How the web turns the call center into the contact center
By Kurt Peters
Most people’s view of a call center is a big room
with dozens or hundreds of cubicles, motivational signs and
pictures—and the occasional Whoopee! as someone scores a tough sale
or breaks through a barrier. But the call center that siphons off the load
for Plow & Hearth, a home furnishings division of 1-800-Flowers.com
Inc., isn’t like that at all. In fact, it’s probably not even
accurate to call it a call center. “It’s the call center
without the bricks and mortar,” says Reg Foster, president and
chairman of Alpine Access Inc., which operates Plow & Hearth’s
overflow call center.
Golden, Colo.-based Alpine Access uses web technology
to allow 3,000 agents to work out of their homes, yet provide the same
level of service—Plow & Hearth says even better service—as
traditional call centers that aggregate agents in one location. “Our
company would not exist if it weren’t for the Internet,” Foster
says.
Pervasive changes
Routing calls to decentralized agents domestically, as
Alpine Access and others are doing, or even overseas, is only one example
of the way in which the web is changing how call centers that serve
retailers operate. Other web-initiated changes include making all of a
retailer’s product information available on the Internet or through
an intranet so call center reps can answer questions faster; automating
responses to customers’ e-mail queries; offering live chat support;
inputting order and customer data directly into retailers’
order-entry systems so the call center and retailer don’t have to
operate separate databases that later need to be rationalized with each
other; and making a shoppers’ web session available to agents to help
solve problems. “Our overall strategy is full integration with a
retailer’s operation. The Internet is very important to achieving
that,” says John McGovern, president of Grand Rapids, Mich.-based
Progressive Distribution Services Inc., which provides the gamut of
services to web retailers, including a call center.
In fact, the Internet was so important, McGovern says,
that when he started developing the company five years ago, he wanted the
web as part of the call center right from the start. The technology for
such integration wasn’t available then, so the company developed it
itself and now has invested 40,000 staff hours into tying its call center
into the web.
Web-enablement is much easier to find now. “I
don’t know a call center today that’s not using the web in some
format,” says Anne G. Nickerson, president of consultants Call Center
Coach.
Foster attributes the success of Alpine Access to the
Internet. The flexibility that web distribution of data makes possible
allows Alpine Access to hire a higher quality agent who is attracted by the
flexible work hours and ability to work out of the home, he says.
Two-thirds of Alpine Access agents have a college education and are
over age 34. The typical call center rep has a high school diploma and is
between 25 and 35, according to BenchmarkPortal Inc., a contact center
consulting and research company.
No geographic bounds
Furthermore, using the web allows Alpine Access to
match agents more closely with the products they are repping. “We can
match the background of the agent with the nature of the call coming in
because we don’t have a geographic boundary,” Foster says.
Alpine’s agents need only a PC equipped with a
browser and a second telephone line with Internet access. Everything moves
over standard telephone lines. Agents log onto a web site that divides
their screen into three parts: one section to manage the call, another to
view web pages that a customer may be viewing and the third as an interface
with the order entry system.
One thing that motivates many call center agents is the
camaraderie and excitement that contests in call centers create. JP Simons,
director of training and service quality at Madison, Va.-based Plow &
Hearth, says the distributed nature of Alpine Access has not diminished
call center reps’ enthusiasm or ability to sell. “When I listen
in on the calls, the agents are very upbeat, pitching the right
thing,” she says. “They also have a skill in integrating the
pitches into the conversation with the customer.” Foster says Alpine
Access creates virtual motivational programs and hosts a company picnic
every year so agents can meet one another.
Thanks to the web, monitoring Alpine Access’s
agents is as easy as monitoring agents at Plow & Hearth’s
own 150-seat call center, Simons says. She logs on to the Alpine Access web
site, clicks on the Monitor button, selects an agent to listen to, then
monitors the call. “It’s really slick,” Simons says.
“With some of the others that we looked at it was really difficult to
listen in.”
But just as web technology is allowing companies to
operate with dispersed reps in the U.S., it also facilitates the movement
of call center jobs overseas. “The web plays a big part in it,”
says Nickerson, who has consulted on training call center reps in India.
“The web breaks down a lot of barriers.”
Interpreting the experience
Having a web-enabled contact center is particularly
useful when reps are helping web customers, as is becoming more common. For
instance, Tower Records’ contact center uses TeaLeaf Technologies
Inc. products to capture and analyze customers’ web site sessions.
Tower Records reps can view a particular session click by click and page by
page. “It’s extremely helpful to see what the customer
sees,” says Gail Henderson, director of customer care for
TowerRecords.com. “We can see how the customer interprets something
and make changes if necessary. This is a tool to improve what we’re
doing.”
When Tower Records began getting calls from customers
unable to complete the checkout process, for instance, it began reviewing
those customers’ attempts to purchase. It noticed a pattern of
transactions failing when a Verified by Visa pop-up window asked customers
for their Visa passwords. Tower Records concluded that the problem was with
customers whose banks had automatically enrolled them in the Verified by
Visa program. Those customers didn’t know they needed a password to
check out, so they either abandoned the order or closed the window and
attempted to check out anyway. Without a way to analyze patterns from a
multitude of shopping sessions, Tower might not have been able to isolate
the problem, she says.
TowerRecords.com has found TeaLeaf’s technology
useful in identifying other patterns. For instance, the company contracts
with BizRate.com Inc. and ForeSee Results Inc. to gather customer feedback
on the web site experiences. It reviews that information as well as
customer calls and e-mails daily to identify potential problem areas. It
can re-create problem sessions to identify areas for improvement, matching
customer i.d.s to the sessions.
TowerRecords.com has had to exercise caution in a
couple of areas related to its use of session analysis. One is the issuance
of customer identifiers related to particular sessions and the
privacy issues that raises. Apart from the purchase information, Tower
Records uses the i.d.s only for trouble-shooting, Henderson says. In
addition, TowerRecords.com’s privacy policy gives customers the
chance to opt out of being assigned an i.d. number. The second problem is
related to the fact that TowerRecords.com used to contract for the hosting
of its web site. The hosting company would not allow TeaLeaf’s
technology to access customer sessions. “We’d see the log in
and the checkout and nothing in between,” Henderson says. That
problem ended when Tower brought the hosting inside.
Apart from troubleshooting, TowerRecords finds the
TeaLeaf technology useful in other ways, Henderson says. For instance, it
can review sessions in which a new rep helped a customer as a way to
improve the rep’s performance. It also can take loss-prevention steps
by reviewing all actions a rep takes and determining if, for instance, a
particular rep is placing too many free orders, indicating that the rep is
obtaining CDs for himself or his friends.
Contact
The web also has changed how customers get in touch
with retailers, which has changed how retailers respond. Many inquiries
today come in via e-mail or live chat, a phenomenon which has prompted many
to change the “call center” designation to “contact
center.” Writing responses, rather than speaking them, takes more
time, so some technology vendors have developed systems that automate
e-mail responses.
Unlike earlier automated e-mail response systems that
tried to make the entire process untouched by human hands,
today’s systems operate with a series of suggested answers and
drop-in phrasing. The answers are reviewed by a rep before they go out. A
system from eGain Technologies Inc., for instance, intelligently routes the
e-mails to reps, based on words in the subject line or the body. Once the
rep has opened the e-mail, the system then suggests answers.
Bookspan.com, the web site of the Book-of-the-Month
Club, is using the eGain system in its contact center. EGain reports that
within six weeks of when it swapped out a prior system that had been
allowing customer service reps to answer 30 e-mails an hour, Bookspan reps
were answering more than 39 an hour.
Analysts caution that even with automated prompts,
skills in responding to written communications are different from those
needed for spoken communications. Because people put more faith in written
word than spoken, especially in communications with companies,
“Errors in written communications are magnified exponentially,”
says Nickerson of Call Center Coach. Further, unless a rep engages in
web-based support on a regular basis, the rep may not be as productive
responding via chat or e-mail as on the phone. As a result, many contact
centers assign reps to one area or the other. “These are specialized
skills,” says Jon Anton, director of research and founder of
BenchmarkPortal and director of benchmark research at Purdue
University’s Center for Customer-Driven Quality.
The web changes how a call center operates in other
ways, Nickerson cautions. For one thing, most call centers do not have
enough experience in e-mail or live chat workload to know how to schedule
staff properly. They know the ebb and flow of phone calls but not of
web-based communication. “Many experience huge volume in the evening
and even late in the evening after people get home from work or after the
kids are in bed,” Nickerson says. “It’s a different
volume from calls.”
New set of skills
The web also changes how customer service contact
centers operate in other ways. For instance, OKS-Ameridial Inc. has
developed a system whereby agents can input orders over the web directly
into clients’ order entry systems, so the call center doesn’t
have to maintain a separate order system that needs to be reconciled later
with the retailers’.
In addition, many call centers provide agents with
browser-equipped PCs so the agent can use the retailer’s web site as
a source of information for answering customers’ questions.
“Think of an agent as basically a knowledge worker who needs quick
access to lots of information before, during and after a sale,” Anton
says. “A robust web site with a natural language search engine helps
both the customer and the agent.”
Whatever approach a center takes in implementing the
web, it’s clear the web has changed call centers
dramatically—and that, in turn, has changed the management of call
centers, Nickerson notes. “Management has a whole different set of
responsibilities now,” she says. “There’s a whole group
of jobs that didn’t exist before the Internet.”
kurt@verticalwebmedia.com
To view the Guide to Web-Enabled Contact Center Solutions click here.
