John Linton
Exetel has, from its inception, put a great deal of time, effort and money into automating as much of its operational processes as possible. We did it for all the obvious reasons including the main reason - that we would only survive by lowering the cost of our operations to a level that was below any other company with which we would at any time be competing. At the time we started Exetel, January 2004, there were no ISPs of which we had any knowledge that had made any realistic efforts to automate the most expensive parts of their operation and we determined that there was a very large operational advantage if we were able to actually deliver automated systems that not only worked as well as systems that involved 'human beings' but that did better than any human being could be expected to perform the same tasks.
This was hardly 'rocket science' as automation had been the driving force of commerce since the industrial revolution some 250 years ago. However we began the long, and ongoing, processes of automating the areas of an ISP's business that, as far as we could see, had not begun to be implemented by all other ISPs in Australia - customer service. Steve's and my direct experiences with several ISPs up to 2004 were that 'call centres' were amazingly inefficient and extremely expensive operations within ISPs - often being the single largest expense incurred by an ISP.
So we began the process of automating the support functions which Exetel was putting in place on 'day one' and have continued to invest in automating those support functions ever since. Of course, as time goes on every company in any sort of 'service business' has found that web based systems (on line price lists, on line application forms, help forums, on line FAQs etc, etc) have significantly reduced the 'human' processes of providing sales information and taking orders and advising customers of the progress of processing their orders. There probably isn't a commercial entity of any size on the planet today that isn't using web based facilities where once there would be a 'human' doing those jobs either on the phone or person to person which was heavily endorsed by this article I read earlier this morning:
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/19949/127/
which includes various percentages of how call centres generally around the world have reduced 'human' responses to customer support queries which included this statement:
"human agent transactions account for just over 50 percent of all
inbound transactions to contact centres, but ten years ago, 90 percent
of all inbound transactions were completed by a human agent."
Within Exetel's operations we achieve quite a bit better than 50% and the advantages of doing so are very obvious. One of the most obvious advantages of automated response systems has always been that they are 'error free' in as much as they are incapable of giving a customer 'incorrect or misleading' information and they are, by definition, incapable of being 'misquoted' by a customer in subsequent events. However the major advantage, as noted in the referenced article, is that it allows 'human beings' to deal with the more complex issues that arise in providing various servces to various levels of customers more effectively and far more quickly.
In Exetel's, and so many other 'technology provider's cases, this means that we are able to only hire competent engineers to assist customers (and therefore provide real, knowledgable support) as opposed to the rapidly turned over "script jockeys" that are the inevitable result of a lack of automation in so many call centres in Australia and in other countries.
Exetel has over 80,000 customers of our different services and we have 14 support personnel - a ratio of support personnel to customers of a little more than 5,000 to 1 (all sales enquiries are handled by the same personnel. However when an Exetel customer does need to speak to a 'human being' the waiting time required is one of the lowest, if not the lowest, of any company with which we compete - the statistics for the last few months can be found here:
http://forum.exetel.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=324&t=27043
Without automating as much of the current processes as we have done the cost of our basic broadband services to the customer would need to be around $A8.00 a month higher than they are today - a stark example of the benefits of a high level of automation or, in contrast, a good example of how not automating support functions adds unnecessary cost to the provision of any service to an end user.
When you look at what's happening in Australia (and the cases in point I referenced yesterday are among the more obvious examples) you see that the cost of providing call centre support is very high on the list of reasons that companies such as Commander went out of business and why AAPT is addressing its operating losses by moving its call centres to the Philippines - the costs of these services (no/little automation) is just too high for an Australian company to absorb and still stay competitive. I obviously don't know that for a fact but I'm well aware of the costs of support as delivered by call centre processes over the past 15 years.
With the likely economic climate continuing to decline rather than improve it would seem likely that Australia's call centre staffing will decline at a more rapid rate in the near future than it has over the past two years. This may mean employment opportunities in countries other than Australia improves in direct proportion to the job numbers lost here (or even as a multiple of the number of call centre jobs 'lost' in Australia) but it is not going to help the Australian call centre personnel who then have to seek other employment - almost certainly their call centre skills will not be needed in any future postion they find.
Maybe a call centre operative is going to be as scarce to find in Australia in the not so distant future as the once omnipresent blacksmith?