The Ovum View: My call centre confession...

Following recent articles about call centre excellence and readers' best and worst call centre experiences, here Ovum analyst Alex Kwiatkowski reveals his dirty little secret...

Ladies and gentlemen my name’s Alex and I have a confession to make. Ready. Here we go. Deep breath… I like call centres (and exhale). There, I’ve said it. Now I know that doesn’t have the same shock value as admitting to being the perpetrator of a major crime or letting slip that I admire the acting skills of Madonna but there’s such an enormous stigma associated with call centres. I almost feel embarrassed to speak of my experiences in public.

Why do I like them? I find them useful. I don’t have the time to wander off down to my local British Gas showroom (not that I even know where my nearest one is) with a query on my latest bill. I’ve got easy access to a telephone. There’s one on my desk at work, two in my home and a mobile one in my pocket.

Sure, I might have to wait in queue listening to something from ‘The Best Middle-of-the-Road Album Ever – Volume 2’ every once in a while but I’d rather spend five minutes of my life doing that as opposed to sitting in a traffic jam trying to get in to the town centre to visit my nearest branch office. Plus, I quite like Dire Straits (another confession).

Furthermore, I began my career in one, have written extensively about them and on more than one occasion can say with hand firmly on heart – rather than tongue firmly in cheek – that I’ve been genuinely impressed by the experience of using them (Bose Audio – two thumbs up from ‘Mr Satisfied Customer of Brighton’).

I’ve spent over half my working life in an environment where “Press 1 for Sales” is a way of life and my CV proudly reflects my time as an agent, team leader and call centre manager.

Yet for the uninitiated, visions of cavernous windowless buildings, featuring football-pitch sized rooms filled with glum looking customer service agents, controlled by the sort of people whose management skills would have excelled on a Roman galley come easily to mind. Trust me when I say that they’re not all like that.

Today, the call centre is the embodiment of the expression “Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em”. Simply put, they’re everywhere, every business (medium-sized and up) seems to have one and everybody seems to have an opinion on them - usually a negative one.

So, this begs the question – or at least it does to me – “Where did it all go wrong?” And while I’m down on my knees, I might as well go the whole hog and ask “What will it take to put it right?”

I think the answer, as with most things in life, is painfully obvious. There are three crucial pieces in the call centre puzzle.

First up, sophisticated technology has, in many instances, been poorly used.

Second, good managerial capabilities and strong coherent leadership have not, for the most part, complemented the labour intensive nature of the working environment.

Finally, the call centre has tended to drift to the periphery of an organisation, acting as a place where problems are simply dealt with and nothing more. In my eyes – and no, I’m not wearing rose-tinted glasses – the call centre must be at the very heart of the business and the place where opportunities are created, revenues increased and, most importantly, the needs of customers met.

For the purpose of this article, and with my technological head screwed on, I readily concede the frustrations associated with interactive voice response (IVR) when it has been poorly implemented. It’s all too easy for callers to get lost in a maze of queues, some of which can literally be dead ends and impossible to escape from unless you hang up the receiver.

The ‘Golden Rule of Five’ – with five being the maximum number of options presented – is a concept that’s been around for almost as long as the call centre industry itself. Yet time and again, businesses fall into the same old trap of bombarding us with a plethora of options and unless you’re blessed with the memory of an elephant, it can be tricky to recall which button you really should have pressed. However, when used properly, IVR can deliver exactly what call centre solutions vendors promised all those years ago, namely an efficient and effective way of directing customers to the person who’s most appropriately equipped to deal with their enquiry.

Despite the relative maturity of IVR, and the arrival of other new-fangled technological marvels such as speech recognition and multi-channel interaction (via email and the web), organisations must continually ensure that their IVR is as user-friendly as possible.

Big businesses will spend thousands of pounds each year on their corporate headquarters, making it look attractive, welcoming and impressive to visitors but in reality few customers will ever see it and be wowed. The call centre has become the public face of many organisations and it’s imperative that these organisations get the IVR set-up properly.

After all, as my dad likes to say: “If you get the simple things right, then the complicated tasks are much easier to accomplish.” Wise words indeed.

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