Working from the center - Technology Information

CommunicationsWeek International, Oct 23, 2000 by Joanne Taaffe

Call centers, although seen as a boost for customer services strategies, in many cases have simply managed to make processes less personal and more frustrating. Now vendors, having also failed to make full use of the information call centers generate, are starting to integrate them into their wider communications and services strategies.

Call centers will be regarded by many people as one of the communications industry's success stories of recent years. Lauded as a much-needed stimulant to developing regional and national economies in need of new employment, and providing a handy location-neutral sales mechanism for vendors, call centers were reckoned to put the personal element back into customer service for the beleaguered customer.

The reality is often very different: frustrating phone calls to call center staff who ask you to explain your problem for the second or third time; e-mail requests that, once sent, disappear into a void; and interactive voice response systems with mind-muddling, not to mention time-consuming, menus.

For staff, the work can be low on responsibility and interest, yet high on stress, with the result that little of the knowledge gathered about customers is fed back into the company they are serving.

Now there is growing force behind the argument that call centers need to be seen as part of a larger communications, sales and service strategy. And as a result, call centers are being integrated increasingly into customer relationship management (CRM) and Web-based solutions,

The indications are that customers are looking for complete integrated packages," says Gordon Sadler, Frimley, England-based business development manager, call centers, at Alcatel SA, of Paris.

In recognition of this, few call center service providers and equipment or software manufacturers these days call themselves simply that. Call center outsourcing giant, Sitel Corp., of Baltimore, Maryland, for example, describes itself as a provider of "customer relationship management solutions across all e-media." What's more, staff in many call centers are now known as "agents," a word more resonant of action.

By making call centers part of a broader relationship management structure, companies hope to build up a better knowledge of the customer and address some of the de-personalizing aspects of call centers. Not only should this make the experience better for the customer, but information gathered could also be fed into the marketing process, thereby enabling a company to better understand its customers' buying preferences and behavior.

In spite of the possibilities, says Susen Sarkar, analyst at the Yankee Group Europe, of Watford, England, so far enterprises have been wary of so-called "multi-contact" centers, and for simple reasons. "It's new, it's hard and it's expensive," he says. "They've only just got to grips with the call center itself, and [are] now being faced with all these other [technologies]."

In fact, only 39% of enterprises in Europe interviewed for a Yankee Group report on tends in call centers, published earlier this year, intended to install a Web-based customer care solution within the next year. Sarkar, the author of the report, estimates that fewer than 5% of European enterprises have installed multi-contact centers to date.

But the problems run deeper than that: companies don't seem to be taking advantage of the information generated by their call center activities even before they are integrated into a wider customer service solution. After more than a year of hype over CRM strategies and the need to converge information from different divisions throughout an organization, the call center is still often regarded as incidental to the marketing process, according to Sarkar. Rather than feeding information and ideas into marketing strategies, call centers instead often bend to decisions taken by marketing departments.

What's more, current voice-based call centers are often relatively inefficient and do not enable agents to be proactive enough. The Yankee Group report found that 43% of customers' enquiries take more than one call to resolve, which suggests that call agents did not have the necessary information to answer the customer's enquiry first time round.

And whereas outbound calls are already made by three quarters of call center companies which responded to the Yankee Group report, not all are made to check on customer satisfaction or to provide information. One third of outbound calls are made to follow up inbound calls, again suggesting that the customer's request went unresolved on the first call.

Growth expected

Despite all the apparent shortcomings of call center setups, the market for call center services is expected to grow steadily. The number of agent positions in European call centers is projected to more than double between end-1999 and 2005, according to a report to be published shortly by consultancy Datamonitor Europe Limited, of London.

Datamonitor's forthcoming report Call Centers in EMEA estimates that the number of agent positions will increase from just over 800,000 at the end of last year to nearly 1.8 million in six years' time (see table.)