Have you ever called a utility company several times about an issue, and had to explain your problem again and again to different operators? Or waited on hold for what seemed like an age to speak to a customer service person, because you had no faith that the automated help offering would actually help you? Have you ever used an email help facility when you wanted an answer fast?

Probably not. All these scenarios are good examples of how customer contact offerings have not lived up to their promise in the past, says UCMS Solutions’ Mark Maddren, but more and more these days, he tells us, technology and a new attitude at management level is changing all that. We caught up with him recently to learn more about contact centre technology and managing customers.

iStart: So what’s driving businesses to finally get real about CRM?
Mark Maddren: Leading up to late 2001 most organisations had big plans for expansion. Post 9/11 there was a major slowdown and businesses have said ‘hey we’re going to be going through a rough patch, we should start looking after what we’ve got’. So business strategies shifted to be more about customer retention and in many cases cost-reduction. Companies are saying ‘if we’re going to offer our customers different channels like web and email, let’s make sure we do it in an effective way so we reduce the cost of servicing them over and above our traditional channels’.

iStart: It’s clear having people use email support or web-based help systems means the cost of customer support representatives (CSRs) is greatly reduced, but isn’t it true that the majority of people will still opt for a ‘live’ CSR so they can get immediate action?
Maddren: There is a general perception that if you want help ‘now’ you don’t go to an organisation’s website or do anything other than phone – because you’re just not going to get help within that five to 10-minute window that you’ve allowed to solve your problem. We know with email for example, people may hear back in two hours’ time, the next day or maybe the next week – often because the process is actually manual. Although the customer may have filled out a quite specific help form online, all that’s actually happened is that it’s been printed out somewhere and is now sitting in someone’s in-tray waiting for them to get around to it.

iStart: So how is this being addressed?
Maddren: There’s two elements to that. One is technology has some new solutions, and the other is that organisations are making the decision to treat inquiries via non traditional channels, like email or web, with the same priority as they would a phone call.

There’s intelligence in the system that collects the relevant information, then goes away to a skill set database and says ‘right, which agent is available to handle the web or email inquiries?’ and it routes that inquiry through. A record is maintained in the contact management system as though it was a live call. Yes, the cost per transaction of email and web-based online options is significantly lower, but if we really want to encourage and in some cases incentivise people to use those channels, we need to get real about the service we’re providing behind it – and hence the need for this kind of technology infrastructure to support it – and a management attitude shift as well.

iStart: What about web-based self-help, how is that evolving?
Maddren: In some cases it is being fully automated if there is enough description provided. That is, it’s very much like a person surfing through a website and a frequently asked questions page – and then drilling down to the information they want. In the case of web-based self help, if the help system gets the person to provide enough description, usually through filling out a well-structured form, then the knowledge base can do a search and provide the relevant response to the query. From the customers’ point of view, this is great – they have entered their problem and 30 seconds later they have the answer they need.

iStart: There’s definitely an industry buzz around Natural Language Speech Recognition (NLSR), but has it come of age yet?
Maddren: If I had to pick one thing that was going to make a big impact over the next couple of years, I think that’s what it would be. You can basically free form talk to these machines and they can work out what you’re asking for.

People do confuse them with PC-based speech recognition systems like Dragon Dictate and so on, but they’re for desktops, we’re talking here about heavy duty servers running within large institutions and highly integrated into the telephony environments, with a lot more capability than desktop systems.

Because they’re just a port on a big computer somewhere, they eliminate waiting time (for a call to be answered). Overseas, airlines use this technology to sell airfares and handle inquiries about flight dates and times and other variables and the speech systems can interact with people.

Insurance companies are using them to handle policy inquiries. At any stage a caller can say ‘operator’ and the system will channel them to a live operator, but the NLSR will often have saved a lot of time because it collects data and presents the live operator with a pop screen containing all the relevant information collected so far. I think more and more we’ll see NLSR speech systems as a front end to organisations as consumers become more accustomed to them and understand that they really can tell them what they want. Once they’ve had positive experiences with that they will adapt to the technology and use it. And for them it’s really just about speeding up the user experience, rather than sitting in a queue they may very well have their issue dealt with by the NLSR system.

iStart: Getting back to more traditional contact centre technology, how is the focus on cost efficiency evolving that business?
Maddren: We’ve come through the stage where organisations were throwing large sums of money at CRM projects. The emphasis then was a big bang approach – providing a tool kit of application and functionality which wasn’t necessarily well integrated into the organisation itself, and sometimes with little or no consultation with their customers to see if it would add value for them.

After 9/11 that kind of project came to a screaming halt. Now these investments are more pragmatic; ‘if we’re going to consolidate a call centre down, in some areas head count and others operational costs, let’s make it as efficient as possible’. And that is being done through introducing superior reporting systems, and modelling systems such as workforce management.

It’s about scheduling the right people, with the right skill sets, at the right time. And measuring with KPIs if you’re delivering on the service you’ve promised – whatever the metrics. It may be about time on hold, length of calls, number of issues handled in one call so the customer doesn’t have to call back, all those sorts of metrics go into it. As we move away from these big CRM projects, the return on investment is much shorter and we’re seeing investment now that can possibly provide a return in six to 12 months and the irony is, the customer gets just as much benefit, if not more, from this ‘retention’ approach – than the organisation itself.

iStart: What’s your take on VoIP systems – is that the way the industry will go?
Maddren: To date there’s been a reasonable level of scepticism about voice over IP, but I think all the big PBX vendors and anyone who’s in voice and data delivering IP solutions for voice, think they are really starting to come of age. The benefit is you have one physical network to deliver all voice and data so there are definite cost savings in that.

iStart: In terms of integration with existing systems, what is the trend? That is, are buyers looking beyond their existing solution providers for CRM/contact centre solutions?
Maddren: For getting the most leverage I think people will opt to stick with existing providers. Some of the ERP vendors are working really hard to get their products up to scratch. Sure a company might choose to go with a different CRM product than their ERP product but equally we’re seeing organisations that even if their existing ERP product isn’t really there as a mature CRM product, compared to say a third-party CRM vendor, they’re sticking with their existing supplier because it’s an integrated suite. They can leverage their existing investment – particularly in the area of technical support, it’s a logical way to go. People don’t really want half a dozen organisations providing different specialised services.

iStart: What should be the most important thing on the checklist of companies looking for a CRM/call centre systems integrator?
Maddren: I’d rate the integrator having commercial experience in your industry as critical. I’ve seen research from Gartner and others into how many CRM projects actually deliver on their business objectives, with numbers as poor as 75% to 85% failing to deliver. So businesses need to find integrators that are absolutely committed to delivering the agreed business outcome for their clients. We’re interested in providing an end-to-end solution, so we don’t really see any one technology as being a silver bullet, and we’re not aligned to any one vendor. Businesses should always ask for referrals – ultimately it’s not so much about technology, it’s about ‘what are you like to deal with, did you deliver on your promises and what were the business benefits?’

Mark Maddren can be contacted on: mark.maddren@ucms.co.nz

For more information on UCMS Solutions contact:
Nick Egerton
Phone: 09 302 1730
Email: nick.egerton@ucms.co.nz

January 2004