IT and the call centre - a recipe for success

Europeans are becoming increasingly fussy about levels of customer service. Like their counterparts in North America and Japan, they're demanding more from companies, especially as competition grows in areas such as telecoms, travel and financial services.

But at the heart of many customer service operations lies the humble call centre, a facility which all too often serves merely to sour the customer-supplier relationship.

And while many users choose to blame call agents when service goes awry, let's not forget that those agents depend on IT.

There are two steps in approaching the IT-customer service conundrum.

First, a lot of companies - whether they're high-tech or not - must take a deep breath and admit they have a problem. This has happened, for example, in the UK cable industry. At a recent cable communications conference in London, the heads of the big three cable players - Cable & Wireless Communications (C&WC), NTL and Telewest - said things have to improve. Many users have left BT only to find the cable operators treat them just as poorly.

C&WC chairman, Graham Wallace, promised delegates: "We have spent £50m connecting three call centres into one 'virtual' call centre. Most of our customers get a good experience, but we get one million calls a month, and the challenge is making them all good calls. We'll see significant improvements from now on."

The next stage is to do something about the problem. One school of thought is that staff are the most important part of any call centre. This may be true.

Sima Patel, MD of Call Centre College (CCC), a training centre for call centre staff, says: "It's all about working out which people have the right attitude and personalities on the phone. Product knowledge is something they can be trained on later."

To this end, CCC's sister organisation, recruitment firm, Call Centre People, has pioneered a form of tele-assessment to determine which job seekers it should put forward for positions.

Simon McBeth, customer service and call centre manager at construction company, Hilti, says: "It's not just about firms getting the call agent side of the centre right. There aren't enough senior managers in business that have call centre, or even customer service, experience."

This is a view backed up by L&R Group, the consulting arm of call centre specialist, Sitel. A recent L&R survey found that 91 per cent of call centre managers are frustrated with senior management's lack of understanding.

But even if a company knows it has to improve its customer service, and strives to put its staff first, there's still no guarantee its call centre operations will run smoothly. This is where IT comes in.

Barclays has been one company that has grappled with integrating customer records with its call centre operations. Ian Taylor, customer service solution manager at Barclays, explains: "Our international payment enquiries operation was faced with the problem of bolting together call centres with back office systems dealing with electronic enquiries.

"We had no phone integration, no ACD [automated call distribution] and no call logging, so we implemented front-end technology that makes use of middleware, and now we have a call centre which accesses payment records from all over the world."

And it seems those call centres that serve customers well will increasingly be those that make the best use of technology.

"There are only so many people prepared to work in call centres," says Steve Morrell, analyst at Datamonitor. "In a mature market like the UK, staff retention is a real problem, but organisations in Italy and Germany - where call centres haven't been around so long - are more efficient because they tend to make use of the latest technology, such as CTI (computer telephony integration) and IVR (interactive voice response)."

With corporate and consumer buying decisions increasingly based on levels of customer service, and a call centre staffing crisis looming, getting the technology right is more of a priority than ever.