You just keep me hangin’ on.Can cloud-based solutions solve the call centre customer service dilemma?

GROUPOX YGEN

Contents

Hello ..............................................................................................................5

Call management – theory and practice ...........................................6

Three key challenges for corporate call centres ............................8

1 The credibility gap .....................................................................8

2 The sales gap ...............................................................................8

3 The technology gap ................................................................. 10

It doesn’t have to be like this .............................................................. 12

You can have it all ................................................................................... 14

Conclusions .............................................................................................. 16

About Oxygen8 ........................................................................................ 18

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hello.About the Author Simon Brennan has more than 14 years’ experience in the telecommunications sector working with a wide variety of companies from tech start-ups to FTSE100 organisations. He is an expert in improving corporate customer communication, using technology to supercharge internal processes and deliver increased sales through the customer contact centre channel. Simon has a strong track record of successfully delivering cross-channel payments and communication solutions for Oxygen8’s corporate customer base, across multiple divisions within an organisation.

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“Executive mandates to reduce costs and improve efficiency are a routine within the contact centre. At its base, the contact centre seems a calculable formula of seats, calls and resources … [which] are the focus of reduction, streamlining or automating.”1

IBM: The Customer Focused Contact Centre

Call management – theory and practice The theory was simple. In an increasingly time-starved world people wanted the convenience of interacting with companies via a brief telephone conversation, during which the customer service representative would have all the necessary information at his or her fingertips and the whole thing would be over in less than five minutes.

We would order the weekly shop, renew our car insurance, complain about the lumpy hotel bed we stayed in last week, check our bank balances and book our holidays. All we had to do was tap in a few numbers on a keypad and quote a reference code.

As a result, the call centre or contact centre, call it what you will, became the hub of a company’s operations; the frontline in the war to maintain and grow the customer base. New entrants to sectors rid themselves totally of bricks and mortar operations and went wholly into online and telephone customer service. Within two years of its launch in 1989, First Direct, the UK’s first telephone bank, had over 100,000 customers.

As the call centre grew and evolved, it began to encompass a much wider variety of customer interactions, including email, online and social media. Customers were demanding connectivity across all multiple channels. If we order it today online we expect to be able to speak to somebody about it tomorrow. The busiest call centres nowadays can be interacting hundreds of thousands of times every day with its customer base.

Greater automation was part of the answer, with voice connectivity and interactive voice response (IVR) which offers pre-recorded voice prompts and menus which

segment and direct call traffic to suitable locations within the call centre, leading the way. However, technology upgrades have placed ever greater stresses on the traditional call centre model and its IT infrastructure. Clunky hardware and software based ‘on premises’ are increasingly unable to offer the degree of flexibility required to scale up and down based on traffic, seasonality, employee resource and the customer’s own choice of contact channel.

What’s more, the investment in new IT, its maintenance and upgrading, is a burden which many senior managers are unwilling to countenance for a function which is still widely regarded as a ‘cost’ rather than a potential sales generator.

The result is that many companies feel as if they are on the horns of a dilemma, trying to balance the competing demands of customers wanting an ever-faster and efficient service - which can only be delivered by increasing human resource or upgrading IT - against the wider organisational need to keep already significant IT and wider call centre costs under control. This paper outlines the problems facing call centres and answers the following question: how do you provide great customer service, at a reasonable cost, across multiple channels?

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Three key challenges for corporate call centres

1 The credibility gap We’ve all heard the phrases which are supposed to reassure that their first and last priority is you, the customer. “For us, our most important stakeholder is not our stockholders, it is our customers,” or “Customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job,” or “The customer is the centre of our universe.” Even, “We see our customers as invited guests to a party.”

This is all very well as long as the actions match the rhetoric, but all too often the experience of using a call centre fails to match the brand promise. Recent research in the UK demonstrated that 85% of missed calls will not call back and 75% of people will not leave a voicemail. What’s more, four out of five people say that they have lost patience or hung up when faced with a lengthy call centre queue.3

In other words, you have one chance to get it right.

2 The sales gap So, we have determined that poor call handling procedures can affect your customer credibility but what affect does this have on sales? Putting an exact figure on lost sales is difficult, but the different surveys and reports available all agree that it is a big number. Research suggests that UK business is losing £1.6 billion every year due to poor call handling.4

However, this figure only looks at callers with a high intent to buy, in other words those who are already willing to pick up the phone and make a call. But, what about potential customers who are lost much closer to the top of the sales funnel, during the information gathering phase, due to negative brand perceptions? How many of us have made buying decisions influenced by reports of poor quality aftersales support or slow call handling amplified by a negative review on a website or social media feed? These lost sales are unquantifiable but ultimately could do even greater harm to a company’s long term sales prospects.

There is of course a third ‘lost sales’ issue, namely the inability to lead generate, upsell and cross-sell, and keep customers informed of new developments, using multiple devices and channels, which only become available once customer trust has been gained. The potential for this sort of activity is enormous, with research suggesting that 16-20% of callers make a purchase based on an on-hold offer, but this activity is all-too-often largely untapped.5

“Customers should vote with their feet if they are tired of waiting or fed up with the service they get. We want the worst offenders …. to raise their game by answering the phone quicker and improving staff training to demonstrate they really value their customers’ time.” 2

Richard Lloyd, Executive Director, Which?

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3 The technology gap The third issue facing call centres is the limitations of legacy technology which is having a direct impact on call centre performance.

Research by the Aberdeen Group identified four key objectives when call centre operators looked to deploy alternatives to on-premises IT solutions, with more than half identifying IT costs and lack of flexibility with current software as a key inhibitor.6

So what is standing in the way of call centres embracing different IT structures?

In our experience, it comes down to entrenched IT infrastructures and fear of change which manifests itself in phrases like, “we’ve always used this software,” time, which results in comments like, “I don’t have the time to look for an alternative and manage the implementation,” and money, which leads to, “I don’t have the budget to replace the existing solution.”

The result is either inertia or a costly jump in the wrong direction which does little to improve customer service.

“We had a very challenging period following the introduction of a new £200 million customer IT system and we apologise to customers who experienced issues.” 7

UK utility spokesperson

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Figure 1: Key objectives when deploying alternatives to on-premises IT solutions

Source: Aberdeen Group, December 2012Percent of respondents, n=101

Improve customerexperience

Improve agentproductivity

45%

32%

26% 26%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

It doesn’t have to be like this The problems of the ‘traditional’ call centre are leading to what can only be described as a revolution in the sector, with the concept of a cloud-based solution gaining real traction amongst, CEOs, IT Directors and FDs, eager to utilise cutting-edge technology to deliver outstanding customer service solutions at a fraction of the cost normally associated with renewing and upgrading IT infrastructure.

According to research by DMG Consulting in the United States, cloud-based call centres are significantly outstripping the on-premises sector in terms of growth rates.8

So what is driving this growth? The first reason is upfront investment cost. Cloud-based solutions can be deployed quickly without costly investment in new hardware and software, and with no need to load new applications or compete with other projects for IT resources. What’s more cloud providers usually offer customers creative and flexible pricing options, such as tiered a-la-carte pricing, making it easier to offer solutions tailored to business needs, whilst matching value with cost.

It is not only upfront investment cost that can be saved. On-going costs can also be slashed because cloud solutions require less maintenance and management from IT, allowing resources to be reallocated to other projects in the business.

Once installed there are a number of key business benefits which can enable call centre operators to offer a vastly improved service to customers. Operators can benefit from lower abandonment rates via the use of ‘Call Queuing’ and ‘Call Routing’ functionality which ensures that calling customers are managed effectively, reducing the risk of callers hanging up. These systems allow users to accept more calls and deal with inbound callers efficiently at peak times – all of which helps to project a positive brand image and maintain high customer service levels.

Automation is another major plus. It is impossible to personalise the customer journey and treat callers

as ‘individuals’ unless call centres have the tools and processes in place which, in turn increases brand loyalty and customer satisfaction. Automation is the lifeblood of personalisation, enabling call centres to ‘smooth’ out call volume spikes by using customer data gleaned from multiple touch points, from calls through to emails, social media and information about the individual products and services that the customer has purchased or previously been interested in.

The cloud can also help call centre users to future-proof their businesses, by making the call centre flexible and scalable dependent upon volumes and customer growth. The cloud allows companies to make fast and cost-effective capacity adjustments, scaling up and down depending upon traffic, seasonality and business need.

As a minimum, voice connectivity software should have dashboard reporting that illustrates the biggest pain points in a call centre’s processes.

Whilst basic historic reporting, live queue views and agent reporting are a necessity, the cloud enables contact centre managers to have more granular business information at their disposal. By monitoring Network Level management intelligence, managers can track engaged, failed or unanswered calls in real-time. Taking things a step further there is also the option of having full mapping of a customer’s journey through the use of touchpoint reporting. Touchpoint reporting maps all customer interaction within the IVR, and can importantly highlight potential snag points, improvement required, and key information areas within the IVR. It’s one of the many reasons “the cloud is king”.

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0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

2008 2011 2015(projected)

2.2%

5.9%

18.1%

Figure 3: Cloud-based call centre adoption rates

Source: DMG Consulting

You can have it all I’ve talked a lot of theory but what happens when a call centre does go over to the cloud. “Put some metrics on it,” I hear you cry.

Very well then. Let’s take the Aberdeen Group research quoted earlier which demonstrates a more than 20% increase in first contact resolution rate with the cloud compared to traditional call centres or a +13% year on year improvement in annual company revenue compared to just 4% for the traditional model.9

Or what about the decrease in non-compliance incidents versus the increase?

The truth is that cloud-based call centres not only promise improvement but also deliver it.

“Customers increasingly demand effortless customer service over a range of touchpoints and communication channels. Customer service executives face the constant challenge of simultaneously meeting customer expectations and business cost goals.” 10

Kate Leggett, VP, Principal Analyst Serving Application Development and Delivery Professionals, Forrester Research

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Figure 2: Better Performing Contact Centers are more Likely to be Deployed on the Cloud

Average Performance

Cloud-based Contact Centre Users

• 51% first contact resolution rate• 13.1% average year-over-year improvement in annual

company revenue• 3.2% average year-over-year improvement (decrease) in

non-compliance frequency

Traditional Internal Contact Centre

• 30% first contact resolution rate • 4.0% average year-over-year improvement in annual

company revenue• 1.2% average year-over-year worsening (increase) in non-

compliance frequency

“This is not a passing fad. It is the fastest growing sector of the contact centre infrastructure market, and cloud-based solutions are going to account for an increase in percentage of new purchases in the future.” 12

Donna Fluss, DMG Consulting

“Cloud-based solutions, omni-channel interactions, natural-language speech and the use of mobile devices are forcing enterprises to re-evaluate their approaches to self-service and interactive voice response. IT planners should examine how IVR technology can increase revenue and customer satisfaction.” 11

Gartner, Market Guide for IVR Systems and Enterprise Voice Portals, 2015

Conclusions At the start of this paper we identified a problem, namely ever more demanding customers wanting a fast and efficient service which demands investment from call centre operators who are, at the same time, under pressure to keep costs under control. But, we also identified another issue, namely a perception problem, that the call centre is a cost, not a potential revenue generator; and worse, that it is a ‘black hole’ which can suck-in ever-more investment with no tangible return.

The truth is that the call centre dilemma and its perception in the organisation are intrinsically linked. Poor call centre management is a drain on resources, damaging to brand perception and a turn-off for customers. Best practice call centre management is flexible with resources, can bind customers in and offers the chance to lead generate, building turnover and revenue.

However, there is one other ‘must have’ for all call centres, namely the provision of outstanding customer service across multiple channels, from voice, to text (SMS), email or web. In the future call centres may even be forced to embrace visual communication, such as FaceTime, if that is what the customer demands.

This is where the cloud can truly make a difference, converging multi-site applications onto a single, centrally managed and administered platform promises in turn to reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction, improve customer support and provide a boost to the bottom line.

A good example is Hermes, the UK’s leading consumer delivery specialist, which adopted cloud-based, multi-channel technology to deliver real-time parcel information via a mobile app, e-mail and SMS messages. The multi-channel approach enables them to find the most effective route to engage with individual customers and ensure those customers are kept informed every step of the way. The business benefit is tangible, with a significant reduction in the number of missed deliveries or collections and the number of parcel-related customer service enquires received in their contact centres.

Crucially, management has a complete view of all activity and a holistic view of each customer’s history. Developers work at a single interface to create customer-facing applications that combine the functionality of all systems. Administrators have one central point of control for all resources.

Only the cloud can do this.

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About Voice Oxygen8 Voice is a cloud-based suite of voice connectivity and IVR applications, which have unlimited potential to improve business’ multi-channel communications. Voice enables you to set up and manage your voice services as well as monitor and manage current activity. The platform also enables you to report and analyse call history, track performance and critical trends.

“Thanks to Oxygen8’s Voice platform, and the associated APIs in place, we can intelligently handle our customer contact management services, allowing our customers to confidently and safely advertise goods and services whilst having an anonymised contact channel.”

Dan Newman, Managing Director, Freeads

About Oxygen8With offices in 10 countries, operations in over 27 countries, a turnover in excess of £90million and leading cloud-based technology, Oxygen8 Group is a global technology provider of multi-channel solutions. Oxygen8 Group helps businesses make smarter choices to transform their sales and marketing through innovative integrated platforms. Our easy-to-use cloud-based solutions focus on results, giving clients performance management software that truly integrates mobile, email, voice and payments. From sending bulk SMS to custom API integrations into your CRM application, we make multi-channel communication simple. We’re proud to be working with some of the best brands out there, such as Experian, O2, Travelodge, Unilever, Sony, play.com, PaddyPower, Sainsbury’s and Hermes.

For more information, visit: http://www.oxygen8.com

End notes 1. IBM Global Business Services, “The Customer Focused Contact Center” pg.5

2. “Most dreaded UK call centres revealed” Daily Mirror, 21st May 2015

3 How much are missed telephone calls costing your business? Answers4u infographic http://www.answer-4u.com/news/missed-telephone-calls-cost-your-business

4. How much are missed telephone calls costing your business? Answers4u infographic http://www.answer-4u.com/news/missed-telephone-calls-cost-your-business

5. Stan Rapp and Tom Collins, “The New Maximarketing” November, 1995

6. Aberdeen Group, “The Hidden ROI of a Cloud-based Contact Center” pg.3

7. “Most dreaded UK call centres revealed” Daily Mirror, 21st May 2015

8. Destination CRM http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/Columns-Departments/Scouting-Report/Why-Contact-Centers-Are-Moving-to-the-Cloud-86627.aspx

9. Aberdeen Group, “The Hidden ROI of a Cloud-based Contact Center” pg.4

10. Forrester Research, “Transform the Contact Centre for Excellent Customer Service https://www.forrester.com/Transform+The+Contact+Center+For+Customer+Service+Excellence/fulltext/-/E-res75001

11. Gartner, Market Guide for IVR Systems and Enterprise Voice Portals, 2015

12. Destination CRM http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/Columns-Departments/Scouting-Report/Why-Contact-Centers-Are-Moving-to-the-Cloud-86627.aspx

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Learn More Take a demo Speak to Sales

GROUPOX YGEN

www.oxygen8.com +44 121 621 2000 sales@oxygen8.com

12th Floor, Lyndon House, 58 - 62 Hagley Road, Birmingham, B16 8PE, United Kingdom

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