John Linton A colleague referred me to page 57 of the August 7 - 13, 2008 edition of BRW which was an article on the performance of Australian call centres providing 'sales assistance' to prospective customers. The article was headed "CALLING, NOT LISTENING" with the sub heading of "RUDE, UNHELPFUL AND FLOGGING PRODUCTS YOU DON'T WANT. THEY'RE THE CALL CENTRES FROM HELL".
Now, I have no idea of the real credentials of either the writer of the article (Adam Goodvach) nor the credibility of the organisation that did the research (Global Reviews). The article describes Global Reviews as "does quarterly benchmarks of call centres .....making tens of thousands of calls in the process" - so perhap it is a credible analysis. What caught my colleague's eye was the fact that in the list of the ten worst call centres surveyed, five of the ten were ISPs:
2. Internode
4. TPG
5. Unwired
8. Soul
9. Primus
In stark contrast, in the list of ten best call centres there was, at number two, Telstra BigPond - the only ISP on the top ten.
Obviously this survey was on the various companies call centre capabilities when people called in with SALES enquiries - it wasn't how the call centres performed in terms of handling support calls and requests. However it seems quite odd that 50% of the worst ten sales call centres should be operated by ISPs and only one ISP was rated as being very good.
My interest was not in how badly five 'competitors' were rated by an unknown organisation but how Exetel's sales answering services would fare in such a survey. For over a year Exetel offered no telephone sales enquiry answering service for a range of reasons that appeared to be valid at that time so we have some realistic statistics as to what happens between not having a telephone service avaialble for sales enquirers and having such a service. However we have no statistics on how effective, or otherwise, answering sales enquiries are within our company - other than that our sales increased after we resumed a telephone sales enquiry answering service.
That may sound strange (as strange as this survey finding 5 large ISPs having really bad sales enquiry handling services) but it may come from a common set of situations. Having only thought about it for the time between reading the article over 'breakfast' this morning and now, I have no real answers but I think the reasons may be related to:
1. ISPs are technically based companies with little internal sales abilities or even interest in sales processes.
2. The ADSL market has been a boom market since the beginning and new sales have been pretty easy to acquire and few ISPs have given much thought or interest to the 'sales side' of their call centres.
3. ADSL was a difficult service to provide (and therefore buy) initially, and for quite a long time, and many ISPs had to use 'engineering background' personnel to handle 'sales' enquiries effectively.
While none of the above reasons apply to today's marketing environment it is pretty hard to make changes to large call centres (or any large operation) within a commercial enterprise. There are all the obvious reasons for this being the case not least of which is that call centres produce endless call answering statistics of how well they are doing and few decision making managers within large organisations are capable of understanding what's going on in their call centres until some newspaper writes up a 'complaint article' sourced from disgruntled customer comments - but that is only going to apply to support call centres (a la Dodo's recent slagging off in the media).
No media are going to write an article on how people are not getting sales information from a call centre; not least because no-one who 'suffers' is going to care about their treatment - they just buy from someone else.
So what does Exetel do about this article's claimed information? Easy enough to say - "that doesn't happen here". Such a view is unlikely to be true. So what do we do? I suppose it's a 'action jogger' in that Exetel has always had engineers answer sales enquiries (because of 3. above) and we have never reviewed that situation since January 2004. Just goes to show how careless even the most involved decision making management can be. So it is a reminder that it's long past time to actually build a sales enquiry call centre service that is premised and based on being purely a sales operation rather than something a new Exetel employee has to do so they can move on to 'proper' engineering responsibilities.
One more change to Exetel's operational processes to be added to the never ending list.