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!

Are the customer service shelves bare?” Ambition and a desire for continuous improvement are all very well, but paranoia and curiosity are great motivators, too! Maybe that’s why there’s often something especially intriguing about the opportunity to look at how you’re performing in comparison with your peers and how your customer proposition stacks up next to your competitors.

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.

However, if you work in contact centres and you were around from 2017 to 2018 when the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the last Data Protection Act went live, you may be less excited about the prospect of more change!

Following the previous Bill, millions of working days were spent trying to figure out what it all meant in practical terms; changing processes and procedures; ditching databases; confusing consumers with millions of ‘would you still like to hear from us’? emails; and preparing for a tsunami of data rights request contacts which never really happened.

Well, the good news is that the recently proposed Bill looks a lot more like a sensible tidying up of the rules (and the slightly vague promise of less data protection bureaucracy and admin), rather than a radical overhaul. The fundamentals will remain the same. The post-Brexit UK version of the GDPR will remain in place, alongside the 2018 Data Protection Act. For a business this is doubly reassuring, not only does it suggest fewer revisions and re-work to existing policies and processes, but it also means that it’s less likely that the UK’s rules will deviate so far from the EU’s that we lose our prized ‘adequacy’ status, which allows UK firms to process and transfer personal data with the EU with little friction.

There are many areas covered by the proposed Bill, but for most of us the key elements are:

If you would like to discuss these forthcoming changes and review your current approach to ensuring data protection and privacy, please drop us a line.

Source information: Data Reform Bill

Just before revealing that the new domestic energy bill price cap in October would rise by another £800, on top of a near £700 increase in April, Ofgem said that it was ‘minded to’ change the frequency of the price cap setting. From October the price cap will be set quarterly, partly in the hope that when energy prices do eventually start to go down consumers will be able to benefit more quickly.

So, what does this mean for energy providers, which are already struggling with the consumer impacts of a massively challenged – and arguably dysfunctional – market and high contact volumes?

The cost centre

If you are responsible for an energy supplier’s contact centre you can forget about engaging in the old profit centre versus cost centre discussion. Your operation is now firmly in the cost centre category. The market is effectively dead, with little or no customer migration between suppliers and E.ON warning that 40% of its customers will be experiencing fuel poverty by the autumn.

The support centre

That level of financial exposure amongst consumers means that the high degree of vulnerability awareness that Ofgem has long required will only increase still further. Energy firms’ agents are right in the front-line of the cost-of-living crisis. An increasing proportion of contacts will be looking for support and enquiring about the suppliers’ own schemes as well as the growing range of government support measures. Keeping the front-line team resilient, protected and engaged is a massive challenge for contact centre leaders to add into the mix.

The insight centre

But – as we all know – there is one area in which the contact centre excels and that’s acting as the organisation’s ‘eyes and ears’, benefitting from thousands of interactions with customers every day. That insight might now be redundant from a customer acquisition and revenue generation perspective, but it’s more vital than ever when it comes to understanding the customer experience and reducing costs.

In most organisations, one of the biggest drivers of customer contact (and confusion) is the communications the organisation itself generates. With the price cap being adjusted every 3 months then it is almost inevitable that contacts will rise. And this is where the contact centre can really help.

A quarterly price cap will inevitably just put more strain on the contact centre and its staff, but if the rest of the organisation can be engaged it might just help spur some process and experience improvements along the way.

If you are facing these sorts of challenges, in the energy sector or elsewhere, and would like to talk them through, why not get in touch.

That’s a familiar piece of advice which is credited to John T Chambers, the former boss of Cisco. It’s a comforting mantra for your boss to repeat; it combines displaying respect for staff with a degree of humility.

In the old days, most leaders in the ‘customer world’ could not only say they would be ‘willing’ to do what they asked of their contact centre employees, they could do it too. Technically they might have been a bit slow, but when it came to understanding, empathy and the resolution of customer problems or commercial opportunities they would be confident of their ability to effectively engage with consumers.

That was then. What about now?

Last week a client shared with me some analysis they had done which showed that their frontline advisors were having to use 20 different systems, applications and third-party portals. 20.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1659441626817{padding-bottom: 30px !important;}”]Just think about that for a moment. I’ll be honest, I’m not the world’s greatest multitasker – but even if I was, 20 applications would be about four times the number I’d be confident in using. So, in my client’s contact centre I know I couldn’t do an advisor’s job and if I was the boss I wouldn’t pretend that I’d be willing to either!

It’s a truism that contact centre agents’ jobs have steadily become more difficult over the years. The number of contact channels available and the range of activities undertaken have steadily increased. At the same time the emotional state of customers has often become more heightened either due to their frustration at failing to successfully self-serve or external environmental factors. We all know that the ‘cognitive load’ frontline staff work under seems to have steadily grown and the technology and processes they work with just make matters worse.

So, what can we do about it?

For one, we can start to acknowledge that our people are increasingly doing technically and emotionally challenging jobs that most of us couldn’t. Recognising this fact won’t change anyone’s reality, but it does show a degree of genuine understanding and empathy.

Secondly, we can ensure that the needs of the frontline are front and centre every time new tech, propositions and channels are being planned. There’s a direct line between employee experience and customer experience, so we need to start to make reinforcing that relationship – and helping our frontline people – a priority.

First, some history…a few weeks ago, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) announced a series of related fines on firms using illegal telemarketing tactics. Five firms in the appliance warranty insurance sector were fined a total of £405,000. And at least one of them appears to have already gone out of business.

The primary reason for these firms being fined was that they were calling prospects who they didn’t have a prior relationship with, whose numbers were registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS). This, as most of us should well know, is illegal. As covered in our previous articles – ICO flurry of fines and BTB sales and marketing ops compliance.

However, when the ICO levies a whole series of fines on firms in the same sector, with similar sales and marketing models, it’s evidence of other underlying concerns. Although the ICO’s Enforcement Notices only refer to 67 consumer complaints, these kinds of collective enforcement actions are invariably evidence of alarm bells ringing at the ICI’s Wilmslow offices about widespread misbehaviour. Here, the ICO has highlighted these firms’ targeting of vulnerable consumers, in this case the elderly.

Targeting the vulnerable elderly

Undoubtedly, judging by the evidence presented by the ICO, this is exactly what these businesses did. While it’s arguably unfair to judge a firm’s sales and marketing practises based on relatively little information, I think we can be confident that these firms were all at the malicious end of the ‘Ignorant vs Complicit’ spectrum of compliance awareness. They seem to have known exactly what they were doing, which is to deliberately target the vulnerable; selling on the basis of worry and fear, not value and consumer benefit, to those least well equipped to make informed decisions.

Scammers stick together

In an interesting example of geographical clustering, 4 out of 5 of the firms were located in East Sussex on the South coast, presumably showing connections to the biggest name in appliance warranty insurance, Domestic & General in Brighton (about which there is no evidence of the ICO having concerns, I hasten to add). So, even scammers like to stick together!

The vast majority of firms don’t set out to exploit or deceive, but

  1. Being a legitimate, respectable firm – even a blue-chip brand – is no guarantee you won’t be snared by the ICO, as the Royal Mail, American Express and Saga, which have all recently been hit by enforcement actions and fines, can attest
  2. Awareness of the prevalence and importance of vulnerabilities has grown. An understanding of vulnerability had increased before Covid 19, but the pandemic has accelerated it massively. Firms need to be able to both recognise and adapt to prospects and customers who are exhibiting signs of vulnerability

So, what can we learn from this raft of ICO fines? Does the rise of vulnerability awareness just mean that we can no longer sell to older people?

We sought the opinions of some members of the wider Contact Centre Panel network.

Are older consumers too ‘risky’ to market to?

Senior Response is a long-established outsourced contact centre “dedicated to communicating with the older consumer market”. So, what conclusions does Managing Director Michael King draw from the ICO’s slew of fines? Can firms still confidently market and sell to Mature consumers?

“We find that firms which utilise direct mail or online activity prior to commencing telemarketing activity not only have better results but give the customer and prospect the opportunity to know a little bit more about the business and ultimately be more receptive to being contacted.

We work very closely with our clients to ensure that we have a shared Vulnerable Customer policy, which outlines the process if we believe we have a vulnerable customer and what steps to take.

The other point I would stress is that firms should be aware that the adult children or grandchildren of many mature consumers are often part of the decision-making process and therefore your customer journey from marketing to sales, should incorporate this. We often arrange call-backs with our client’s customers to speak with the family member where permission is granted by the customer and requested by the family member. We all want to ensure our parents and elderly relatives are not being taken advantage of by the very things that the ICO have acted on.  It is our view that firms who are proactive in the examples I have mentioned, are more successful in marketing to this rapidly growing market.”

What really is vulnerability?

“Circumstances impact people in different ways – what makes one person vulnerable may affect another quite differently. Age, mental and physical health and financial pressures are all subjective. We believe it is important to communicate with people in the most tailored way possible according to their circumstances and use the tools available to determine what is appropriate.” Helen Lord, CEO, Vulnerability Registration Service

You can find out more about the Vulnerability Registration Service by clicking here

How can technology help?

Can the new technologies of machine learning and artificial intelligence play a part in helping firms identify vulnerable prospects and customers – and serve them better, too?

Keith Shanks of Vorth Technology Solutions helps make contact centres work more effectively through the application of AI (artificial intelligence) tools. Can they support centres involved in sales and marketing, especially when they are targeting groups which may contain vulnerable consumers?

“Advances in AI and Machine Learning (ML) now mean that all contact centres are able to highlight potentially vulnerable customers. As has already been highlighted, vulnerability comes in many different forms and it is the responsibility of companies to understand these and act appropriately.

The truth is there is insufficient attention given to vulnerability and if you consider the current economic climate, responsible companies should be paying more attention to the welfare of their customers and the right technology will have a huge impact on this.

We expect a mini-revolution in this field over the next few years as regulators also start using technologies to review and monitor call centre services.”

Financial services: What’s the FCA’s perspective?

Elanev provides dynamic scoring services to contact centres including propensity and best time for contact, propensity for purchase and propensity for financial resilience / vulnerability with no GDPR implication.  Elanev’s John Willoughby gives his practical guidance for the future of such financial product sales and marketing, in light of proposed regulatory changes:

“Financial product sales will be bound by the FCA’s proposed Consumer Duty requiring marketing firms to “deliver good outcomes for retail clients”. The FCA expects all reasonable steps to be taken to avoid causing foreseeable harm to customers. Harm being primarily financial, but may also include mental health effects.

The FCA is requiring firms to have a better understanding of their customers calling out the need to understand customer propensity for vulnerability and to harm. The FCA expects firms to predict behaviour and monitor outcomes recognising the need for data to support this. Common data sources include:

 To properly identify, quantify and assess vulnerability a combination of data sources may be needed. The specific combination depending on the depth of customer insight that the organisation has and the level of customer consent granted.”

So where does this leave us?

Helen Lord of the Vulnerability Registration Service makes clear that vulnerability isn’t simple or clear cut. The scammers recently fined by the ICO deliberately targeted older people, but not all older people are vulnerable. So, we all need to be more vulnerability aware and unavoidably some customer and prospect groups are likely to contain a higher proportion of people with vulnerabilities. Senior Response is dedicated to engaging and communicating with older people, but as Michael King explains, they do so in a sophisticated way. Senior Response and its clients make use of multiple contact channels and embrace more varied and flexible customer journeys. This might point the way for other sales organisations – and not just for those targeting the ‘grey market’.

A growing role for technology and the insights it can provide seems to be unavoidable and desirable. Vorth Technology Solutions’ Keith Shanks has explained how technologies like his can help identify the ‘growing’ number of vulnerable consumers. John Willoughby from Elanev shows that in the regulated financial services sector, especially, the smarter use of data across a combination of sources is now essential.

The ICO’s fines of exploitative scam marketers doesn’t mean that older consumers are now ‘off limits’ for responsible, ethical firms. But the fines do help highlight the growing importance of being able to recognise and respond to consumer vulnerabilities; not just as an ‘add on’ but in a way that is embedded into processes and customer journeys.

If you require guidance on any of the areas discussed in this article, please contact us.

If you’re running a contact centre, especially one providing multilingual services, the dominant news themes of the past few years, Brexit, The ‘Great Resignation’ and War, have all compounded to make a challenging job even more difficult.

At the same time, Covid especially has driven significant growth in the demand for multilingual customer service as more and more firms have exploited to shift online to enter new overseas markets.

This is a trend which Contact Centre Panel has been acutely aware of over the past two years, both in the UK and globally. So, if you need to identify and recruit staff who can support customers in languages other than English what are the options available to you?

1. Employ people who are already here

Most multilingual contact centres are supporting European languages, so native language speakers originally from the EU are the most obvious candidates. EU residents who were in the UK by 2021 should have achieved Settled Status so can be employed just like any other resident. However, as nearly all contact centres are reporting massive recruitment and retention challenges, that’s far from easy.

2. Recruit new staff from the EU

This may help, but remember that to do so you will almost certainly have to take advantage of the Skilled Worker Visa Scheme which entails a lot of administration, being approved as an employer by the Home Office and meeting the minimum salary level of £25,600.

3. Recruit Remote Workers in the Country

With the widespread adoption of contact centre homeworking, employing foreign-language speakers to work for you remotely in their own country is now entirely technically feasible. However, the costs and complexity of doing so – especially if you don’t currently employ any staff outside of the EU – can be considerable.

4. Outsource

Outsourcing contact centre customer service isn’t always the right solution for every organisation. But as many of our clients have found, done the right way outsourcing can be a sustainable, affordable solution to the multilingual resourcing challenge.

Please get in touch if you would like to discuss any of these options.

Whether you provide outsourced services from overseas or are a client planning to use an outsourcer with delivery locations outside of your home market, you will be used to planning and managing lots of tasks. For any new outsourcing activity or contract you will have a long list of activities and factors that you need to scope and understand.

Naturally, this will encompass numerous areas under the heading of People, Process and Technology. But for some “getting your head around the costs and risks of foreign exchange management” will need to be added to the list for the first time.

Traditionally, outsourced contact centre providers and business process outsourcing (BPO) firms would handle the foreign exchange currency risk of delivering services from abroad themselves. When the first wave of UK offshore outsourcing started, with the use of India 15 to 20 years ago, this was invariably the case. As time has gone on, though, BPO companies have come to realise that being responsible for delivering ‘flat’ UK prices in the face of variable exchange rates is fraught with risks and potentially an unattractive option. This is even more the case as commonly used locations have expanded to include the Philippines, South Africa and a growing number of central and Eastern European locations outside of the Euro zone.

The range of foreign exchange management approaches agreed between BPOs and their onshore clients is very varied. What they all have in common is both client and provider facing the challenge of who should carry the currency risk, to what extent and for how long.

Options may include:

  1. The client is billed simple, ‘flat’ pricing in its local currency (Sterling, say) for the duration of a contract
  2. Periodic – usually annual – reviews of pricing, partly or wholly adjusting according to the change in FX rates
  3. Every monthly invoice being adjusted to your local ‘paying’ currency – or, more unusually, clients agreeing to pay invoices in the delivery location currency
  4. And every variation in between

You might imagine that the larger global BPOs, with both their financial scale and range of operational locations to help defray FX risks, would be more willing to offer clients simple, local currency pricing. However, broadly speaking the opposite is the case and the larger the BPO the more likely they are to look to pass more variable pricing onto their clients. This is probably a function of both:

For some BPOs, as they either enter new territories directly or in partnership with local firms, managing foreign exchange (FX) risks is a new challenge. Both they and their clients will need to take a view on:

  1.  The risks of their particular situation (the currency involved and its anticipated volatility, the current and future value of the contract and its duration)
  2. The costs of mitigating those risks (e.g. through currency ‘hedging’) as opposed to the potential impact of doing nothing

And finally, it’s worth remembering that currencies can rise as well as fall. There can be a significant upside if the value of a delivery currency falls and thus becomes far cheaper in real world terms for both onshore clients or the BPO business entity in the client’s location.

Still, you might feel that playing at being a Forex trader, with only one deal to your name, may be a stretch too far on top of the day job…