March/April 2003

Natural speech recognition, intelligent scripting and call-back buttons are among resources now streamlining contact centres, says Marcia MacLeod, but she warns in this second part of her investigation that they still need to be applied with a human touch

Any e-tailers serious about improving customer service will want to know how they can best exploit technology to give customers that warm, loyal glow. As we saw in the last issue of e.logistics Magazine, contact centres by themselves don't do it; interactive voice response (IVR), for example, can make customers hang up - and go elsewhere - as easily and as quickly as it can encourage them to hold on.

But one emerging technology could go a long way towards changing IVR's less-than-perfect reputation: natural voice speech recognition. This technology, which is offered by companies such as Nuance, SpeechWorks, Philips and Loquando, allows callers to speak in their normal way of talking. For example, a caller could say "I'd like to place an order" or "I want to buy a T-shirt" and in each case, the caller should be put through to order-takers.

"This form of IVR is more acceptable to most people," argues Shirley Hemstock, principal consultant at Avaya, a Lucent company. But it's early days yet. Pete Moody, product marketing manager at Mitel, thinks it is too early to implement natural speech recognition because "the technology isn't reliable enough yet."

Others disagree. According to Daniella Astarte Walters, senior marketing manager at Nortel, the human ear is 82 per cent accurate in understanding an IVR message - or even another person - whereas natural language systems average 97 per cent accuracy. Nortel's new range of hardware puts more ports into a small space, so that thousands of customers can link in to the natural language system at once.

Natural language cannot be used for outbound calls, though, and cannot answer all callers' queries. As explained in our last issue, the increasing use of the term "contact centres" to describe these resources indicates that traditional call centres are increasingly coping with a lot more than just telephony. Email management has become one of the biggest issues for contact centres. Should the same agents handle both telephone calls and emails? If so, how do emails fit into the queue for agents' attention? How quickly should customers expect a reply?

Contact centre experts believe that most people would be happy with an email reply within two hours, allowing a little more flexibility in approach. "Telephone centres work in real time; they have to be equipped with sufficient agents to cope with peak traffic," Mitel's Pete Moody points out. "Email can be handled in batches. This allows one agent to handle both phone and email, dealing with emails when the volume of calls reduces."

However, he warns that the contact centre manager must be sure that an agent is not addressing emails when 20 callers are being held in a queue.

Noetica, too, suggests one agent should handle both types of contact. "Our software integrates voice and email using the same user interface, same application and same lists of questions and answers, or 'scripts'," says managing director Danny Singer. "It turns an email into a structured database item that can be handled, monitored and reported on in the same way as telephone calls."

But although modern systems may physically allow one agent to handle both kinds of contact, Singer admits that different skills may be required for the two - notably written skills for email. That is why Noetica's software prompts the agent through the email, even suggesting a reply.

Email management may seem enough of a major challenge for contact centres, but Web contacts can go beyond email, involving "call-me" buttons, Web chat and Web collaboration. "Things like Internet chat aren't as popular in Europe as they are in the US, but there are solutions out there," adds Danielle Walters. "Click-to-call (call-back) buttons, for example, are growing in popularity, albeit more in the B2B market."

But call-back buttons have to be placed on Web sites with care; if they are on the home page, people will use them instead of ordering through the site. Call-back buttons also make it hard to judge the amount of work agents will have to deal with; "and if an agent does call back, he or she had better be able to answer the customer's query!"

Web chat allows agents and customers to send text to each other in real time; Web collaboration, in which the agent guides the caller through the site, can be useful for large, complex Web sites. But e-tailers should remember that any of these Web contacts requires the caller to have two lines to enable them to talk to the agent and look at the site at the same time. So far, not many consumers in the UK do, unless they are prepared to use their mobile phone for the talking.

Whatever technology is used, successful contact centres are heavily dependent on the quality and availability of people. "Management and monitoring software is essential," believes David Mackenzie, founder of CT Consulting and head of the Call Centre Management Association. "They help provide quality assurance and training. You can see if your dialogue works. And staff rostering software is necessary when there are at least 10 agents."

Calls may be monitored for a number of reasons - to identify the number of orders, queries or complaints, for example; for assessing agents' performance; and for training agents. "By monitoring calls, you can understand the interaction between callers and agents," suggests Jane Strachan, head of consulting at Eyretel. "You can see if the workforce needs more training in a particular area; you can use it to increase first-call resolution, reduce hold times and so on."

And, according to Shirley Hemstock of Avaya, "stunningly good things" are being done with call recording systems. Eyretel can evaluate the stress levels in a caller's voice pictorially, identifying whether the stress goes up or down during a conversation.

Good staff rostering systems help ensure the right people and the right skills are available at all times. "How many people do you need to achieve the service levels you want to provide?" asks Bart Delgado, managing director of Swan, which supplies telephony and workforce management systems.

Blue Pumpkin helps plan the number of people needed, too. "It gets more complicated the more varied the contacts handled," says Hugh Jones, Internet product marketing manager. "You have to look at flexishift patterns, working out how many contacts come in when, and match people to demand."

With so much technology to install, some might fear the cost would be prohibitive, but it has come down. IVR has dropped by around 30 per cent; other contact centre systems are also less expensive. Even integrating contact centres with back office has reduced in price. And whatever the cost, as Nicholas Turney, sales director of i-Sky Europe, the outsource call centre specialist, points out: "The biggest failing in call centres is that people look on them as a cost, when really they present an opportunity." An opportunity few businesses that really want to know and serve their customers can afford to miss.

M&M Sports: automating contacts without losing touch

M&M Sports, which sells manufacturers' excess branded sports goods, implemented a contact centre when its mail order business grew to the point where staff could no longer take down orders manually. Now 20 to 25 per cent of its business comes through the Internet.

"A large percentage of customers still want to talk to someone at our end," says operations director Tom Penn. "We have a 30-seat telecentre using Avaya's Definity software to route calls to the right group (for instance sales, customer service or whatever). Mailbrain, from Sanderson, prompts the agent to offer a similar product when necessary, since our limited stock sells out quickly."

Email is used to receive and answer queries and to confirm orders. However, M&M Sports does not yet have full computer telephony integration, which means for instance that agents have to call up the customer details on their terminals explicitly when the call comes through. "We take customers' home phone numbers because it helps to reduce fraud," says Penn, "but often they don't call from home, so CTI wouldn't always work."

M&M Sports is now looking at Web chat, call-back buttons and other contacts. Since the contact centre was designed as an additional way for customers to get to the retailer, why not extend the options further?