Spring 2007

If you're telephoning a retailer's contact centre, which would you prefer: to deal with someone on another continent, who may be bright and educated, but doesn't understand your accent and has no knowledge of British culture and geography; or to talk to a machine, which knows even less about these things, but which was programmed by people who do, and leads you through a logical login process before passing you on to a human operator (if necessary)?

These are not the only two options, of course; you could deal with a contact centre hosted in the UK and staffed entirely by humans. They do still exist; in fact there are about 5,900 contact centres in this country, of which around 14 per cent are thought to be outsourced.

But consumers can't make that choice for themselves; it's down to the company they're calling. And for many such companies, the lure of 'offshoring' still seems too strong to resist.

Historically, outsourced contact centres have been run by specialist companies as their main source of income; but increasingly, fulfilment businesses have found themselves drawn into the market too. Often it's more convenient for them to provide such resources in-house as an all-in package than to buy them in separately.

Some such companies have in fact made contact centres a major part of their business, offering their services on a stand-alone basis as well as linking them with picking, packing and fulfilment; typical are 2Touch, Prolog and Zendor (which shares these resources with parent N Brown).

Others such as Braywood tend to flex their contact centre resources according to the needs of their fulfilment customers. As director Matt Cannon puts it: 'We look on our contact centre as an added-value element of our fulfilment offering, not a profit centre in its own right. We find that's the way to get the best out of it.'

The true outsourced contact centres have recently come in for a blasting from Exony, a specialist in contact centre technology, which suggests that better management of outsourced contact centre providers would save UK companies £55 million a year in improved performance and enhanced customer service.

Controversial talk - but of course it ignores the wide variances that inevitably differentiate the best-performing contact centre operators from the worst.

Perhaps more surprising, analyst Datamonitor reckons that speech automation in contact centres can save far more than outsourcing. To put some figures on that, it says that where outsourcing might cut costs between 25 and 25 per cent, an automated call costs only a quarter the price of one to an outsourced centre.

Cost isn't the only aspect of contact centres that has lately come under fire, however; credit card fraud can sometimes be attributed to dishonest staff as well. The BBC's Whistleblower programme lately took great relish in highlighting just how vulnerable confidential information can be. The risk is that staff will be seduced or threatened into passing on the information to the criminal fraternity. Once again, technology can come to the rescue here. It is possible to install your consumer telephony system in such a way that confidential data is read out by consumers to a machine interface which the human operator can't hear or see, even though the rest of the conversation is carried out on a normal person-to-person basis. Sabio claims to be a leader here.

And heaped on top of all these niggling problems comes the story of how US retailer TJ Maxx managed to let hackers acquire details of 45 million credit card transactions. This wasn't blamed on contact centres as such, since it was largely related to purchases made in bricks and mortar stores, but it came as another blow to confidence in the ability of retailers to treat customer information in confidence.

As with all such news stories, the hype was more alarming than the reality. It emerged that few consumers had detected any fraudulent transactions on their cards, and none at all had done so in the UK.

Running contact centres must often seem to operators like a no-win activity, in which staff turnover tends to be high, consumer expectations constantly exceed what is possible and affordable, and the high-profile mistakes chip away at reputations. However, it's only fair to point out that thousands of calls are received and handled to everyone's satisfaction every hour of every day.

But that doesn't entirely offset the bad feeling often generated by adverse anecdotal experience. One of our own editorial team was recently trying to reach a well-known PC manufacturer's help line. He was cut off twice after waiting ten minutes each time, then again after waiting three quarters of an hour - yet was given not a trace of sympathy by the company's switchboard operator, who would offer no advice on how to jump the queue.

The worst stage was after the second ten-minute wait, when the phone was lifted at the other end but not answered, and our caller was subjected to a minute of banter between call centre staff before being unceremoniously cut off. Could do better.