The UK new anti-fraud strategy looks to ban (a) ban the cold calling of financial services products, (b) ban SIM farms, mass texting and number spoofing and (C) utilise Action Fraud services.

A few days ago, the UK Government announced its new strategy to help combat fraud. It’s not surprising that this provoked generated a lot of publicity, as current estimates are that fraud accounts for 40% of all crime and scams have already cost UK consumers over £4 billion since March this year.

So, what does the Strategy mean for business and those of us involved in the management of contact centres?

In truth the strategy is a mixed bag of things that were already in train, things that should have already happened and some promised new innovations.

1. Ban on the cold calling of financial services products

This is the proposed measure which created most media interest. Even in the age of mass digital adoption, unwanted or ‘nuisance’ calls continue to be an irritant to consumers – and the outbound channel continues to be attractive to fraudsters.

The government’s Strategy, which is currently a proposed set of measures under consultation rather than an agreed series of changes, is a little unclear on specifically what falls under the scope of this measure. At times the government has suggested any financial services product will be banned from cold calling and at others it has referred specifically to investment products – which would seem to be a very logical extension of the current ban on pensions cold calling.

However, even as the GDPR and the 2018 Data Protection Act still slowly percolates its way into the consciousness of some people who’d still prefer to forget all about them, hadn’t true ‘cold calling’ supposed to have stopped anyway? In any event, none of us should be calling consumers ‘cold’ to offer them financial services products, now, because the FCA bars the activity anyway. (see its Handbook and the imminent Consumer Duty).

Although if you call a customer or prospect that you deem to have a relationship with and who you think will anticipate hearing from you by phone and they don’t agree, then that’s a different matter! And if you use a business partner to provide you with sales leads – especially for financial services products – then some rigorous due diligence is called for.

2. Bans of SIM farms, mass texting and number spoofing

Sim Farms

Another key proposal contained in the strategy is a plan to ban both SIM farms and mass texting. It would be hard to work out what legitimate reason anybody would have to operate a SIM farm, which is a cheap device that allows mass calls and messages to be generated using numerous SIMs and mobile numbers. The USP of a SIM farm is that it allows the CLIs (outbound calling / texting numbers) to rapidly rotate, thus avoiding detection and the risk of being blocked by the networks.

Mass Texting 

Likewise mass texting is to be reviewed. As the government acknowledges there are obvious, beneficial use cases for the use of mass texting, but not many in the arena of sales and marketing.

Number Spoofing 

Fraudsters love the apparent ease with which legitimate calling numbers can be ‘spoofed’, so that the real origin of scammers’ calls are hidden. You might think that spoofing can best be addressed by the network operators, and you would be right. This proposed change is just a reflection of work Ofcom has finally started to focus on, getting the networks to deploy technical measures to stop spoofing. As well as applying more pressure on the networks and their re-sellers to undertake proper due diligence of contact centres and communication providers using numbers.

3. Action Fraud action (again)

Like Mark Twain, reports of the death of Action Fraud are greatly exaggerated. Action Fraud is a fraud reporting service run on behalf of the City of London police. It carries out a triage and assessment function, helping collate the volume and type of fraud, nationally, as well as providing data and insights. However, only a small minority of the c.1,000 cases reported to it each day by consumers go on to be actively investigated by the police.

Now the government has pledged to invest £30m over 3 years to replace Action Fraud with “a state-of-the-art reporting centre, including a simple to use reporting website and upgraded call centre with reduced waiting times”. In fairness, while that doesn’t sound especially ambitious it will a step-change improvement over the current service.

So, if you might benefit from a chat about how you handle your outbound calling, CLI treatments, how you assess marketing permissions for proactive communications including by SMS – or anything else the new Strategy touches on – then just let us know (unless you’re a fraudster, of course).

You’ll need to tailor that approach according to sector, profile and demographics, but speaking to people is where you start to bring all that hard work together.

In late March Concentrix made the surprising (but far from shocking) announcement that it was purchasing Webhelp, creating a $10bn revenue BPO giant. Currently, the global BPO market is in a constant state of flux with mergers, acquisitions and the occasional business failure. In recent years multi-billion pound BPO M&A deals have included

Where does this leave customers and other operators?

Firstly, if you work for one of the big, global BPO firms you’ll know that there tends to be a lengthy gap between a deal being announced and it ‘closing’. Unless you’re one of the very senior management team who already knows whether you’ll be either spending more time in your garden or racking up your air miles, then you’re likely to have to wait and see what your role will be in the new structure. If you’re a client of one of the big BPOs, though, you are less likely to be comfortable waiting to see what happens. In the same way you won’t experience any significant changes in the short term, though it pays to prepare for what might come your way.

Most of the acquiring firms are experienced and have gone through similar transactions before. It is a truism that corporate acquisitions and mergers tend to destroy value and culture as often as they create and reinforce it, but BPO players are very conscious of the dangers of a mishandled acquisition. They operate in a relatively low margin business, commercially reliant on the retention of stable business in which relationships are still very often key. So, the BPO players recognise the important of continuity when appropriate and the maintenance of clients’ ‘share of voice’ and sense of recognition through and beyond merger processes.

Potential areas of change

People

Senior management is likely to change and as mentioned changes at the supplier C-Suite will probably be the first to take place. Middle and supervisory management changes are unlikely in the short-term, but will inevitably happen – either as a result of a conscious process of selection or through people choosing to move on voluntarily in the face of expected disruption and change.

Locations

Even in an increasingly hybrid world, contact centre locations costs and strategy remain key concerns for BPO providers. Most businesses are still grappling with the challenges of how to configure and manage their property resources for the post-Covid workforce, so a major BPO going through a business merger will have infrastructure consolidation and ‘right-sizing’ as a key priority.

Operational techniques and processes

There are no real ‘silver bullets’ in the world of outsourced customer experience delivery (though if there are and you have one, I’d continue to keep quiet about it!). Most approaches, techniques and operational models are established and largely shared between BPO providers. However, there are variations and if a particular process or workaround delivers value to you and your customers you may need to ‘defend’ it in the face of operational standardisation pressures.

Technology

Over the medium-term technology solutions are also likely to be standardised with support and maintenance for some tools ceasing as a prelude to their removal or migration to a preferred alternative. There are obvious potential benefits to clients from this process, but the business needs of a single client may be lost amongst competing needs.

Commercial

The financial logic for acquisitions is most often based on economies of scale and the reduction of shared resources. However, some may also seek to re-base pricing to a higher level or remove some of the legacy commercial idiosyncrasies that can develop over time as suppliers’ services develop. In addition, if you are a client of an acquired firm you may have benefited from a growth-over-profit strategy if had pursued one prior to sale.

What should you do next?

If you are a client of a newly merged or acquired BPO supplier here are some actions you should get started straight away:

If you’d like further guidance on this subject, get in touch.

How easy is it to sign up or subscribe to your company’s products or services? Pretty easy I should think (or hope). Now more than ever, organisations understand that in our hyper-competitive world, a friction-free way to make consumers aware of what you offer and to make it as easy as possible to become your customers, is vital.

However, deliberately creating friction and barriers for customers looking to leave is almost as common. We all know that it takes a lot of effort and expense to acquire customers, so surely making it a bit of an up-hill slog for customers to leave is just common sense?

Maybe, but possibly that’s all about to change. Be warned!
In the US, Ericsson-owned Vonage has been fined $100m by the US Federal Trade Commission for using a raft of measures which meant that domestic and small business customers found it almost impossible to cancel Vonage’s VoIP services.

Vonage’s services were easy to start using, with many customers offered ’free trial’ opportunities allied to less-than-transparent switches to default sign-up and auto-billing. But when it came to trying to cancel their membership, things were difficult and ‘friction’ was everywhere. The tactics Vonage used ranged across: the sophisticated use of ‘dark patterns’ on the web; making customers speak to ‘retention team’ advisors in order to cancel; hiding the ‘retention’ phone numbers; routing cancellation calls to barely-staffed phone lines with inconvenient opening times.

“Do as I say, not as I do”

The FTC gleefully highlighted Vonage’s own advice to its business customers which it totally failed to take itself – a classic case of “do as I say, not as I do”.

Vonage’s advice included:

They don’t mean us though, do they?

However, most of us aren’t in the US and not under the jurisdiction of the FTC, so does this really matter?

Well, first of all, a lot of us work directly or indirectly supporting US clients and their customer experience delivery, so it’s always helpful to know if you’re potentially part of delivering illegal customer journeys!

But equally, government regulation tends to – slowly – follow international trends. So, Vonage’s recent experience might be a $100m sign of things to come in other markets and jurisdictions. In the UK we know that government is still determined to tackle the consumer ‘loyalty penalty’ (the fact that many products and services are cheaper for new customers than for loyal, long-established users), which is closely related to a customer’s ability to exit expensive deals and relationships – and similar concerns are voiced in the EU and expressed through its Digital Services Act.

So, if part of your customer retention strategy is the creation of challenging journeys for people looking to cancel, then it may be time to do some redesign!

Like most trades, the contact centre industry has an arcane language all of its own. Terms like ‘shrinkage’, ‘containment’ and ‘adherence’ are regularly used by contact centre people, often as a bit of a badge of honour, to show that they’re in the know. (Though if you ask two or three contact centres for their definition of those phrases, then you’re likely to soon find yourself in the middle of a heated argument!)

That’s detailed, technical terminology, but what about the names we give ourselves and the work we do in our contact centres?

Who are you?

What do you call your front-line people? Perhaps 40 or 50 years ago being an agent sounded important or even glamorous. Like an FBI agent or a secret agent. But for lots of people nowadays, the term ‘Agent’ is synonymous with ‘Call Centre Agent’ and all the bad connotations that that description brings with it – boredom, micro-management and insecurity.

So, instead are they ‘Advisors’? Do they advise? If so, that implies a level of authority and resultant customer trust? Or perhaps they guide customers. Should you call your front-line people “Guides”? Our IT colleagues aren’t wide off the mark,  because they run help desks and who wouldn’t want to be helped?

‘Associates’ is a professional-sounding term, albeit with a with a slight sense of vagueness that might make people sound unhelpfully semi-detached from the organisation. If you’re really ambitious, your people might be called ‘Ambassadors’, ‘Gurus’ or ‘Experts’. That sounds great, but you have to be sure that real world status and empowerment go with the lofty job titles, or the gesture will just feel disingenuous.

Here’s an idea: ask your front-line people what they would like to be called. Kick off the empowerment with some self-definition!

Where are you?

And where do these people work (physically, virtually or both)?

‘Call Centres‘ were re-branded as ‘Contact Centres‘ years ago (even if that memo still hasn’t reached everybody, particularly consumers). The name change was as much to do with trying to escape the negative, scripted telemarketing associations of 1990s call centres, as it was reflecting the move to a multichannel world in the noughties.

But things just keep getting more varied and confusing. We can debate all day whether customer experience does or doesn’t mean the same as customer service. Or we can argue about the extent to which customer service embraces all that is entailed in customer management. But more contemporary terminology is reflected in workplaces and business units – which might be why I frequently spend time with organisations in which no one seems to agree what the ‘contact centre’ is now called.

You might be running a ‘support centre‘ or a ‘service unit’, a ‘customer hub’, ‘customer home’ or ‘customer experience factory’. In a sense it doesn’t matter – unless you aspire to really make a difference. In order to do that, you need to engage your frontline people, both actively make things better for your customers but also, vitally, take those learning and insights into the wider business. Only then can the hard work on the front line translate into a genuinely improved customer experience, propositions, technology and processes.

If the name you give to a unit or department helps the people in it and your colleagues and stakeholders all understand what you’re trying to achieve and how, then that’s a great start.

So, what’s yours called? And why? Let us know at hello@contactcentrepanel.com 

One of the biggest contact centre challenges of 2022 is still with us – the rising tide of rudeness and incivility, which is most often experienced at work by our frontline colleagues. Research conducted by Professor Christine Porath, across multiple countries, business sectors and customer-facing roles, demonstrates that this depressing trend is real and growing.

This HBR podcast about her article “Frontline Work When Everyone Is Angry” provides an authoritative view of the problem. But also offers some ways to combat this onslaught of unpleasantness and help protect the welfare of our colleagues at the customer service ‘coalface’.

It’s getting worse

Professor Porath shows that “rudeness or disrespect or insensitive behaviour” has worsened globally over 17 years and that by last August, 76% of people claimed that they had been treated rudely during the month.

Porath highlights that a lot of abuse is now experienced through digital channels, the use of which has grown massively. Even when not directly subject to abuse, people working in online content and community moderation are also exposed to damaging levels of intolerance and unpleasantness.

Covid and complexity

Porath also cites surveys showing a decrease in workplace community since Covid. As this McKinsey article explains, homeworking doesn’t necessarily worsen a sense of isolation and disengagement, but it often does. Traditionally, contact centres have – at their best – been cohesive and supportive workplaces. So in theory, contact centres should be well-placed to help support workers faced with rude and unpleasant behaviour, but many just aren’t.

At the same time, with the rise of self-service tools, the types of queries customers present to contact centres have become more complex, time-critical and emotionally charged.

So, our frontline colleagues are facing a toxic ‘double-whammy’ of consumer incivility and task complexity.

The costs

Colleagues’ emotional damage and distress are obvious, but there are clear performance impacts too, says Porath: “they lose attention, lose focus, make more errors, and perform far worse.” Added to which, abused and unsupported staff quit their jobs, fuelling costs, colleague stress and management challenges.

How to help

Increasing rudeness and incivility is a complex, societal problem – but there are concrete measures you can take to help make things better:

1. Support your people and allow them to support themselves

2. Use technology to protect your frontline colleagues

3. Reconsider whether “the customer is always right”

If you’d like to discuss how to better face up to the challenges of growing incivility and anger – or share with us what you’re already doing – just drop us a line.

However, it might be that you provide services to a financial services firm at some point along its customers’ journeys, or that you are in a customer-facing part of a financial services firm that tends to be the last involved in these big programmes of work. In which case, what do you need to know?

If that is the case, it will almost certainly pay dividends to take some time to read through the FCA’s documents and guidance, which you can do here. You don’t need to be an expert in it all, but it’s good to be able to put the customer contact tasks in a wider perspective of what’s trying to be achieved, which is “delivering good outcomes for retail customers”.

The Consumer Duty is broad in its scope. It naturally has a major focus on how B2C financial services products and services are designed. As well as the changes at executive level that need to be made to recognise the Consumer Duty’s demands. But – I hope – you don’t need to worry about that, because your colleagues or clients should already have that in hand. Where they might benefit from your help is in how firms communicate with customers and support them. This is where the contact centre and customer engagement teams’ detailed understanding of customers and their needs can really help.

Customer Communications

Even if you have no direct role in the creation and distribution of automated communications (letters, texts, emails, in-app notifications, etc.) you will have ‘from the horse’s mouth’ an understanding of how they are received, understood and acted upon. Previously firms were obliged to be “clear, fair and not misleading” in their communications. Now they need to be “understandable” to a whole range of customers, in a variety of circumstances, including those considered to be vulnerable.

This is likely to require:

All of which you and your teams are perfectly placed to help with.

Training

Your teams are directly interacting with customers. To do this as well as the Consumer Duty will demand, your people will need the skills and tools to:

If you feel that this is not already the case, then you need to ensure that training, coaching tools and resources are made available to you. If all these elements are already in place, then now might be the time for you to start training the rest of your organisation on these vital skills and aptitudes!

If you’d like to discuss how you are facing up to the Consumer Duty’s customer management challenges, just drop us a line.

What is undeniable is that the pace of change facing organisations across all sectors is showing no signs of slowing. The necessity for firms to change and constantly innovate is clear. So, can we dispense with iterating, pruning, maintaining and some other ‘boring jobs’?

It sounds like contact centres and all teams tasked with guiding and engaging with customers need to get with the programme of relentless change, yes? Definitely. But unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that customer-facing functions have the freedom to ‘change and move on’.

Although contemporary technologies allow firms to implement new tools and solutions without the lengthy delays of a few years ago – and often do so using their expert frontline teams directly – this does not mean that hard work finishes at the point of implementation. For customer-facing teams and operations, with their need to reflect and adapt to changes in firms’ propositions, markets and customer expectations, the successful initiation of a new technology often just creates another maintenance, administrative and optimisation task.

Failing Bots

In the past few months, I have seen various examples of expertly optimised chatbots. One failed to recognise any of the eight most common query types for the business sector it operated in. Another failed to resolve 20 easy and theoretically bot-friendly queries in a row. Instead, everyone of the contacts had to be passed to a live advisor.

Does this mean that bots are useless? No, not at all, but they require progressive, iterative optimisation to ensure they resolve as many queries as possible, in a way that’s friction-free for customers. Bots can’t be switched on and left to their own devices; they need informed, experienced customer service people to guide their processes and learning.

Multiplying Templates

Recently a former client explained that after an apparently large number of inconsistent email templates had been identified, they started a project to review and simplify the templates. As a result, the previous total of 1270, which had built up over many years, were reduced to a far more manageable 70.

So, is the use of email templates doomed to failure? Again, no, but in order to maximise the effectiveness, relevance and the degree of colleague adoption of templates, a person or team needs to be tasked with their ongoing review, maintenance and curation.

Dull but essential

Neither helping a bot to learn or editing and managing text templates are glamorous jobs, but they absolutely need doing. To some extent this maintenance will directly reflect and support the exciting change agenda. But at other times it’s just another routine task that can too easily be overlooked or dismissed in the face of seemingly more demanding priorities.

Over the coming few months contact centre people will be getting increasingly skilled at re-stating business cases for the value they can generate for both organisations and their customers. They need to ensure that they champion some of the ‘dull but essential’ tasks of process maintenance and optimisation, too.

If you’d like to discuss how you are facing up to these challenges, or how best to effectively optimise technology both new and old, just drop us a line.

It’s not surprising that it did, because Microsoft’s findings – based on feedback from 20,000 people in 11 countries – highlighted a number of fascinating trends that home and hybrid working seems to have reinforced. The first of these is “productivity paranoia” 87% of employees reported that they were productive, but only 12% of their managers said that they were confident of their teams’ productivity. View Microsoft research here.

So, what are we to make of that?

Firstly, it might be that there has always been such a chasm in workers’ and bosses’ perceptions of their productivity, but that’s not what Microsoft conclude. So, at a minimum, the past couple of years has made managers less confident that they know what their teams are doing, how well they are doing it and how quickly. Microsoft thinks that a lot of that is due to managers lacking information, data and reporting that tells them about their employees’ performance.

That will still be at least partially true of some contact centre people working from home, but overall contact centre managers have far more employee performance data than their peers in just about any other type of business, pre or post Covid. But we know that there is still plenty of managerial “productivity paranoia” in home working and hybrid contact centres.

On the surface, contact centre managers’ “productivity paranoia” is surprising. We all know that one of the great strengths of contact centres is their ability to generate statistics. Unlike lots of areas of work, nearly all of which will have to a greater or lesser experienced a move towards full or partial home working over the past 2½ years, contact centre managers are knee-deep in management information about their employees’ performance.

However, most times the easiest stuff to measure is, arguably, the least important. We know about wait times, call durations and throughputs per hour, but far less easy to measure is experience, genuine resolution of queries and emotional engagement with customers. And that challenge isn’t much greater just because someone’s working at home than when they are sat in front of their boss.

A further complication is that the kind of contact centre activities which are very easy to define, target and measure are ideal candidates for automation and/or process improvement (most likely in your organisation’s digital self-service real estate and tools). So the challenge here is not to manage these activities more efficiently, but get rid of them altogether. In a sense, if you are wholly confident of your team’s base efficiency then you might just know a lot about the wrong things.

It looks like what Microsoft’s research crystalises is that the shift in working styles and locations has unearthed some hidden problems. Ones that have always been there but were easier to ignore when everyone was always in the same, shared location. However, the good news is that these are problems that contact centre managers should actually be closer to being able to address than their peers in other sectors.

If you’d like to discuss how different technologies and techniques can help you address some of these challenges and do your bit to banish “productivity paranoia”, just drop us a line.

PS As an aside, if you’re that rare exception to “productivity paranoia” and your boss is convinced that you are more productive than you actually are, then that’s a very different challenge. And anecdotal evidence suggests that having an idiot boss is more double-edged than you may at first think!

Unfortunately, mystery shopping and benchmarking can be quite tedious and a lengthy undertaking. But recently a colleague and I carried out a mystery shopping assessment for a client operating in a competitive financial service environment.

So equipped with Neville Doughty’s recent article ‘The Triple Threat: 3 key challenges facing contact centres’, which highlighted ‘staff attraction and retention, channel shift and automation’ as major current challenges to contact centres, I’ve mused on what my bit of mystery shop benchmarking might tell us.

1. Bots still aren’t that common and often just don’t work

Surprisingly, only 2 of the 12 companies use webchat and none of the others actively promote any social media messaging apps as customer service channels. Both of those companies also had a Bot. But neither Bot recognised any standard terms or phrases related to their proposition or service that we used, so consequently none of our contacts were ‘contained’ and managed by the Bots

2. Other elements of best practice or useful technologies are under-represented

3. Service levels are all over the place

Across the 12 companies the average call answer time varied by a factor of 26 to 1 (41 seconds was the shortest average, 1075 – that’s nearly 18 minutes – was the longest)

4. There’s no ‘settled view’ about acceptable, live-agent opening hours

Some companies were only available to customers Monday to Friday, and some also open on Saturdays. A few opened on Sundays, too and one – surprisingly an ‘app-first’ online challenger brand – was available 24 hours per day, across all contact channels. This results in their having total weekly open hours 4 times the number of its least accessible competitor

These are challenging times for brands and their contact centres, but options and possibilities to do things differently and better abound. If you’d like to discuss how different technologies, resourcing and customer propositions might help your hard-pressed contact centre operation, just get in touch.

Thought so. In which case how do you fancy tackling the low pay and high inflation conundrum (as no one else seems to know what to do about it) of contact centre salaries?

It is not an attractive prospect, is it? However, you or your team are probably already doing just that, in small ways. I recently spoke to an operational leader who has agreed that a handful of their most vulnerable employees can get ‘first dibs’ at the weekly food donations gathered across the centre for a local food bank. People’s financial circumstances are highly variable and not always linked to the macroeconomic situation. However, right now a lot of people working in contact centres will be feeling more financially exposed than they have in years, or possibly ever.

The backdrop to all this is two-fold:

The bosses are getting richer

In the US the pay gap between CEOs’ and median workers’ earnings in 300 major firms has now stretched to 670:1. In the UK things are a bit fairer, but Reuters has reported that, based on company results published in 2022 up to early summer, CEOs were paid 63 times as much as their median employee’s salary. Bear in mind that’s the median (“mid-way”) salary point, not the lowest. In most companies traditionally low-paid jobs like cleaning, catering and security will have been outsourced long ago. So, in many organisations, the largest group of relatively low-paid employees are likely to be found in your contact centre – whether that’s in your corporate offices, at home or a bit of both. Of course, some or all of the customer management and contact centre operations may have been outsourced, too, but low-paid and financially struggling outsourced representatives of your brand are still your problem!

Contact centre salaries remain low

Despite the nature of the roles getting progressively more complex and challenging, contact centre salaries, in-house or outsourced, have remained stubbornly relatively low for over two decades (as ContactBabel’s long-term research results demonstrate), certainly before the ‘Great Resignation’.

So, what on earth can you do about it? Unless you have an especially well-funded and guilt-ridden executive team and shareholders it will be a variation on the old theme. That is, how to maximise the value generated by your operation and the customer interactions it is responsible for.

More than ever, the insight you hold into what are the broken processes and failed communications that drive unnecessary contacts is truly valuable. Make a nuisance of yourself and use a time of change and uncertainty to champion what your organisation needs to do for its customers. Only then can you either allow your people to focus more on value generation and be in a better position to argue for pay and rewards that can help them avoid the worse effects of the cost of living crunch.

If you’d like to discuss your current employment challenges or how to help drive and demonstrate more value from your contact centre operation, just drop us a line.