Recently, I had the privilege of meeting with a very well-respected CIO from one of the nation's top wireless carriers. We spent some time discussing my observations from a recent visit to Moscow for the Call Center World conference over a reasonably priced, exceptional southern Italian meal (the strip mall appears to be delivering big-city gastronomic sophistication to the exurbs these days).Topping the list of my work-related observations from my trip was the unique opportunity that Russian IT and telecom managers (and their business counterparts) have to bring their organizations to the leading edge of customer care in a short window of time. My central thesis is that many Russian enterprises and government agencies have the luxury of designing customer care operations from scratch because they:
1. Are highly motivated to get care right 2. Do not have significant call center infrastructure in place today, and 3. Can learn from the countless lessons of more mature customer care markets.
Only a few short years ago, there was literally no notion of phone-based (let alone online) customer care for most companies in Russia. Upon the common occurrence of hearing a busy signal, a customer's only recourse was to call the next of the series of listed numbers in the hopes of eventually getting through to a live person (rarely a call center agent) by war-dialing PBX extensions.
The rapid growth of the service industry in Russia during the late nineties and first part of this decade allowed those consumer-facing companies to overlook the importance of high quality customer care. The leak in the bottom of the bucket didn't seem too important when the spigot at the top was gushing.
The global economic crisis has hit Russia, and its service industry, especially hard. A sudden stop and then reversal of foreign investments, the credit crunch and cratering oil prices have led to a--pardon the cliche--perfect economic storm. The inflow of new customers for many organizations has temporarily been reduced to a trickle. All of a sudden, the leak at the bottom of the bucket--the customers who leave due to bad service experiences--has become a major cause for concern.
These organizations are now starting to raise the priority of investments in formal contact centers because they understand the impact of customer service on the long-term health of their operations. Researchers Rayport and Jaworski pointed out in their 2004 Harvard Business Review article, "Best Face Forward," that service quality is five times more likely to influence purchase and repurchase decisions than product features and functions, performance, and price.
As a result, interest in call center technologies, and spending on agent and supervisor training, are skyrocketing. Care matters in Russia. A lot.
By spending time now to absorb the lessons learned over the past four decades in markets such as the United States and Western Europe, the service levels that Russian companies offer their customers could, in a relatively short amount of time, leapfrog those available in more mature markets. In a nutshell, these managers have the opportunity to get customer care right from the beginning.
So what should the managers charged with building out a call center do? Learn from the past. Understand how service has evolved in markets like the US and Western Europe. Create a phased, rational roadmap and invest in a platform that anticipates what world-class care will look like in three to five years.
Too often, the service experience that many callers face in mature care markets is negatively affected by the inherently silo'ed nature of underlying technologies and the organizational structure of the teams that manage them. My "mother-in-law" research suggests that one of the biggest frustrations for callers is the lack of a seamless experience that spans what we know to be multiple applications in the call center, in this case the interactive voice response (IVR) system, the automatic call distributor (ACD) and the agent's desktop.
Callers interact with the IVR in the hopes of either resolving their problem or getting to the right agent who can assist them. Consumers are frustrated when most agents will not have access to (or use) this caller-entered information and therefore ask the caller to re-authenticate. On subsequent calls, most organizations will not use caller ID (even in scenarios where customers use the same phone for multiple calls) to help speed up the process.
According to industry analyst Tern Systems, basic computer-telephony integration (CTI) is properly deployed in less than 10% of caller interactions. Why? The IVR and ACD systems are often purchased from different vendors and managed by disparate teams in the organization. If the company has invested in CTI software, they may not have it properly deployed or agents might not be trained or incented to use the information.
To make matters worse, IVR application designers often pursue a goal of fully automating as many calls as possible and consider it a "failure" when a caller opts out to speak with an agent. Poorly designed interactive voice response (IVR) systems--dubbed voicemail jail by many--lead to immense caller frustration (witness the popularity of the GetHuman initiative in distinctly non-technical circles).
These sorts of problems can be easily avoided with proper planning and execution in greenfield environments such as the contact centers in Russia.
What can the rest of us--living with the realities of our existing infrastructure or org charts--do?
One simple exercise that I often recommend to customers is to hold a short (even a few hours can be very productive) offsite to outline the ideal interaction from the customer's perspective. To do it right, though, teams must fully divorce themselves from the realities of their existing environments, at least for the duration of the exercise (which is often best performed in a location that is physically separate from the team's day-to-day workspace).
Brainstorming rules must apply--that is to say that the pragmatists and naysayers should fight their urges to point out what can't be done given the "current environment." Inviting a small number of properly empowered participants to act as the voice of the consumer is also a powerful tool for marking the team's ideas to market.
The result of this exercise, if properly motivated and moderated, is a vision for how care should work. Next, the team should come up with all of the reasons why this vision is difficult to achieve. This list of challenges will identify the key areas of focus for the coming years. In many cases, the top issues will relate to organizational design and process--areas that can often receive attention in today's tight-belt environment.
The old maxim that those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it is no less applicable to the evolution and use of technology as it is to politics or military strategy. By studying what worked (and, perhaps more importantly, what didn't), managers can quickly formulate a strategy that will, if not ensure success, help dramatically increase its chances. Even mature organizations that could be viewed as the "Before" picture can pretend, if only for a moment, that they are starting from scratch. This approach clearly identifies the biggest issues in delivering the world class care that we all want to receive.
Based on recent conversations over a bowl of borscht in one city and a slice of brick-oven pizza in another, I can happily report that this exercise will soon be pursued in at least two major organizations on opposite sides of the globe in pursuit of the lofty goal of delivering world-class customer care.
I would like to thank Eric and the NoJitter team for the opportunity to participate in this forum. I've been an avid reader of these blogs for some time and am honored to have a seat at the virtual table with some of the best minds in the business.
