comfortable the next time they used a speech recognition interface, and 43 percent expressed a strong preference for using the speech recognition interface rather than waiting on hold for two minutes to speak with an agent.
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