Contact centres are the front line for customer service and have become much more than call centres with new technology developments. David Braue outlines the evolution of call centres to contact centres and beyond with examples of how organisations are benefiting.
In the past, if you called Pine River Shire Council with an enquiry you were likely to be transferred directly to the desk of a council staffer who would listen to your request and, eventually, get back to you. The result of years of history, however, this approach was showing signs of strain as the fast-growing council - which services 128,000 residents in an area immediately northwest of Brisbane - worked to improve its responsiveness.
This push resulted in implementation of a new Avaya PABX, which replaced a nine-year-old model whose capabilities were limited to simple call routing. Building on the new technology, last October Pine River Shire established a 13-person call centre that now provides first-level call handling and escalation.
Changes since then have been dramatic. Not only are calls handled more efficiently, but council staff are finding far more time to get their jobs done properly. Tasks raised during calls are automatically escalated throughout the organisation until they're resolved. The PABX's monitoring and benchmarking capabilities are giving the council its first ever metrics judging how well it is (or isn't) servicing customers.
"The core business of a lot of council departments isn't necessarily to answer telephones," says Greg Starkey, the council's manager of IT and communications. "By establishing a call centre, what was traditionally set up as hunt groups now goes straight into the call centre. It's been a policy of the council to be as personal as possible for our customers. We're offering them a wider range of access into the organisation, and the PABX and call centre are the first stage of that."
Future stages will build on the council's new PABX by adding technologies such as voice over IP (VoIP), customer relationship management (CRM) software, and internet self-service tools. Their goal: to give organisations completely new ways of interacting with their customers.
The contact centre paradox
At all levels of the business world, organisations face a growing need to contain costs while accommodating growth in call volumes - and, somehow, improving customer service despite it all.
In the past, technology to make this possible was largely limited to basic computer-telephony integration (CTI), which lets the computer pull up a caller's details for transfer alongside phone calls. Also common was automatic call distribution (ACD), with past solutions largely focused on analysing each customer service representative's (CSR) call load and routing new calls accordingly.
With most call centre environments still focused around handling voice calls, CTI was more than enough data integration for call centre managers to think about. But with the voice industry rushing headlong towards IP-based services, the call centre industry is rapidly expanding its vision with the introduction of technologies and services that are revolutionising the way customer contact centres are run.
Research group Frost & Sullivan has grouped these technologies under the moniker interaction customer relationship management (ICRM). Within the ICRM segment, Frost & Sullivan has grouped a range of ACD, interactive voice response (IVR), outbound speech, CTI, email management, web interactions, call monitoring and workforce management (WFM). In varying degrees, all are emerging to play a role in next-generation contact centres whose functionality extends far beyond simple call answering and CTI.
The emergence of non-traditional technologies has been slow, however: ACD and CTI together accounted for 66 per cent of an Asia-Pacific ICRM market that reached US$620.6 million last year but grew just 0.7 per cent over 2002, according to Frost & Sullivan. By 2007, however, the overall market is expected to pick up: the firm projects Asia-Pacific ICRM revenues will surpass US$1.1 billion by 2007 based on a cumulative average growth rate of 13 per cent that will continue until 2010.
Technology on the line
Early adopters are finding that a little technology can go a long way. Natural language speech recognition (NLSR), in particular, has generated a rapidly growing fan base as companies implement ever-improving technology to offload some of the burden carried by their CSRs.
Telstra, which operates one of Australia's busiest call centres with over 25 million calls a year, recently took a big step in this direction by diverting calls to its main customer service numbers to an NLSR system using technology from market leader ScanSoft.
Rather than forcing customers to wade through a torturous multi-level IVR system to reach specialists with one of 70 possible skill sets, the service - known as One Number, One Voice - lets callers say in a natural voice exactly what they want to do. Intelligent voice parsing routes them directly into the correct CSR queue with an accuracy that was well over the 65 per cent target even before the system went live in May. In other words, more than two-thirds of calls to Telstra no longer need to be routed by human operators.
Given that human costs make up around two-thirds of contact centre budgets, utilising those skills in a better way can significantly boost productivity, says Con Lambropoulos, general manager of Telstra Customer Access.
"It's a waste of people resources [to have them do basic call routing]," he says. "Speech can do the mundane things and you can get an agent to do the complex transaction. This gives better use of people, and job satisfaction is higher for agents who can focus on more mentally stimulating tasks."
The value proposition of Telstra's offering is based on the idea that NLSR-based call routing will improve customer satisfaction by getting them to their destinations faster. At rival AAPT, however, NLSR is taking on a much bigger role as the basis of AAPT SmartSpeak.
Built around NLSR technology from VeCommerce, SmartSpeak also routes incoming calls by letting customers say what they want in a normal speaking voice. However, callers to AAPT can also use the NLSR engine for a variety of more complex transactions such as checking account balances, paying bills and launching other service enquiries.
During limited testing, the solution had already reduced queue times for the call centre - which handles around 60,000 calls a month - by around 20 per cent, says Rhoda Holmes, general manager of AAPT's Customer and Network Services division. That is expected to increase, however, as increasingly complex NLSR applications handle a growing number of calls from human operators becoming ever busier due to growing numbers of enquiries about complex internet-phone-mobile service bundles.
"The complexity of what our customers want to speak to us about is only going to grow," says Holmes. "We need to find a way to handle those volumes without increasing the burden on the contact centre. With speech, we're able to target processes that weren't really good to do using dual tone multi-frequency (DTMF) tones. Payments are easy to do in DTMF because they're all numbers, but when you start doing more complicated interactions that's where you really start to get the benefits of speech."
Because size matters
AAPT has another motive for implementing NLSR, however: as part of its growing portfolio of IP services, the carrier will soon begin offering its speech recognition platform to customers as an outsourced service. "We're great believers in eating our own dog food," Holmes laughs.
Managed contact centre services are becoming a hot topic thanks to the growing trend of implementing IP-based contact centres. Standardisation on IP frees call centres from their ties to the arcane, proprietary interfaces of often outdated PABXs, allowing contact centres to both improve visibility of their calling trends and to leverage growing portfolios of managed services.
In an IP world, it doesn't matter where a service is sourced from. This underlying fact is being seen as a great equaliser within the contact centre industry, where investment in data-related technologies has been focused largely on cashed-up big businesses while smaller companies make do with rudimentary PABXs with a touch of CTI. CRM is high on the list of technologies to be outsourced, as is WFM, which allows contact centres to better direct calls by tracking individual employees' training and areas of expertise.
According to Frost & Sullivan, smaller businesses recognise the value of such solutions: the firm projects that contact centres with less than 70 seats will lead the "relatively rapid" push to IP-based contact centres, due largely to the increase in hosted ICRM solutions and a growing recognition of the value of superlative customer service. Most contact centres with legacy ACD systems, Frost & Sullivan projects, will deploy IP call centre technologies within the next two years.
"Being able to pay a monthly fee [for rental of contact centre services] is quite attractive to customers," says Joan Murphy, national manager of Customer Contact Solutions with Kaz Business Services. Kaz recently implemented a multimedia service platform from Apropos, which it will use to offer customers a hosted solution integrating voice, email, web and fax communications.
Murphy expects that easier budgeting and more rapid access to advanced ICRM technologies will make hosted services a big winner for small businesses. "Most people tend to stick to a call centre function and don't really explore the technology to its greatest extent," she says. "But [hosting] makes the whole business process much easier: with a fixed expense per agent per month, you take the budget from capex, put it into an expense line, and you get a very effective platform."
Although the market is currently quite diverse, expect consolidation as carriers and traditional PABX vendors strengthen their offerings in this area. Kaz, for example, was recently acquired by Telstra while AAPT's own efforts highlight its intentions. By next year, even small businesses will be able to gain ready access to what used to be considered cutting-edge contact centre services.
All it takes is IP. For companies contemplating their next move, the shift to an IP contact centre is clearly a good choice. Once that framework is in place, customer-centric business strategies become much easier to implement.
"You're getting technologies that are more provable and adoptable, and can be consumed in smaller bites," says Steve Herlocher, vice president of marketing with contact centre technology vendor Concerto Software. "Instead of seeing it as leading edge to know about customers it's becoming a requirement. We're seeing a real need for analytics, optimisation across multiple campaigns and the like, and the ability to spread those across multiple sites. The important thing is making sure your infrastructure acquisitions can meet those goals and enable all the pent-up potential of your CRM system."
