When Call Centers Go Bad

Photograph by Ha-Wee.

Sales force automation (SFA) is thriving, running on-premise and in the cloud, in part because one SFA application can support complex sales activities. Log on, enter or retrieve the required information, and you’re ready to sell.

The call center environment, in contrast to SFA, is much more complex, even when running service in the cloud. That’s because, instead of your salespeople calling—or calling on—the customer, they call you. So in addition to integrating CRM, back-end systems, your private branch exchange (PBX) for incoming calls, and agents’ landlines or VoIP-based calling (especially for work-at-home agents), you also need:

• Computer telephony integration (CTI) to do a “screen pop” showing a call center agent the name and details of the person who’s calling.
• Interactive voice response (IVR) to identify callers, reduce costs and resolve issues with minimal—or no—live agent interaction.

Providing great customer service, besides having top-notch customer service agents, requires integrating and making all of the above components work well together. But too often, it instead adds up to one big headache.

The Perfect Call Center Storm

Several years back, for example, one of Innoveer’s high-technology clients integrated its Siebel CRM software with third-party IVR and CTI software. But about six times per day, often at night when call volumes peaked, the call center software would crash for 10 minutes, booting customers out of call queues. For a company selling items worth hundreds of dollars and taking 1,000+ calls per day, the result was lost revenue and no small risk of customer defection.

The culprit? Small memory leaks, which in the high-production environment eventually added up to a system crash. These memory leaks resulted from the underlying third-party call center software and components having been designed for slightly different versions of Siebel—one for 7.7.0.1, another for 7.7.0.2, and so on. Meaning, no simple fix existed.

Murphy’s Law Alive and Well

Unfortunately, no one offers a great soup-to-nuts call center. Telephony systems are complicated, proprietary, not yet open, and difficult to test at high volumes. Furthermore, your vendor for every required component—CRM, PBX, IVR, CTI and so on—will often differ, and their software not be quite compatible.

Holding Out For A Hero

Arguably, call centers are ripe for a savior, and help could be on the way:

• Oracle CRM On Demand: With version 9, added a virtual CTI connector, which lets organizations more easily bring voice, voicemail, email and Web channels into the on-demand service picture. Meanwhile, IVR enablement via SOA offers new types of self-service and on-demand possibilities.
• Service Cloud: For this salesforce.com service offering running on Force.com, the company, together with Cisco, announced a Customer Interaction Cloud, aimed at SMBs, which is an out-of-the-box, SaaS-based call center.
• Asterisk: Run this open source call center software on an inexpensive Linux server, and for a few hundred dollars (including a digital-to-analog converter), you can have a working call center.

Upsides to cloud-based and open source call centers, besides their relatively low cost, are that they’ve been designed from scratch, which means they could potentially work much better than the call center technology kludge that’s become common today.

Downsides, however, include a dearth—so far—of plug-ins to make them work with your internal network, IVR software and all of the other modern call center requirements. To integrate SaaS-based service with your on-premise systems, you’ll also need to start opening firewall ports. From a security and privacy standpoint, that can expose you to data hijacking and potential break-ins, including browser cache attacks.

The Collective Power of Frustration

Will open source technology and SaaS call centers solve today’s call center technology issues? With so much collective frustration over call centers, they’re the safe bet for how we’ll make the next big step forward toward creating easy to integrate, useful and headache-free call centers.

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Mastering customer service, regardless of whether it’s running on-premise, in the cloud, or as open source software, requires treating the call center as a strategic asset. Furthermore, until you get your customer service business practices and self-service sites in order, from a service standpoint also forget social networks.and don’t worry about Twitter.

Call Centers in the Cloud

Why run customer service in the cloud? Well, let’s rephrase the question in terms of business results. Namely, doesn’t every top-notch call center want to improve:

• Growth by cross-selling and up-selling customers with relevant offers?
• Efficiency by providing service representatives with a better picture of the customer?
• Customer satisfaction by talking with customers more knowledgeably, as well as with greater empathy and intimacy?

For example, you call to renew your car insurance policy. In the call center, the service representative sees not only your account history but also your current Facebook profile picture—a family photo—and notices you have a teenage son. He asks if you’d like to add him to the insurance policy as well.

Or say you’ve been in a fender bender and need to get your car fixed. When you phone your insurance company to locate the nearest auto body shop,  the service agent notices—again from your Facebook photo feed—that you have small children. She asks if you need car seats with your loaner, or if you want to use the ones you have.

In both of these situations, giving the service agent a fuller picture of the customer they’re assisting helps everyone and makes for a richer customer experience. These are just some of the benefits of moving customer service to the cloud.

Insurance Agents Relocate to the Cloud

Recently I asked, Why not run CRM in the cloud? (Just for definition’s sake, by CRM I refer not only to sales force automation, but also to marketing and customer service.) In other words, why not use software-as-a-service (SaaS) CRM applications, provided they deliver—as they typically do—more rapid procurement, easier manageability and a lower total cost of ownership, compared to on-premise CRM applications?

For many organizations, SaaS customer service applications will meet their needs. For example, Innoveer recently helped a property and casualty (P&C) insurance company deploy a SaaS-based customer service application for about 100 call center agents. This isn’t the largest call center we’ve ever worked with, and perhaps the SaaS application doesn’t have all of the advanced features that some of our bigger call center customers have, such as interactive voice response (IVR) integration or computer-telephony integration (CTI) support.

But from a functionality standpoint, the application meets all of the organization’s case management needs—from case capture and assignment to resolution and closure. Furthermore, thanks to having a good plan (because pursuing SaaS CRM applications without a plan is a recipe for failure), the P&C insurer quickly got and running.

What’s not to like about less expensive software that rapidly delivers business value?

Cloud-to-Cloud Integration Benefits

Another reason to run service applications in the cloud is for cloud-to-cloud integration. Many organizations, for example, would love to link their customer service platform to Facebook, so when a customer calls in, the service agent can literally see who they’re helping.

Well, connecting your SaaS customer service application to Facebook is much easier than integrating on-premise CRM with Facebook. (For example, salesforce.com has a Facebook connector; on-premise Siebel does not.) In fact, integrating any two cloud applications will always be easier than integrating an on-premise application to the cloud. With SaaS, one person builds a connector and thousands of people can use it. Whereas when integrating an on-premise application to the cloud, finding that economy of scale is, at best, difficult.

As the Cloud Expands, So Do Service Possibilities

Is SaaS right for all customer service requirements today? No. But that’s changing as the cloud (which includes platforms and infrastructure—not just SaaS) continues to expand.

In other words, as the cloud evolves, the attendant costs and benefits will drive more companies to host their call center in the cloud.

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Mastering customer service, regardless of whether it’s backed by on-premise or SaaS applications, first requires treating the call center as a strategic asset. In other words, drop the “necessary evil” thinking and remake your call center or contact center into a valuable corporate asset.

Until you get your customer service business practices and self-service sites in order, from a service standpoint also forget social networks. (For more on setting the right service priorities in a social networking world, see The Tweet Must Die.)

Finally, with online self-service success rates declining, maybe we should all just use Facebook for every online customer service interaction instead.

Forget Self-Service—Just Use Facebook

Is your online self-service experience made for the modern customer? Photograph by blakespot.

Online Self-Service is Failing

Pick one: your cable television provider, cell phone carrier, gas utility, electricity provider or bank. Now ask yourself: Is its customer self-service offering any good?

In fact, self-service success rates are declining. According to John Ragsdale, research director with the Service and Support Professionals Association (SSPA), which conducts a regular study of self-service effectiveness, “the overall industry average for self-service success is 40%, down from 48% in 2003.” Knowledgebase and other self-service software vendors may claim 80-100% effectiveness, he says, but that’s simply not true.

What’s killing online self-service? The Internet has evolved beyond the domain of technologically sophisticated early adopters with the experience and wherewithal to overcome poor interface design. Now, you’re dealing with people like my 80-year old uncle Luke. If he encounters a bad customer service website, he’ll give up and call. Which, if your company is the one providing the service, costs you a lot more than if he’d stayed online.

Self-Service Must Improve

For companies with customer-facing activities, their marketing, sales and service programs—the three components of any successful CRM program—must work together to maintain an excellent customer experience. In other words, providing a bad online self-service experience is a great way to kiss your customers goodbye.

What, then, does it take to improve the online self-service experience? The answer isn’t just technology. In fact, the technological aspect is relatively simple. Integrating your SAP order management system with your website to show people where their package is in the fulfillment process? Easy. Extending knowledgebase access to customers so they can run their own queries? Easy. In short, the path to solving both of these problems is known.

Creating a great customer experience, on the other hand, is much more difficult, and on all but the best sites, it shows. For example, I can buy or return a book to Amazon.com in about 20 seconds, using maybe a dozen clicks. How long do you think it took Amazon to create that level of seamless customer interaction? There’s no easy formula for getting there—just trial, error and time.

So Let’s Just Use Facebook

If creating a great, easy-to-use customer experience—and accompanying interface—online is so difficult, then why not just find a highly subscribed online community with a great interface and layer your customer experience on top? In short: Why not use Facebook for all of your online customer self-service interactions?

Consider that Facebook now has 350 million users. Any network of that size should have powerful network effects—meaning that once there’s a critical mass of users, the more that people use it, the more useful it becomes—and yet social networking doesn’t seem to be producing these results. (How many friends do I need to suggest the latest CRM-themed Lolcats?)

On the other hand, Facebook is positioning itself, from business standpoint, to do much more, as its December deal with Yahoo—to use your Facebook Connect (aka ID) to connect with any Yahoo property, and then relay these interactions back to your Facebook base—demonstrates. According to Om Malik at GigaOm, this positions Facebook to become the single sign-on for your entire Internet experience. Consider the implications: Instead of entering separate passwords at Amazon.com, eBay, the New York Times or Yahoo, just log on at Facebook, and voila, you’re authenticated on any other participating site. From an ease-of-use standpoint, you can’t beat it.

So let’s take this a step further and increase the network effects by several orders of magnitude beyond just single sign-on, by making Facebook the one-stop shop for all online customer. Compared with the outdated, poorly considered self-service interfaces on so many of customer-facing sites, this would create much more useful and enjoyable customer experiences, leading to higher levels of customer satisfaction with a company’s products and services. And did I mention it would cost much less to support? (Again, with the network effects.)

Here’s how: Companies create their own Facebook page and self-service widgets, integrated with their back-office systems, and allow users to easily search everything on offer—knowledgebases, communities, updates—to solve any issues, retrieve their statements, or even pay their bills. Along the way, they can tap the collective power of the entire Facebook user base to help solve problems.

Go Ahead, Resist

Of course, AT&T (to pick one example) may say, “Log in to your AT&T information with your Facebook account? Never.” And that would create an opportunity for a smaller competitor like MetroPCS to take a run at AT&T’s customer base. Eventually, perhaps, so many people would be using Facebook for self-service that not offering customer service via Facebook would be the 2010s equivalent of not having a website.

Unless, of course, you enjoy today’s online self-service experience?

Learn More

In the age of Twitter and Facebook, how can companies provide effective service and keep their brand intact? Our advice: forget social networks, at least until you get your customer service business practices and sites in order. For more on setting the right service priorities in a social networking world, also see The Tweet Must Die.

For any organization catering to members, rather than customers, see our white paper on advanced portal capabilities, which contains numerous insights for creating more flexible and interactive self-service portals.

Finally, while online self-service is a valuable, cost-effective channel, mastering customer service also requires treating the call center as a strategic asset—namely, remaking your call or contact center into a valuable corporate asset, rather than treating it as a necessary evil.