Trust and Trustibility

Doing the washing up on Thursday night I heard yet another story of a security breach involving an off-shore contact centre. The BBC (in the guise of The World Tonight) secretly recorded an undercover reporter buying “leads” with names, address & credit card details.

This is nothing new, of course, there was a Dispatches programme in 2006 that found evidence of data theft in UK as well as overseas contact centres, but it is a little depressing to know that it is still going on.

The problem isn’t limited to off-shore contact centres, of course. Earlier this month, a manager in a UK call centre (Barclaycard) stole £11,000 from a customer having stolen his details when he called in.

The fact is that credit card fraud happens. It happens in shops, pubs, petrol stations, ATM machines (that’s Cashpoints in English), restaurants and anywhere else people use plastic to pay for goods and services.

What’s more, occasionally bad people work in call centres. And in banks, newspaper publishing, restaurants, petrols stations, shops, pubs etc.

So why the interest? Why the undercover operation and top billing for a report that might be considered a bit “dog bites man”?

Well, I think there are a three things in play here.

Firstly, the brand on whose behalf the transaction was made and from which the details were subsequently stolen, was Symantec (marketing strap-line, "Confidence in a connected world") taking payments for the renewal of antivirus software. Antivirus software is surely something you need to think you can trust. It is also one of the few applications that regularly (well, every year or so) pops up and asks us to feed it with money. The thought that the software you installed to protect your computer and your data is actually inducing you to pass your credit card details on in order that they can be stolen is unsettling at best.

Secondly, it happened offshore. In these days of “British Jobs for British Workers”, a tendency towards protectionism in governments about the world and, let’s face it, a considerable lack of love towards the financial services sector, a good old-fashioned off-shore bashing session was definitely on the cards.

Thirdly, and perhaps more importantly, our details are now (despite what it might say in the papers) more secure than ever before. Chip & PIN has stopped the dodgy waiter from double-swiping your card at the back of the restaurant. Initiatives like the Payment Card Industry (PCI)’s Data Security Standards (DSS) have made businesses more aware than ever before that they need to protect data, from their staff as well as from external attack, protect their networks and be open about how they handle sensitive information.

So, what’s to be done. Over the web we have services like “Verified by Visa”, WorldPay & PayPal that give consumers confidence. We have Chip & PIN in face to face environments and a mattress to hide our worldly wealth in if we don’t trust the banks. Call centres are one of the few remaining situations where we still hand over our card details to an individual. How do we get the trust back?

Technology can have a part to play – the transfer to an automated system for the collection of the sensitive credit card information before passing the call back to an agent – has been used successfully. However, if you don’t trust the organisation you’re calling, how do you know that their IVR isn’t bent too?

Perhaps there is a scope for an IVR version of a “Verified by Visa” scheme, or perhaps a more public awareness of an accreditation like the PCI DSS. If this trust issue isn’t solved, it’s not only going to be overseas call centres that attract suspicion.

Ideas, anyone?

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.