Entry No.42f

IT Writers Awards

The growth of the Net is changing the culture of call centres, with customers calling the shots at the click of a button.

The culture of the call centre is changing and customer contacts via the Web and e-mail are driving this change. Call centre vendors must now place the emphasis on electronic media—their systems must be able to handle inquiries the way the customer chooses. They also need to focus less on efficiency and more on customer experience. Durelle Fry reports.

Call centres have evolved into customer contact centres. These are a cost effective point of contact between an organisation, its suppliers, and its customers, whether internal or external. Rather than focussing primarily on telephone, the contact centre is a controlled environment using phone, fax, e-mail, Internet and video kiosk. Its purpose is to deliver customer services and, quite probably, generate revenue, but it is also important in helping organisations understand, anticipate, and react to their operating environments and specific customer demands.

David Paddon, general manager, Asia Pacific, Rockwell Electronic Commerce, believes that the new customer will demand more information and services via a multitude of channels.

"They will expect to hit a button and expect to see an agent face to face.” And when appropriate, with permission, will expect the agent to remotely guide their browser demonstrate how things work or where information comes from. This is but a fraction of what is already possible and a fraction of what customers will expect."

Paddon adds that consolidated queuing, consolidated routing, consolidated management and reporting across any medium were already basic requirements of today's contact centre. 

CRM is priceless
Call centres come under the customer service and support umbrella of CRM, together with field service and dispatch technicians, and Internet-based service and self-service via a Web site. The call centre needs to be integrated as part of a CRM   strategy, linking sales, customer service and marketing information. The level of priority of a call centre when first implementing a CRM strategy,  Paddon believes, depends on the nature of the business. If a high volume of sales and efficiency are important, then a call centre should be high on the list of priorities. If knowledge of the customer base is more important, then other strategies may come first.

Peter Brannighan, chairperson of the Australian Teleservices Association (ATA) says that if the business involves transactional elements, then the establishment of a call centre is a priority in a CRM strategy. CRM he believes, is about embracing as many of the touch points as possible to broaden the appeal of the company, and call centres have a very important role here. Brannighan adds that the development of CRM in the SME space is more mature than anywhere else "because they have had to rely on this more than anyone". Ideally, call centre technology will provide software, which will link the Webshopper and the shopper's current Web activity to a customer history file and connect it all to a live centre agent at both the phone and browser levels.

Privacy is paramount
A fly in the ointment of such great advances, and one which must soon begin to niggle the cautious Web shopper, is the issue of privacy. At the Computers, Freedom and Privacy 2000 conference held in Toronto in April, Austin Hill, CEO of Montreal- based Zero-Knowledge Systems, declared, "Privacy is the civil rights and environmental movement of the 21st century." His company has just released Freedom 1.1, an upgrade to its privacy software that allows users to surf the Web and send e- mail anonymously or under pseudonyms allowing tracking software to only know what the user wants it to how. 

Trying to cope with this situation in the best way for all concerned, 26 companies at the April Internet World in Los Angeles, formed the Personalization Consortium to establish guidelines and procedures for the use of private information provided by customers. 

Call Centre technologies, while seeking to provide the ultimate customer experience, cannot afford to overlook the issue of privacy and reassurance of this needs to be built into all forms of contact. The last impression a customer will want from a vendor is one of being watched.

Staff turnover
Staff turnover Call Centres are increasingly being set up outside metropolitan areas because of the economic benefits of real estate and the increased employment opportunities. Maintaining call centre staffing levels has always been difficult. Problems include de-motivation and boredom. Identification of the causes of these problems is the first step in overcoming them. 

The changing culture of call centres has eliminated many of these problems. As they are transformed from being a pure cost-saving culture to one where the focus is on adding value to the customer's experience, the staff become multi-skilled agents intent on enriching the interaction with the customer. Job satisfaction and motivation are improved.  

Noise in the working environment can remain a hidden element of concern. Call centres with open plan environments, low height workstations and high workspace densities need to address the issue of noise.  

Significant time and funds are being invested in more highly trained call centre staff and the issue of staff retention has become paramount to the maintenance of an efficient and successful call centre.

A brief history 
PC Week spoke to Martin Conboy, managing director of ACA Research to learn the technological history of call centres. Conboy claims that call centres have been around for about 25 to 30 years, the first centre being a Rockwell site. Up until about five years ago, the call centre environment has been very primitive. The second generation of call centre evolved when there was a need to formalise and structure calls. The volume of calls increased and the old system became expensive to run, especially with a high volume of STD calls.   

Then the integrated voice response system (IVR) was developed (for sales, press one, for service press two, and so on). This form of call centre response was not ideal and Brannighan of the AlA points out three problems with this technology. First, consumers can get trapped in the loop. Second, information usually has, to be repeated by the frustrated customer as they move through the system, and third, it depersonalises the service. Brannighan says most call centres are no longer cost driven but can be described as `added value contact centres'. 

Conboy's research reveals that with the third generation move to computer telephony integration (CTI), the cost of management was reduced by 30 percent and service increased dramatically. Screen histories were available on customers and there was no longer a need to begin an enquiry from scratch every time you were transferred through the system seeking assistance. Finally today we are seeing the fourth generation, which provides full voice and data functionality, using the Internet, the Web, and speech recognition. 

Cost Is Important too  
Conboy explained that even though transaction costs are reduced with e-mail compared to a phone call, it can become expensive if someone has to manually respond to e-mail. Call centres can now use intelligent software to handle standard e- mail responses with only those necessary being sent through to live agents. 

Statistics provided by ACA research reveal that the Australian call centre market today is valued at $6.5 billion it employs 160,000 people, and it is growing at 25 percent per annum. The annual growth rate over the last five years has  been 62 percent. Looking at the viability of new technologies, ACA has determined that it costs between $10 - $50 to service a customer via a branch (face to face), it costs between $2.50 and $6.50 to service a customer via a call centre, and it costs between 25c and 5Oc to service a customer over the Internet.  

Agents
Rob Witthoft, managing director of Call Time believes that HR is going to be the biggest cost for future call centres. In order to handle contacts from Web sites, an agent needs to have the necessary information and skills. This will involve massive training as the skill set of existing   call centre staff will have to be upgraded. The next problem is to integrate the automated and intelligent agent.

Brannighan also identifies this problem and he brings the rush to new call centre technology into perspective by saying that while a degree of automation is good, the most important part of the call is the content, and it needs to be used to improve the efficiency of the agent. If a company is going to rely on mechanical intervention to respond to many calls, it needs a very mature knowledge base.

Brannighan believes that human intervention is the way forward until a knowledge base is built up. He doesn't feel that the knowledge base in the call centre industry is at a level yet where it can adequately handle enquiries mechanically. 

Consumers
ACA research has revealed that 80 per- cent of all Australians use call centres to conduct personal transactions. Traditionally call centres appear in the banking, finance and insurance industries (30 per- cent), with 10 percent occurring in IT and telecommunications. The outsourcing market has about a 13 percent share with smaller percentages of the call centre market in utilities, hospitality, transport and freight, retail/wholesale, entertainment, pizza delivery, and taxi services. Conboy claimed that two thirds of all business transactions in Australia go via call centres. 

Conboy believes that call centre Internet technology will take off in this country  because Australians have proved to be early adopters of the Internet. He believes that even though, given a choice, a consumer would prefer to do business face-to -face, this is overridden by the convenience of using the telephone or the Internet.  

Customer service is an issue of paramount importance once Internet transactions and consumer contact via the Web come into play. If a company doesn't provide a good customer experience, it will lose them. Call centres should be aiming to build a customer care solution that ties all contact with the customer together, regardless of the media he chooses to correspond with.

Personalisation of the customer will be the key to the success of new call centre technology according to Witthoft. He says that with e-commerce, the focus should be on customer retention from the Web site.  

Product delivery
Sidestepping from the issue of communicating with the consumer for a moment the most advanced call centre in the world will be of no use if final delivery of the product is not efficient. The customer demands service and as Conboy says, if he is not happy, the vendor is "just one click away from oblivion". The industry has not fully understood that once companies appear on the Internet, they are now global. Just supplying a brochure and/or having no means of product delivery are not enough. Conboy believes that the consumer will switch to a site that can deliver the product to his door. The power of the click means that the customer is now the one holding all the power.

A further differentiation between companies is the delivery time and the requirement for worldwide delivery has resulted in real estate within five kilometres of airport being at a premium for warehousing and delivery. 

Conboy says there is still plenty of consumer goodwill when the system falls down, but product delivery is crucial and before long litigation will become a significant cost if things go wrong. 

Call Time
Call Time is a communications and e-bus ness solutions provider for contact centre and enterprises. The company specialise in building contact centres that integrate computer telephony platform, eCRM/iRM technologies, natural language speed recognition, and e-commerce applications 

Call Time is committed to delivering solutions within an implementation period of six to eight weeks. The service includes system integration and customisation as well as ongoing support and professional services. 

 Managing director Rob Witthoft says that Call Time's target market is new companies or "companies reinventing themselves." In order to establish an effective call centre, he believes that companies need to reinvent their business processes Many of the company's initial clients haven't even gone to the Web yet, but they have the platform ready and they are highly trained. A common requirement is a need to have a vision for the future. For example a `brick and mortar' company wanting to become a transactional company, or a `.com' company maturing. 

Call Time will discuss business processes and where the client wants to go. The new call centre solution will be implemented quickly to minimise risk. There have been problems in the past because the telephone world which has been closed and proprietary, needs to be linked with the data world. This has previously required middleware and the risks involved have been time and the cost of delivery because of the need to work with three or four different vendors. Computer telephony, offered by Call Time offers all the traditional telephony with software on one or sometimes two platforms. This involves much less risk and a lower cost. Call Time takes the responsibility for any hiccups and the client has only one company to chase up if there is a problem. 

Call Time's computer telephony solution provides universal queuing of phone, fax, e-mail, voice-mail, with fully integrated ACD, IVR, and Web gateway functions. A second option from Call Time is Natural Language Speech Recognition (NLSR). Routine customer queries can be handled by automated agents (a talking computer). Call Time can integrate this with an existing platform. According to Witthoft, NLSR has really grown in acceptance in the US and Europe. He believes it will have a huge impact in Australia because it will be taken on by large organisations and "everyone will be touched by it". It will also be successful Witthoft says, because the different accents in Australian English have identified in the software. He claims the cost of investment in NLSR will be returned within three to four months.

Call Time's solutions are claimed to integrate into virtually any back end software because that is the core element of the company's skills. Call Time sells both software and hardware. The specialised offer 24/7 support, and there are standard maintenance contracts at different levels, depending on customer requirements. 

Call Time is in the process of building an ASP Model, a communication portal, for its services so that call centre use can be time-shared to cut down on the cost for smaller businesses.  The ASP service will be available for rental on a monthly basis, or on a per user basis, or on total cost.
Call Time www.calltime.com.au 

Rockwell Electronic Commerce
Rockwell develops hardware and software for call centres. Their solutions are largely open standards, as the company believes the future for call centre technology lies in the need for standard-based technology.

On March 29, Rockwell released Transcent e-Commerce, a product that allows small to medium size contact centres to provide the same service as much larger enterprises. The product integrates a full set of multimedia customer contact and relationship management applications based on Transcend 2.0, an upgrade of Rockwell Transcend. The package has a capacity of 10 to 160 agents, with the same multimedia, Web-enabled contact routing and management capabilities as larger, sophisticated contact centres, all in one configuration. 

The new package is consistent with Rockwell's commitment to open standards, based on the latest Intel/Dialogic industry standard CT media open interfaces. It offers seamless integration with applications such as predictive diallers and IVRs. Other features include system monitoring and instant notification, as well as enhanced real time displays and graphical reporting. 

Asia Pacific general manager of Rockwell, David Paddon says that by the end of 2000, Rockwell will be able to offer a single product package, which can integrate all call centre functions. Already this year Rockwell's product has developed beyond the need to use systems integrators to install the software, and developments are continuing.

Rockwell offers clients the opportunity to purchase a maintenance contract for a pre-determined period and al future upgrades are guaranteed with this contract.  Rockwell Electronic Commerce.
www.rockwell.com 

Trilogy Business Systems
Trilogy offers TalkBroker, which allows  an investor to call up a stock quote by  saying the name, or even an abbreviation, of the stock over the telephone.

First used in Australia by T D Waterhouse Investor Services, TalkBroker uses technology developed by SpeechWorks.  It has been implemented on an advanced  interactive voice response (IVR) platform by world leaders in IVR technology,  Inter Voice-Brite.
Trilogy Business Systems
www.trilogy.aust.com 

Remedy Corporation
Remedy Corporation develops and markets leading worldwide software solutions for a consolidated service desk. A combination of Remedy Help Desk with Remedy CRM Solutions, Sales Force  Automation and other key applications, allows Remedy to provide comprehensive solutions that can be used individually or as a collaborative, integrated suite.

Remedy products and services are  available on the company Web site. www.remedy.com 

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