Homeward bound

Contact centres were invented to save costs. So their primary operational focus has been always been on reducing the organisation's cost of interaction with customers, as well as the expense of running the contact centre itself.

Self-service suits both parties down to the socks.

Evan Jones is director of operations at Merchants.

Now, however, some contact centre operators are realising that customer satisfaction must get equal attention - because satisfied customers have a funny way of driving revenue!

Also, keeping customers satisfied means having more effective contact centre agents - and more effective contact centre agents automatically reduces costs.

One way of achieving more effective contact centre agents is to provide incentives for them to be more accountable for keeping the customer happy. Providing a great place to work is an important key to driving overall performance. And, for some agents, a great place to work is at home.

In addition, providing customers with more self-service facilities frees agents to focus on adding practical value to customer interactions - boosting customer satisfaction and cutting costs at the same time.

And, of course, as customers become Web savvy through their social media activities, so they're preferring self-service options because they allow them to engage with the organisation on their own terms. Self-service suits both parties down to the socks.

Home working isn't quite as cut and dried a benefit to the employee, the organisation, and the customer.

Most contact centre operators employ young people or people in lower wage brackets, neither of which see working in contact centres as a career. This saves costs.

However, having these kinds of people work from home raises the spectre of remote maintenance of quality of service. It takes a particular type of personality to stay motivated to do the best they can when working from home. And, yes, there have been extraordinary examples of successful home working in places like Australia, the United States, and Europe.

But, the work ethic and general culture of employment in those places have been developed over hundreds of years and tend to be based on shared, universally applicable values. There just hasn't been the time to achieve that in most emerging economies.

In addition, in developed regions, the telecommunications infrastructure is usually very sophisticated and pervades every part of society. In developing countries, it's neither easy nor cost-effective to extend the necessary infrastructure for home working contact centre agents into domestic, possibly rural, environments.

So, thanks to an intricate combination of infrastructure and work culture, it's hard to see home working taking off in South Africa on a mass scale. That doesn't mean that, in urban areas, a case could not be made for particular categories of service specialists to be equipped with the technology and training to work from home. Best, though, to run a pilot and measure its success before tackling anything on a larger scale.

Social and cultural issues enter into the self-service debate, too.

Most organisations would have to upgrade their platforms and operational processes to enable self-service.

More to the point, most organisations would also have to update their customer strategies. Self-service is not just a matter of switching on a piece of tin. The company needs to know what type of customer is going to use self-service. And the customer relationship management (CRM) systems, therefore, need to collect the right customer information, and that information needs to be interrogated properly to give the company answers that will allow it to offer the most relevant self-service in the most cost-effective way.

In South Africa, for instance, there is an ingrained resistance to 'talking to a machine' rather than a person, based on early self-service systems being inappropriately designed. So, self-service systems established now could be cost-effective only if they were focused first on customers who like being online and enjoy finding out things for themselves on the Web.

There's more. As the Dimension Data 2011 Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report shows, most organisations are still very bad at tracking customer satisfaction with self-service - and at gathering and using management information from self-service systems. Almost one-third of the 546 contact centres in 66 countries that were surveyed don't measure something as elementary as interactive voice response customer feedback.

Also, there is still an insistence by customers, when they do have to speak to an agent, on first contact resolution. So, intelligent use of management information systems needs to be an integral part of agent training.

From the perspective of the business rather than the customer, organisations need to decide which queries they are willing to field via self-service. And they need to decide on practical issues such as how the customer can opt out of self-service - and in South Africa, whether or not to replicate a self-service offering in 11 different languages.

Self-service and home working are both promising aspects of the evolution of contact centres from cost to profit centres - and on the journey to customer satisfaction.

But the old clich'e applies: 'look before you leap'. Be very clear about how self-service and home working will improve customer satisfaction - because the company will have to adjust its entire focus to exploit that potential.