John Linton
I read this article last night as I was making a list of the key actions we have agreed to take over the first six months of FY2009 to further improve the levels of service we offer our customers (one of which is to improve our reporting and analytical procedures):
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/18565/127/1/3/
I don't know what you think, if you bother to read it, but maybe there are some interesting new and valuable concepts as promised by the reporter but all I saw was a new high in meaningless buzz words. I don't think I've ever seen so many stupid and just plain crazy words and 'phrases' used in one piece of writing out side of Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay's set pieces once per episode where Sir Humphrey produces what seems to be five minute long statement consisting entirely of strung together meaningless phrases. I think this article clearly depicts 'NICE' as being a contender for Sir Humphrey's title of "the Paganini of prevarication".
I'm sure there was some point to the article but all I could find was that the reporter himself had bad experiences when using an Australian call centre and that his personal bad experiences were the norm rather than the exception. Possibly a generically accurate view but hardly worth writing about.
Fixing a customer's problem in the shortest possible time is the prime purpose of a call centre. If the call centre experience can also make the customer feel more positive about the company because of the way his/her problem was resolved then that is a highly desirable bonus and should be the secondary purpose of operating a call centre (making more sales of the company's products/services).
We have now spent almost four and a half years providing call centre services to Exetel customers and, over that time, we have changed almost every aspect of what we do and and how we do it - unsurprising when you do something from 'scratch' and decide that everything you've seen or been associated with in the past is not something you'd like to be part of. Our views of what a customer call centre should achieve from FY2009 onwards can be summed up without using any buzz words or obfuscatory phrases as:
1) Answer any call within an average of 60 seconds
2) Determine whether there is a problem that Exetel is responsible for fixing within 120 seconds of answering the call
3) If the problem is caused by a fault at Exetel or its providers get the customer's service restored within 48 hours in 95% of all cases
4) If the problem is not caused by Exetel help the customer understand how to go about resolving his/her own problem within a further three minutes
5) Document the details of each call on the customer's service history before taking another call
6) If the Exetel/supplier problem is not fixed within 48 hours ensure a Level 3 engineer takes over the control of getting the problem resolved and keeps in contact with the customer at least once a day.
7) If the problem goes beyond 5 working days escalate the handling of the problem to the Support or Provisioning Manager (depending on the reason for the delay in restoring the service).
Written like that, there are no ambiguities and no 'fancy' words. Any call centre manager should be able to agree, more or less without any real changes, to this sort of simple set of objectives in the telecommunications business which must take in to consideration the time frames of the carriers who are responsible for almost 100% of the actions required to restore a telephone or ADSL service.
Of course my personal experiences in dealing with call centres is pretty similar to the writer of the article I referenced:
1) Very long wait times before my call is actually answered
2) Unhelpful, often quite ignorant, "help" from the person answering my call.
3) No fix to my problem within a reasonable time frame
4) No follow up/call back from the people fixing my problem necessitating repeated additional calls by me
5) No way of getting my problem escalated in any realistic time frame or in any reasonable way
So why does this happen?
I don't know. Presumably there are failures within the organisations that I have personally dealt with in adequately staffing the call centres concerned (resulting in long wait times) and poor personnel selection and training (ignorant/unhelpful call centre personnel) probably all based on senior management indifference to these issues based on financial decisions - but, as I said - I just don't know.
I do know that if senior management are involved then there are few problems and those problems that do occur, as inevitably they will, get addressed sooner rather than later - so my view is that poor call centre customer support is a direct result of poor quality senior management within an organisation.
I am asuming that the "NICE" software is based on providing senior management with some panacea solution that involves spending a lot of money on analysing problems that shouldn't exist in the first place. I didn't really get enough information from the article to properly form that unkind opinion but it seems to me that you don't need too much information to put in place a call centre staffed by people who will allow your company to offer exactly the kind of 'support experience' you have decided is what you wish to do. All you need is the will to do that.
We have developed our own call centre software using the base data provided from our telephone system and our customer data base and that allows us (and of course every other company using their own selected software) to exactly determine what standards are being met and therefore what, if anything needs to be done to improve the 'customer experience'.
The solution to providing the best level and quality of customer service is not a software issue. All it needs is enough personnel to ensure customers don't have to wait to speak to someone and a hiring policy that ensures the person who deals with a customer's issue has the knowledge, tools and skills to fix whatever issue they are confronted with in the shortest possible time.
Then all that is needed by top 'Senior Management' is software that gives a distillation of a few key indicators of the performance of support in general and any individual within support who is not meeting the required customer service levels.
Very simple - needs no fancy words or fancy software - just common sense and the correct budget.