Your Call Center is Your
Electronic Front Door
Carl R. Strathmeyer
March Issue, TeleProfessional
Courtesy of Dialogic Corporation
Let's pretend you are the vice-president of consumer lending for a
large regional bank. You walk into a local automobile dealership and
are surprised to find a new information kiosk installed in the
showroom, right next to the new cars. The kiosk has a screen and a
small keyboard, and -- oops! -- it carries the logo of your biggest
competitor bank.
You walk over to the kiosk, and begin reading the instructions. It
seems that, from this one kiosk, you can complete all the paperwork
needed to get an auto loan or lease approved, and get the funds
disbursed to the dealership. You can even arrange insurance coverage
and take care of title and registration formalities. If you haven't
decided on financing alternatives, the kiosk can give you current
rates and help you figure out whether a loan or a lease would be
most beneficial. And if you are uncomfortable using the kiosk, it is
easy to establish a video call to the bank's customer service agent.
Imagine -- to be able to decide on a car model, and leave the
dealership with all the formalities taken care of! And imagine how
that kiosk improves the sale closing rate for the dealership.
Are you surprised? Worried? You should be. With the convenience of
that kiosk to compete against, it will take more than a
quarter-point rate discount to attract customers away from your
competitor.
A bad dream? It will soon be worse than that. The technology to
construct such a kiosk already exists, and it is not
cost-prohibitive.
Then why don't installations like this already exist? Simply because
business management doesn't appreciate that scenarios like this are
possible. Technology is galloping ahead of our ability to put it to
productive use.
But think about it: Your competitor could adopt some of this
technology right now. Perhaps he already is working on it. And you
can bet it will change the dynamics of your market as soon as it
hits the street, whether you are in banking, retailing, or any other
industry.
How do you prepare yourself for this brave new world? Well, let's
see what we can learn from the more comfortable world of traditional
call centers.
What are you really trying to accomplish with you call center? (If
you answered that you were trying to answer the phone as efficiently
as possible, you get a failing grade for strategy and must stay
after school!)
What does a call center do, after all, for an organization?
-
It allows a wider customer base to do business with you.
- It allows you to economically reach diverse and widely distributed
customer groups.
- It allows you to fine-tune your offerings to specific customer
groups.
-
It allows your customers easy access to your top experts.
- It allows you to do business around the clock, and in any geography.
-
It allows you to avoid the overhead of brick-and-mortar branches.
In many businesses, such as retail banking, a typical customer now
transacts more business through call centers than in
brick-and-mortar branches. How many times have you used automatic
teller machines or bank-by-phone services recently, compared to the
number of times you have entered a bank branch office?
In fact, the call center is often the most prevalent way that a
customer transacts business with an organization. The call center
has become an electronic front door which is often more important
than all the organization's brick-and-mortar front doors put
together!
Organizations spend substantial time and resources analyzing
potential locations and designs for brick-and-mortar branches, and
considerable sums to construct them. How much time and what level of
resources do you and your management spend on your electronic front
door?
We spend time and money on branch offices because we know that
customers will not patronize a branch that is in an inconvenient
location, or whose design is awkward. This same concept carries over
to the call center, your electronic front door. But is your
organization spending a commensurate effort to evaluate and improve
this important asset?
Let's look at the elements you'll need to make your call center a
really effective "electronic front door":
Telephone Resources
You need to be aware of all the offerings of your telephone carriers
and your PBX/ACD vendors. Telephone vendors can supply much more
than dial tone these days. Telephone calls come with a lot of
attached information, such as ANI and DNIS, and this information can
help you give your callers better service. You need to be aware of
these capabilities, so you can develop business scenarios that use
them to competitive advantage.
Telecommunications offerings are also making huge leaps beyond dial
tone. The broadband capabilities of the "information highway" will
stretch our idea of what a "call" really is. If customers can make
video "calls" to your multimedia catalog database, what will you do
about peak calling periods? Do you need the equivalent of an ACD to
park calls in queue? What do the callers look at while they are
parked -- cartoons?
These are not technical questions; they are business questions.
Engineers can build video call machinery. But it is the business
person who must decide how video calls should be handled. What will
callers want? What will be most helpful and convenient for them?
These are questions that you must decide.
MIS Resources
Every organization has its legacy systems -- the MIS applications
that keep basic business records. In most shops, these applications
run on mainframes and are maintained by a separate MIS department.
They are massive systems, a crucial part of your business operation,
and they are not going to be changed very quickly. As a call center
manager, you will probably have to take them as they are.
But you need not limit your MIS resources to just those systems.
Developments in desktop computing and client-server architectures
allow you to add capabilities and features without disturbing the
older systems.
The older systems automate corporate bookkeeping, but you need
additional systems to automate customer service. Not the record
keeping part of customer service; but rather the call-handling part.
You need a good data network to let you reach into the legacy
systems; you need computing power in your department (probably from
desktop systems and shared servers); and you need modern application
creation software that lets you define automated call flow
applications without spending years writing old-fashioned code.
Having your own system resources, under your control and with better
capabilities than the legacy systems, becomes even more important as
you move beyond traditional call centers. If you want to present a
customer's account summary in multimedia graphic format, the raw
data will still come from legacy systems. But it is the new systems
in your call center that will convert this information into
multimedia graphics, and send it on its way to the caller.
Staff
As a call center manager, you have learned the value of service
representatives who enjoy helping customers and have an innate sense
of good customer service. You look for these qualities when you
hire, and you reward and promote staff who exhibit them.
As customer service functions become more automated, you want those
same qualities of approachability in your systems. After all, your
systems are -- quite literally -- talking to your customers more
than your service representatives are!
Unfortunately, some call center managers look at automation
technology and get scared. They abdicate all leadership to the MIS
or telecommunications department. The result is a system that works
fine, but has a bad "attitude" from the caller's perspective. This
is why we sometimes think of the new technologies as being less
user-friendly. It's not the technology itself; it's the attitude and
experience of those we assign to apply it.
How do you avoid this? First, exercise leadership. Technology need
not be so scary. Ask questions in non-technical language, and expect
answers in the same spirit. Use your common sense. Make sure your
automated "agents" are as friendly and helpful as your human ones.
If your technical advisors (internal MIS staff or external vendors)
aren't comfortable working this way, insist on new ones! And most
important, begin hiring technical staff who exhibit the same
commitment to good customer service that your phone staff does.
That's a challenging list of resources. But you're not done yet. All
the resources in the world won't get you where you want to go if you
haven't mapped out how to get there.
Do you really feel that your call center is your company's
electronic front door? What does this mean to you, and to your
management? You will have to start asking yourself, your staff, and
senior management some hard questions about what you want to be to
your customers and what good customer service really means. This
self-analysis may take you in directions you don't expect.
For example, we've come to assume that outbound calls are
potentially more annoying to customers than having a passive
800-number available to take inbound calls. So we may assume that
the best possible level of customer service consists of being ready
to take inbound calls promptly at any time. And this capability
would certainly be an important part of a call center's strategic
plan.
But perhaps there are instances when your customers would very much
like you to call them. You may be a brokerage firm, and your
customer wants to hear immediately about important market events. Or
you are a bank, and your customer wants to hear about an uncleared
item before it cascades into overdrafts. Or an insurance company,
and your customer wants to hear about regulatory changes that affect
his policy. Or a retailer, and your customer wants to hear about a
special offer on merchandise he buys frequently. All of these calls
would be genuinely appreciated by your customer, and would generate
loyalty and satisfaction.
Like the banking kiosk example, the technology to do all these
things already exists. We are talking about things that could
certainly be done, if a business reason were found to do them. The
successful companies of the future will be those who appreciate what
these technologies could do, and are creative in applying that
potential to their own competitive advantage. You don't need to know
these technologies in depth; that's a job for your technical staff
and your vendors. But don't expect these folks to put together a
business strategy for you! That's your job.
Once you have a plan, you need one final element: Empowerment.
Empowerment for yourself, from senior management; empowerment from
you, to your staff. You should expect to work hard to earn that
empowerment. You will have to talk to senior management about the
electronic front door, and how important that front door really is.
You will have to demonstrate a vision of how to make this front door
as convenient as possible for your customers. You will have to
demonstrate that you can lead the organization and manage resources
to accomplish your vision. And you will have to demonstrate what
success could mean for your company -- or failure. And once you are
empowered to bring this about, you need to ask similar things of
your staff and empower them to make it happen.
It makes a big difference, thinking about the call center this way.
With all the recent talk about the information highway, multimedia,
and all the other startling technical developments it is easy to see
that 800-numbers are only the first step in serving customers
through an electronic front door. Where it goes from here is up to
you.
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