Ofcom in Action Again

Earlier this week Ofcom, the UK's telco and broadcast regulator, named and shamed another call centre operator for making silent calls. This time it has gone for Barclaycard, a not insignificant brand, owned by Barclays, an even less insignificant brand. The details have yet to be made public but it adds to the major-league brands nailed by Ofcom (the others being Abbey and Carphone Warehouse).

I think three things are interesting here:

Firstly, despite all the publicity in the general media and specialist press, these large organisations still failed to take compliance seriously. We all know that implementing change in these big businesses can be like executing a 3 point turn in an oil tanker, but one would have thought that compliance in a financial services organisation might be able to pull some levers and make change happen faster.

Secondly, Ofcom are still investigating alleged misuse from 18 months ago - the period they've named Barclaycard for starts just six months after the first statement to regulate diallers was published on 1st March 2006. There may well be more to come.

Thirdly, the brief report on the Ofcom site says that "Ofcom has extended this programme of monitoring and enforcement for a further six months". It's not over yet guys!

While we await with baited breath the results of the latest consultation (now expected in early July) where issues such as Answer Machine Detection and automated calling (i.e. calling with a recorded message with no live person to speak to) are expected to be handled, it is still as important as ever to comply with the existing rules.

That's not just so you don't get caught, that's because it's the right thing to do - for fair treatment of consumers and for the long-term viability of the call centre.

Blended agents are happy agents

A very interesting nugget was presented by Belinda Haden at the Verint Consulting Outbound Forum event last week. According to the recent Contact Babel report, the use of inbound and outbound blending can have a positive impact on staff attrition. Only 29% of contact centres using blending report a problem compared to 56% of operations where blending is not used.

This fits with a lot of what we’ve believed about the future of outbound for a while now – that more warm calling, more service-oriented calling and less cold-calling is going to change the dynamics of the outbound centre and also make it much more likely that inbound and outbound activity is going to be conducted by the same personnel. The historical personality differences which have characterised outbound (predominantly sales) and inbound (predominantly service) thus become less distinct, making outbound a much more key, much more central part of the contact centre mix. It will be interesting to see if this will herald a more integrated approach regarding location, in-house operations vs outsourcing or even a growth in customer-focussed outbound.

Either way blending – something close to my heart for years – is clearly an important part of the contact centre future. It'll be interesting to watch it grow - and also see how it develops in relation not just to inbound/ outb ound blending but also multi-channel too.

The Road to the Manifesto...

The Telemarketing Manifesto I mentioned earlier in the month is quickly taking shape. The Direct Marketing Association (DMA)'s Contact Centre Council held a meeting open to all DMA members to discsuss the Best Practice in Telemarketing called for as one of the deliverables in the manifesto.

Clients, agencies, practitioners, consultants, suppliers - all were represented and a remarkably common aim of protecting consumers to protect the future of the industry prevailed.

You can see the first draft of the manifesto on the Contact Centre Council's pages on the DMA website here. Please get involved - if you are at all involved in outbound and have an interest in protecting the rights of the consumer.

Treating Customers Fairly

I was at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) today for an open meeting organised by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA)'s Contact Centre Council (of which I am a proud member). The event was very much themed around respect for customers and consumers in a number of different areas - nicely summed up by the FSA's Victoria Stubbs' presentation on Treating Customers Fairly. This is an FSA initiative about being open and straightforward with customers and rung true with the PhonePayPlus presentation on regulating 0871 numbers and the DMA Contact Centre Council's very own Manifesto for Telemarketing.

Worthy initiatives all (I'm particularly pleased to be part of the DMA's effort) and it struck me that for the 130 or so people in the hall, openness and respect for customers was clearly at the heart of what we do and believe. The only negative aspect was the thought that such a variety of initiatives are necessary at all is only due to the clear reality that the rights and livelihoods of customers are not considered important by some - hence the need for the regulation and the calls for good practice.

The Contact Centre Council will be having an open meeting on April 16th in central London to start work on a guide to best practice in telemarketing to consumers and would love to have practicioners along. Please contact me (via the Callmedia Website) or the DMA directly. Would be great to have you there.

Night Out in Town

I was with some business partners and customers at the Covent Garden Hotel last night for the official launch of a new joint venture with The Exchange for an integrated contact centre, CRM and Workflow product for financial services organisations. We, of course, provide the contact centre bit and The Exchange provide OfficeWeb, the CRM and Workflow stuff.

It was a great evening, helped along by the champagne, and as usually it really good up with some customers, including the wonderful Click Finance who bravely allowed film cameras into their contact centre for a case study of the joint solution.

It was also and a good chance to spend a bit of time with the Financial Services guys to find out how their industry is feeling the impact of regulation, the economy etc etc.

Not unsurprisingly, their industry being the most highly regulated in the land, compliance is a big deal. As a consumer who only understood about one word in 10 of the financespeak, I'm pretty glad the regulation is there and so - it seems - are the industry practitioners. Compliance gives everybody a level playing field on which to operate, and framework in which customers can feel confident.

It was, I thought, a good lesson for the outbound industry whose attitude to regulation and compliance is often one of "how do I get round this" - good regulation really can be a leveller that gives our customers confidence and creates sustainability for our industry. Well, aren't I feeling half-full today!

Blunted Edge

Re the Phone Rage prog mentioned earlier, there's a rather different perspective from the ever-entertaining Sam Wollaston at The Guardian. Plus the news that it was watched by a cool 2 million people. Maybe they thought it was going to be about Naomi Campbell....

Viewer Rage

Saw the Cutting Edge documentary on Channel 4 last night. Called “Phone Rage”, it said it was going show what it was like to be inside the call centre being shouted at, rather than outside doing the shouting.

On a very basic level it did do that. For somebody who’s never been inside a call centre, it would have been interesting to see the interior of Powergen & First Direct’s UK call centres. But that’s about where the revelations started and stopped.

The producers had found three rather unlovable specimens of customers – albeit with genuine gripes about the service they were getting. None of them were really being let down by the call centres themselves - they were victims of failures of process elsewhere in the organisation (mobile phone not being sent to one chap, another woman being billed twice for her gas bills). We didn’t see how their frustrations were solved – they just served as examples of the kind of stroppy punter we all have to cope with in the call centre from time to time.

What was frustratingly un-illuminating was the footage in the call centres themselves. We learned about “super agents” – that they were going to save the day. Trouble was, we didn’t learn the difference between a “super agent” and ordinary agent, so that told us nothing. We learned that some of the agents actually wanted to do things other than working in the contact centre (signing, acting, that sort of thing). Actually, my original career choices were astranought (to the age of 9) and then musician (to the age of, well I still do really...) - but I’ve buckled down and accepted reality eventually.

We then went on a Channel 4 funded trip to South Africa (India’s been done by the BBC and the Dispatches prog. on security, so the producers got their long-haul jolly in Cape Town instead) and we saw a prospective call centre agent soften her accent and buy some “corporate” clothes. Actually, that bit was really depressing…..

So what did I learn?

• At First Direct you can earn a cream egg for telling somebody they had a tremendous postcode
• At Powergen, the agents are super
• Near Cape Town, agents don’t have to wear the “corporate” clothes if it’s a Bank Holiday in the UK
• That some British people are a bit unpleasantly racist about foreigners

And my overwhelming feeling after watching? That was an hour of my life I would never get back…..

Now I could be being too harsh. Being a bit of an insider, I shouldn’t really have expected to learn a lot. But my long-suffering wife was made to watch it too, and she wasn’t much better informed afterwards than before. Don’t get me wrong, if the program has the effect of making the public think of people working in call centres as human beings and shout less, then that will be a good thing. But the thing that will really stop people shouting will be when we stop making mistakes – when we send out the promised mobile phone, when we don’t collect the gas direct debit twice, and when we keep our promises about following things up. That’s about process and quality, and about the call centre being part of the organisation rather than a customer service veneer stuck on top to handle the flack.

What’s more, if the health & safety people get onto obesity in the workplace, it’ll be an apple you’ll earn for commending the quality of postcode – not the cream egg.