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Summary
The U.K. Customer Contact Association (CCA) is a nonprofit organization that was founded to represent the contact center industry, but it has expanded its role to all matters associated with managing customer interactions and now strives to help its more than 600 member companies professionalize how they manage customers. A key event in pursuing this mission is the annual Customer Contact Convention, which provides an opportunity for members to share views and get updates on best practices and new technologies. The 2007 forum was held in early November. Many of the issues discussed there were not new, the most obvious being that contact centers are still not meeting customers’ expectations. This failing seems to be mostly a matter of company culture and approach rather than technology; as several vendors exhibited products that can support new initiatives – if companies are willing to undertake them.

View
We all lack enough time to do everything we want to do, whether at work or at leisure. Call center managers are no different, and they spend a great deal of their day grappling with operational issues such as agents going out sick, inbound call queues being too long or perennial tasks such as reducing average call-handling times. The CCA forum provides an opportunity for members to take a little time out to share experiences, learn about best practices and catch up on technology developments.

The first and loudest message that attendees heard, from end-user companies, technology vendors and consultants alike, was that, despite lip service to the contrary, most companies still don’t put the customer first. Rather, they are bogged down in issues such as interdepartmental conflict, disconnected processes, legacy systems and striving to meet inappropriate measures. The overall impression was that this lack of focus has caused customers to lose trust in companies, to the extent that they are beginning to believe information they find on the Internet more than what they hear from companies.

But not all the speakers communicated doom and gloom. One said that his organization changed all its interaction-handling processes by focusing on one word: “why” – for instance, why this customer found it necessary to call the contact center, why another customer didn’t complete a purchase on the Web site or why people drop out part way through an interactive voice recognition (IVR) menu. As they came to understand the whys, he told the audience, they were able to do something about them, and many of the old operational barriers disappeared. Several other speakers showed that a multichannel interaction strategy can work. The key was to follow two basic principles: deliver the promise (do what you say you will do) and make the experience consistent across all channels. The importance of the latter tenet was emphasized by the overall consensus that the up-and-coming generations are going to force companies to support more electronic channels of interaction.

Central to this discussion was the trend toward more Web-based self-service. The consensus was that this trend will continue and even accelerate as people have less time to spare for phone calls, more people access the Web from mobile devices and the younger generations simply assume it. This opened up the broad question of the future of the contact center and the role of agents. No one seemed to think centers would go away or that agents would become unnecessary. Rather, the most popular view was that Web-based self-service will mature and simpler transactions will transition to the Web. This shift would leave agents available to handle the more complex transactions, but they would need better skills and better support – and perhaps better pay!! This vision goes along with the trend to virtualize the center by distributing more interactions to skilled or knowledge workers outside the traditional contact center.

No forum of contact center managers and technology vendors can come together without IT playing a major part in the discussion. The good or bad news, depending on your perspective, is that technology’s role is increasing and that new technologies are emerging continually. From this perspective, the question now is not whether technologies exist that can support what companies are trying to do but rather how they choose between the different options available. For example, six vendors showed products that help in different ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the agent’s desktop: Graham Technology, Inquira, Instranet, Jacada, Pitney Bowes and SmartPoint. These, and vendors such as NICE and Verint, were also showing how they can pull together an increasingly complete picture of the customer by integrating ever more types of data into their analysis; with Verint leading the way in using voice analytics to uncover what customers really say to agents and how agents respond.

One of the liveliest debates was about where to site the contact center. This included the pros and cons of remaining in-house, outsourcing to an onshore or offshore third party, or the new option of “home-shoring” to workers based at home. One speaker suggested that the attraction of offshoring is diminishing as companies grapple with customer complaints about agents’ accents and lack of local awareness and costs have risen enough to shrink the savings that made this option so popular.

Assessment
The Customer Contact Convention showed that some old issues still persist and new ones have bubbled to the surface, but overall the industry is in a continual state of change. Some speakers urged people not to dwell on the bad but focus on the good; after all, a growing number of companies have become truly customer-focused and their customer service levels have reached the highest standards. Several have managed to develop multichannel communications approaches that reflect customer expectations and deliver services in new ways. Perhaps the greatest source of change is technology; vendors adding improvements to existing products, and unexpected new products coming to market. The challenge for end-user companies is to find out about such products and then select the ones that really can help them meet their challenges. The future looks bright, provided that companies focus more on the customer, improve their customer-handling processes, make the best use of new technology and integrate contact-handling more into their overall business.

Related Research Notes
Improving the Self-Service Customer Experience
Tealeaf delivers insight into customers’ use of the Web (September 17, 2007)

Contact Centers Still Perform Poorly
Studies show centers don’t meet customers’ expectations (September 7, 2007)

The Challenge of Managing Customer Data
Benchmark research finds creating a single source of the truth for customer information isn’t simple (August 17, 2007)