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.

First Post

Here goes - keyboard primed - first post. Bit embarrassing that since it's 2008 - but better late than never...

Rather disappointingly, I find myself blogging on similar themes in which I wrote my first ever CCF (well it was called Call Centre Focus then...) colums back in 1993 - the poor public perception of contact centres and the delight in which the media like to kick us. Now, much of this is clearly our fault (no smoke without fire etc etc) and my recent experience with a florist who failed to deliver my mum's Mothering Sunday flowers (no names, no packdrill, but their name is an anagram of floraInter....) tells me we're not perfect. However, we are in kicking season, it would seem, coming off the back of a week of BBC Breakfast coverage (didn't see it myself, never did get the hang of television in the morning) and in anticipation of a Channel 4 Cutting Edge this coming Thursday (Phone Rage) we are rather in the thick of it.

From the conferences I go to and the customers I speak to, I know things are so much better than they were. From my experience as a consumer, contact centres are generally pretty good. So why the constant media kicking?

Well, I suppose there are the obvious reasons. "Great service from call centres" is hardly a headline to get the juices flowing, and journalists do enjoy dealing with a profession held in even less regard as their own. But we also need to understand our role in this as a profession.

Firstly, we don't always get it right. Nobody always gets it right, but we don't get it right pretty spectacularly sometimes. Contact centres exist in every area of our lives, we spend hours every year dealing with them as consumers, and those experiences don't have to be too bad to nark people off.

Secondly, when we do get it right, it's not just that people don't remember the good experiences, they often simply don't even realise they've been dealing with a contact centre! The general public's "clues" that they're dealing with a contact centre are long queues, horrible IVR menus, stilted scripting and "computer says no" type interactions with systems. When we get this right, there should be no IVR menus, no horrible queues, and systems that don't appear to be systems.
So perhaps the problem is that when we're good at what we do, people don't even realise we're their? The goal of service from Victorian times.

I'd better go and do some real work. Watch the Channel 4 prog, and do respond if they're nasty. Tell your mates if you get a service that's good. And tell me what you think of contact centres' portrayal in the media.

Bye for now.