Showing posts with label call center. Show all posts
Showing posts with label call center. Show all posts
Thursday, 30 July 2009
It's the new socialism, stupid
Recently, I had the opportunity to give a presentation to an audience of call center managers and professionals. An executive summary of this presentation was published in iAct, a brand new call center magazine for the call center industry... Here you find the contents of the article - enjoy the reading
Friday, 12 June 2009
Wednesday, 13 May 2009
The E-spot
The call center industry is a typical example of a labor-intensive sector. More than 60% of the overall call center budget is spent on personnel costs. The remainder goes to technology, facilities and of course telecoms & networking. Despite many investments in areas such as CTI, scripting, work force management, skill-based routing and so on, customer satisfaction has not really improved over the recent years. Most heard complaints are: long waiting times, first call resolution, quality of service and staff-related issues such as attitude and competences of the Customer Service Representative. 
Although there is now much to do about web-self service, the "Why Talking To Your Customers Is Ruining Your Business" report by Forrester indicates that roughly 50% of the customers (regardless of generation) still prefer speaking to a call center rep in stead of using web self-service (5%),writing an email (6%) or chatting with an agent (3%).
In the current economic climate, call center managers are under increased pressure to reduce costs, improve operational efficiency, leverage business intelligence and most importantly, provide excellent service to prevent the customers from running away to your competitor. Nothing new... but how can you do this in an industry challenged with high employee turnover, skilled labor shortage, low engagement and increasing need to outsource work as a response to increasing call volumes?
Well one way is to implement enterprise wikis and social software in the call center. Dell - with over 5000 call center reps - introduced wikis as part of its knowledge management strategy. Results are staggering: as a result of this improved internal (mass) collaboration and knowledge sharing, they were able to cut call handling times with 2 to 3 minutes. Thanks to the wikis, CSRs spend less time searching for information. Dell estimates that they save up to $4.000.000 per year as a result of this new approach to knowledge management and information sharing.
Besides the fact that wikis save the organization money - they let tacit knowledge surface and help to improve the customer experience in many ways: first call resolution, quality of service and well-informed staff to name a couple of them. I don't know how much they have spent on their social software platform but with prices ranging between $15 and $100 per user for typical social software suites... this smells of a good pay back and great ROI. Can Enterprise 2.0 be the silver bullet for call and contact centers? At this very moment, it looks like the concept has not really penetrated this industry... is it because the call center industry is a laggard in this field or is it merely a lack of awareness on the potential of enterprise social software?
Although there is now much to do about web-self service, the "Why Talking To Your Customers Is Ruining Your Business" report by Forrester indicates that roughly 50% of the customers (regardless of generation) still prefer speaking to a call center rep in stead of using web self-service (5%),writing an email (6%) or chatting with an agent (3%).
In the current economic climate, call center managers are under increased pressure to reduce costs, improve operational efficiency, leverage business intelligence and most importantly, provide excellent service to prevent the customers from running away to your competitor. Nothing new... but how can you do this in an industry challenged with high employee turnover, skilled labor shortage, low engagement and increasing need to outsource work as a response to increasing call volumes?
Well one way is to implement enterprise wikis and social software in the call center. Dell - with over 5000 call center reps - introduced wikis as part of its knowledge management strategy. Results are staggering: as a result of this improved internal (mass) collaboration and knowledge sharing, they were able to cut call handling times with 2 to 3 minutes. Thanks to the wikis, CSRs spend less time searching for information. Dell estimates that they save up to $4.000.000 per year as a result of this new approach to knowledge management and information sharing.
Besides the fact that wikis save the organization money - they let tacit knowledge surface and help to improve the customer experience in many ways: first call resolution, quality of service and well-informed staff to name a couple of them. I don't know how much they have spent on their social software platform but with prices ranging between $15 and $100 per user for typical social software suites... this smells of a good pay back and great ROI. Can Enterprise 2.0 be the silver bullet for call and contact centers? At this very moment, it looks like the concept has not really penetrated this industry... is it because the call center industry is a laggard in this field or is it merely a lack of awareness on the potential of enterprise social software?
Sunday, 3 May 2009
Enterprise 2.0 and call centers
With Web 2.0 now becoming more and more mainstream in the world of marketing and customer service, I was curious to see if I would find data on the state of Enterprise 2.0 in the call center. It struck me that there is little or no evidence about E2.0 take up in this field. How come that an industry that's living by the grace of the customer does not invest more in knowledge and collaboration management related technologies.... Knowledge and information sharing are key in improving the customer experience. Using 2.0 technologies like wikis, (micro) blogs, RSS, forums, comments help to exchange knowledge between employees, customers and partners. Call centers have become a complex web where proprietary, insourced and outsourced operations blend together. In this perspective, it is quite challenging to manage and leverage the corporation's information assets across geographic and organizational boundaries. Combine this with a high personnel turnover, heavy labor costs and increased virtualization and you have all the necessary ingredients for a perfect E2.0 training scheme. I'll present the conclusions of my research on the 3rd contact center conference on May 14th organised by F&G publishing - look forward to seeing you all there
Thursday, 22 May 2008
How many clicks does it take?
I was doing some field research on nerds the other day... yup, my life is very exciting indeed, thank you. We all have nerd-like people in our circles, you usually refer to them as "us" and "them":
big glasses, funny ears, weird haircuts and a proprietary dress code. I literally took me two (2) clicks before I saw pictures of very different nerds... female nerds with no dress code at all! They still wore glasses though. If porn is not really what springs to mind when I think of nerds, there is apparently a whole different world out there. Why doesn't the Net do what I want it to do: find me funny images of nerds, not carnal sins. If I put in key words like"installation dishwasher built in finishing", then all I get is sites that sell dishwashers. Don't want to buy one, just bought one and now I want to install the bloody thing.
Call centers, even worse... how come every time you call the customer service center, all operators are busy? Doesn't even matter which one you try: mobile phone operator, utilities, bank or CC company, broad band provider and the like, everybody is busy, busy, busy. Putting your priorities where your customers need you, that is client oriented, not putting them in a queue for ages and torturing you with Celine Dion and co. Over the last 10 years, companies have invested billions in CRM and still bluntly ignore the fact that a. I hate CD b. I hate waiting in the queue and c. my preferred C2B channel is email.
I bet if you were to call one of those hot-lines and ask for Pamela, Pamela won't be busy, she will not get back to you as soon as possible...no, they will put you through to Pamela who will gladly assist you with all your needs and wishes. Pamela understands why you don't like CD and knows how to make you feel better. Pamela has personal contact high upon her list of corporate values. Now, that's what I call customer service.
And what about my research on the nerd? Wiki claims it originated in the Fifties and first appeared in a book by some obscure Seuss: "If I ran the zoo" - Does the job for me. My post-research conclusion: it's about high time IT invests in the inflow of women, would add a certain female, right-brain touch to our metro-boulot-dodo.
Kind of bringing Jane back into the jungle... but then without six-pack Tarzan-like colleagues. Or Pamela working on the IT service desk: "hello Sir, how can I help you today?"
Yours Cheeta
big glasses, funny ears, weird haircuts and a proprietary dress code. I literally took me two (2) clicks before I saw pictures of very different nerds... female nerds with no dress code at all! They still wore glasses though. If porn is not really what springs to mind when I think of nerds, there is apparently a whole different world out there. Why doesn't the Net do what I want it to do: find me funny images of nerds, not carnal sins. If I put in key words like"installation dishwasher built in finishing", then all I get is sites that sell dishwashers. Don't want to buy one, just bought one and now I want to install the bloody thing.Call centers, even worse... how come every time you call the customer service center, all operators are busy? Doesn't even matter which one you try: mobile phone operator, utilities, bank or CC company, broad band provider and the like, everybody is busy, busy, busy. Putting your priorities where your customers need you, that is client oriented, not putting them in a queue for ages and torturing you with Celine Dion and co. Over the last 10 years, companies have invested billions in CRM and still bluntly ignore the fact that a. I hate CD b. I hate waiting in the queue and c. my preferred C2B channel is email.
I bet if you were to call one of those hot-lines and ask for Pamela, Pamela won't be busy, she will not get back to you as soon as possible...no, they will put you through to Pamela who will gladly assist you with all your needs and wishes. Pamela understands why you don't like CD and knows how to make you feel better. Pamela has personal contact high upon her list of corporate values. Now, that's what I call customer service.
And what about my research on the nerd? Wiki claims it originated in the Fifties and first appeared in a book by some obscure Seuss: "If I ran the zoo" - Does the job for me. My post-research conclusion: it's about high time IT invests in the inflow of women, would add a certain female, right-brain touch to our metro-boulot-dodo.
Kind of bringing Jane back into the jungle... but then without six-pack Tarzan-like colleagues. Or Pamela working on the IT service desk: "hello Sir, how can I help you today?"
Yours Cheeta
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