John Linton .....to at least two large Australian technology providers based on this comment by Telstra's John Stanhope (assuming it was accurately reported from his address yesterday in Melbourne on the subject of Telstra's use of overseas call centres):
"“Increasingly, we are finding that it’s our customers who want to go online. Many of our customers
don’t want to talk to a customer agent,” Stanhope said. “They’d rather make their transactions – such as
changing plans, ordering new services or activating additional features – on their PC or smartphone.”
The Telstra CFO noted that the company wants 35% of its transactions to be online by 2013, up
from around 10% now. He cited other improvements to be driven through Telstra Digital including
new email bill enhancements and new online ordering for business customers."
When Exetel commenced offering residential communications services the FIRST thing we did was to begin automating every process that could be automated. That concept is, of course, a company life long project to which there will never be an end in terms of automating new processes and 're-automating' previous processes to improve them. Before the first six months of offering residential ADSL, telephone and mobile services (July 2004) Exetel had user facilities on line that already allowed the basics of customer support to do the things Mr Stanhope is talking about making available in 2013 - 10 years after Exetel (and almost certainly other service providers to some extent) has been providing them, and so many other customer facilities.
We can have no way of knowing just how many/what percentage of total transactions our customers complete on line as opposed to how many/what percentage they complete via our call centre. When we bothered to keep web statistics our customers would visit the Exetel user facilities on average three times each month to look use those facilities to either obtain information (download usage, call spends etc or to process a transaction such as a plan change, added service or to print previous bills or to make an information change) whereas less than 8% of total customers would actually call us to report an actual or perceived problem with their service or query/resolve some billing issue. 300% on line vs 8% by telephone in crude terms.......a far cry from the figures allegedly applying to Telstra.
We are also talking to two other suppliers of communications services about providing 'back end' user facilities for their customers based on the current Exetel user facilities as neither of those companies, their own words having been shown what Exetel provide, "have anything like that level of function and sophistication" available to their own customers....followed by "it would take us years to get such facilities developed internally and it would cost a huge amount of money". Perhaps that's true - personally I doubt it - but what is probably true is that they have no internal process where user facilities that integrate, financial, operational, network and support could be agreed upon by their many internal departments and then executed by yet another (IT) department very easily.
I take little comfort from this scenario as I see it/hear about it every day concerning our own interfaces to the various companies with whom we deal. It does tend to point out that even the largest Australian companies don't put in enough effort to use the technologies they sell to their customers very well within their own organisations - probably due to the cumbersomeness of size and the inability to get their 'warring' department structures to work effectively, and continuously, towards common goals. Inevitably the failure to use the technology that is available to them continues to demean the human beings who work for them by having them do repetitive tasks that can be more easily, more accurately and far less expensively be done by machines.
Overseas versus local call centres wouldn't be debated if there was no need for them in the first place.
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