The new call center agent

For 11 years, Vance Brown ran high-tech call centers, first for Xerox Corp., then for Eastman Kodak Co. so he knows something about the kinds of questions that customers ask. Now he’s the chief customer officer for Ritz Interactive Inc., which operates RitzCamera.com and other sites. To him, all the surveys that show consumers using the web for product research are not just abstract reports about trends—his customer service agents have to deal with consumers who have conducted that research.

And they’re a lot different from even the business-oriented, well-informed customers that his agents dealt with at Xerox or the customers they dealt with at Kodak. “Customers have become much more knowledgeable,” he says. “They go to manufacturers’ sites, camera review sites and a plethora of other sites to do their research. By the time they get to us they’re pretty informed consumers.”

RitzCamera.com as well as other retailers that sell tech-related products are finding that the role of their call center agents is changing as a result of the information that’s available on the web. On the one hand, agents are answering more complex questions than they might have answered before. “It does require our agents to have more specific knowledge and be more educated about our products,” says Sean McLaughlin, marketing manager for Specialized Bicycles, based in Morgan Hill, Calif.

But on the other hand, they’re often dealing with customers who have made up their minds and simply need affirmation. “By the time they get to us, many have made their decisions,” Brown says. “They say, ‘This is the camera I want. This is what I want to use it for. What do you think?’”

Nearly all online consumers use the web for product research, says research/consulting firm Valentine Radford Inc., which conducts the quarterly iCustomer Observer survey of 5,000 consumers. Valentine Radford reports that 85% of online consumers use the web for product research and 73% use the web often or very often to research products they buy offline. Only 6% said they never use the web for product research. “Call center agents’ work is becoming more challenging because callers are more sophisticated and they have more complex issues,” says Anne Nickerson, president of consultants Call Center Coach.

College education

That new reality is changing the way retailers staff their call centers. For starters, agents at tech-related sites are better educated than they would have been a few years ago. “We very specifically look for college-educated agents,” says Beth Krier, director of training for Finali Corp., which provides outsourced call center services for eBags Inc. and Buy.com Inc. “As we get new clients, that’s one of the things they ask about. They tell us they have really basic reps who can’t answer basic questions.”

Tech Depot recruits at colleges for call center agents, says Bruce Martin, president of Tech Depot, , a unit of Office Depot Inc. “We don’t require a college education, but we feel these are people who have made a four-year investment in trying to make something of themselves and so they’ll do well,” he says.

But even when the reps possess a high level of general education, they still need training. And that’s another area where call centers have changed. At !nPulse Response Group Inc., the length of training that call-center agents go through has doubled since the company started eight years ago, says John Stones, founder and executive vice president of the call center outsource company based in Phoenix, Ariz. “Our buyers are becoming more informed and as a result, we have continued to improve our sales training program,” he says. !nPulse Response, formerly The Aftermarket Co., handles call center operations for web, direct-response TV marketing and other direct marketing for Bose Corp.’s direct marketing group, Sears, Roebuck and Co.’s Sears Direct division, Philips Electronics and others. “It takes 14 days now just to get them to a base level to start handling phone calls,” he says.

Tech Depot puts agents through a 16-week training program that includes such basics as how to deal with customers on the phone, product information, vendor specifications as well as advanced training such as how to write account plans for customers and how to manage an account. “It’s much different from what it was four or five years ago,” Martin says. “Then, an agent might have gotten a week’s training on how to use the system and it was off to the phones. But that’s not good enough any more.”

Even after basic training, continuing education is important, call center operators says. “Ongoing training is key,” Stones says. “We have seen that continue to develop over eight years.” !nPulse Response hosts developers of products its agents sell for frequent training and updates. “They provide the motivation and desire; they’re excited about the product and that’s something the agents can key off of,” he says.

Continuing education is particularly crucial when selling technology products, retailers say. “The training never stops because with technology, there are always new products, techniques and integration issues,” says Monica Luechtefeld, executive vice president of e-commerce for Office Depot. “Our call center reps meet multiple times a week with manufacturers.”

The black hole

But if consumers are using the amount of information to become better educated before they call, retailers can also use it to educate consumers even further and deflect calls. That’s the approach that Specialized Bicycles is taking, using a knowledge management system from RightNow Technologies Inc. Specialized Bicycles hosts several hundred thousand unique visitors a month—McLaughlin wouldn’t be more specific—at Specialized.com. Most who are looking for product information or help never call the call center. “Far better than 90% of the time, customers help themselves,” McLaughlin says. As a result, Specialized Bicycle handles calls from 4,000 dealers around the world as well as from consumers with a call center staff of 10.

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Specialized Bicycles, which has been on the web since 1994, learned quickly that even though its primary relations were with its dealers, consumers would use the web to get answers directly from the company. In fact, the volume reached such a level that Specialized’s customer service operation was quickly overwhelmed and many inquiries went unanswered, McLaughlin says.

More than FAQs

As the volume of calls and e-mails from customers continued to increase, though, the company realized it needed a way to manage them so customers could get timely and accurate answers. Based on the queries it had received, Specialized seeded its web site with questions that customers posed frequently. The questions resides at more than a simple FAQ page, which would quickly have become unwieldy due to the broad range of questions that customers ask. Instead, RightNow creates and hosts a database that contains questions and answers. Customers search for their answer by inputting the question or key words.

The RightNow program asks customers who use the service to rate their satisfaction. If ratings of a particular answer fall below 50%, Specialized’s managers review the content to determine where it is falling short. Call center agents analyze the questions they receive and if they believe that a question is one that others are likely to ask, the company inputs it into the database, thus keeping content fresh. Customers who don’t find answers in the database can submit an e-mail that Specialized will answer within 48 hours.

RightNow offers its service both as an ASP, where it hosts the service, and under an in-house licensing arrangement. Typical fee for a two-year service is $35,000 to more than $100,000, but the fee can range into seven figures for large, multi-site implementations, the company says.

Retailers are also learning that web-based information can be used to increase the amount of information available to an agent’s computer. “Smart agents are very expensive,” says Anand Subramaniam, vice president of marketing for eGain Communications Corp., which operates outsourced call centers and offers a web-based knowledge management product. “An agent can only know so much and that’s where knowledge management helps.”

Greater resolution

EGain creates a database with structured and unstructured knowledge as well as a base of past questions. An agent who receives a question for which he does not know the answer can quickly search the database through a browser, using natural language queries. Agent training is simple, Subramaniam says, because the user interface looks like Windows XP and is accessible through a browser. The content can also be available for consumers to on a web site.

Using the eGain system, UK-based cell phone company Orange SA reports that the number of returns of telephones that customers thought were defective but weren’t was cut in half from 52% of all returns in 1996 to 25% last year. Similarly, the proportion of unresolved problems fell from 23% to 6% in that period.

Similarly, Bradley Direct, an outsourcer of call center and fulfillment services, has created what it calls CareNet, an intranet that contains customer-service related information that supplements its order entry system. Bradley’s clients can input product descriptions and changes directly into the Bradley order entry system, so agents refer to it for most up-to-date product information. But two years ago, in response to the more complex questions that consumers were calling with, Bradley developed CareNet. “We designed CareNet to fill in what traditional order entry systems lacked,” says Andrew Leichter, business development manager. For instance, CareNet could contain an alert that a color in a catalog doesn’t match a product’s actual color or it could present two products side-by-side so an agent can tell a customer what the differences are.

CareNet also allows agents to escalate difficult requests to expert agents who in turn have the option of sending the request to the product developer at the client. That process includes automated tracking so if a response is not delivered to the customer within a prescribed time, the agent, the expert agent and the manager get an alert that the issue is still open.

Bradley Direct has benefited from CareNet by no longer having to equip each agent with thick paper manuals. It also is able to disseminate policy, procedure or product changes to agents more quickly. When changes are made on CareNet, agents get an e-mail, alerting them to the change. It if is a complex change, Bradley can include an e-training session that agents can take from their desktops. “We don’t have to pull agents into a classroom or schedule multiple training sessions, including in the evenings,” says Kim Morgan, QA process manager in Bradley’s call center. And the changes are implemented more quickly. “We don’t have to wait for the paper manuals to filter out of the system,” Leichter says.

Early advocates of online retailing thought that consumers who bought online had little need to contact the seller. They weren’t completely wrong. But there is still a strong group of consumers who want hand-holding or affirmation of their decision. Or they need post-sale assistance on a complex product. And that’s where the additional knowledge of call center reps becomes crucial. “If you can help people with those kinds of questions, they become real customers,” says Martin of TechDepot. “They value that service.”

kurt@verticalwebmedia.com