Green IT & The Contact Centre

Spent an interesting morning at the Green IT Expo conference in London (traveled by public transport - even getting the horribly early bus to save a drive to the station. Aren’t I good? The keynote speaker flew from the US. Figure that out...)

The buzz in the conference is all about the traditional candidates for the Green IT agenda - server virtualisation to reduce the number of machines required and their power consumption; the use of collaboration and conferencing applications to reduce the need to travel; the use of IT systems to reduce the amount of paper produced and the use of low-energy everything from desktop PCs to phones to air-con to coffee machines.

Contact centres are in some ways a bit of a green enigma. Their very existence enables a green way of doing business between an organisation and its customers: - less travelling to branches, less paperwork & forms - all the standard arguments for electronically mediated communication in place of more carbon-intensive traditional alternatives.

However, contact centres themselves are high energy users. Relying heavily on IT, the servers, telephony & LAN systems and buildings all represent some significant energy consumption.

What’s more, there are confusing choices about contact centre deployment. Is home working “greener” because you reduce the need to travel, or more energy intensive because of the need to heat 500 individual houses rather than one 500 seat contact centre? Do the green benefits of VoIP (remote working, multi-site operations etc) outweigh the increased power consumption of VoIP telephone equipment over its old-fashioned TDM forebears?

Of course, there are no simple answers - the justification will vary from situation to situation. But one thing is sure - the Green Agenda is not going to go away.

Currently a voluntary corporate activity, it will be the focus of legislation and regulation before long. What’s more, there will be “consumer-led” regulation where eco-conscious consumers will want to deal with organisations who can demonstrate a commitment to environmentally friendly operations as one of a swathe of Corporate Social Responsibility metrics. The ability to attract staff will be dependent on an organisations social credentials - including those to a green computing agenda.

The good news is that green IT should not actually be an investment - the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) arguments for reduced power consumption in data centres should be compelling enough - although there is always an argument about the replacement of existing infrastructure. Much of the carbon footprint of a server or a desktop PC is in its manufacture and the disposal of its predecessor, not just in the power it consumes during its working life. There is also more hot air than in the exhaust of a data centres air-con unit around the subject. Only last month, we were asked to attend an exhibition and distribute any product information on a USB key rather than on paper “to save the environment” (one shudders to think of the energy consumed in the manufacture of the USB key over the use of recycled post-card that can then be recycled again pointing at a URL!).

So, the Green IT Bandwagon has departed. Welcome aboard - and hold on tight. It’s going to be an interesting ride.

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.