IVR

Art Coombs is one of the contact center industry’s leading lights. He has served as founder, CEO, executive vice president, and managing director of top firms including ICICI OneSource (now FirstSource), Echopass Corporation, Sento Corp, and Sykes (News - Alert). In addition, Art worked for other key organizations such as Hewlett-Packard, VLSI Research, and RasterOps.

Art’s key role today is as President and CEO of KomBea, a contact center solutions firm founded in 2003 that has developed, based on this experience, ProtoCall, an agent-assisted voice product, and ReCall, an easy to use, open-standards-based and low-cost recording solution. KomBea’s vision is to redefine what it means to be world-class and it says its technology will be employed in every major call center in the world by 2012. KomBea will:

* Make the lives of the millions of agents who work in call  centers around the world easier and their work more enjoyable

* Improve the experience for the billions of customers who call into contact centers each year

* Dramatically increase the revenue and lower the costs of every center that deploys its solution.

We caught up with Art and engaged in a dialogue with him on what is happening in contact centers, the issues, opportunities, and challenges, and how he and KomBea are responding to them.

What top three issues do you see facing contact centers today? What factors have created them and what are the consequences if they are not resolved effectively?

 

Before I answer this, let me give some background on how I’ve seen the industry ‘evolve’ over the past two decades. I say ‘evolve’ but really nothing has changed. For 20+ years I have wrestled with this one simple question: How do I get each agent to do what I want them to do, when and how I want them to do it, on every call? 

 

I have spent millions of dollars on better techniques to profile, hire, train and coach the ‘right’ agents in an attempt to reduce turnover and improve agent performance. I have also spent millions on tools such as CRM, scripting, knowledge bases, screen capture, monitoring, CTI (News - Alert), and workflow automation and yet after all this effort even the best agents don’t do what they are supposed to do when and how they are supposed to do it on every call. They skip required steps. They inadvertently and sometimes intentionally give customers misinformation. They make apologetic halfhearted cross-sell attempts. If call centers were making a physical product, they would be shut down in a heartbeat.

 

That said, in my mind the three issues are quality, quality and quality. I could choose many variables that contribute to these results but here are (in my opinion) the top two:

 

1.                  There is no single declarative process for agents to follow. When the single process is missing nothing can be measured, analyzed and improved. Thus, call center leaders truly struggle with Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) initiatives. Many will say we have initiated Agent Process Optimizations (APO) solutions such as, quality monitoring combined with speech analytics to drive performance management. We have even deployed the combination of desktop unification tools with scripting and workflow management, simplifying the complexity of the agents work area. 

 

These are all good tools and take us in the right direction but they still ‘guide’ the agent and leave it to the agent to decide what to say and do at any given point of the call. The reality is that the agents are the process. When you have hundreds or even thousands of agents as your process, you have no process.

 

2.                  Agent turnover. When you combine #1 above with the horrific attrition in our industry you have serious challenges that are daunting to say the least.

 

The consequences for our industry’s poor quality are numerous. First, on the cost side, despite the focus on cutting costs, the costs for customer service are still too high. We can’t go to the lowest cost labor markets because accents are so hard to understand that customer’s rebel. Second, when we find an acceptable labor market, we still have agent variation and poor performance which we try to control with monitoring and coaching. This attempt of fixing one agent at a time is next to impossible and extremely expensive.

 

 

The opportunities for our industry are huge. There is so much we can do to improve the conversational quality we deliver to our customers. Let’s use the auto industry as an example. The quality of the US Auto Manufacturers in the 60s and 70s was abysmal and everyone thought: ‘that is just the way it is’ until Toyota and the Japanese automakers came along and began outselling the U.S. in every market.

 

Did Toyota do it with better profiling, hiring and coaching of employees? No. They did it by focusing on the relentless pursuit of eliminating variance on every level and demanding CPI from every employee, thus producing low cost and high quality. We as a contact center industry would do well to study Toyota Production System (TPS) and apply those CPI methodologies that have proven so successful for Toyota.

 

 

 

With more At Home Agents and a contracting economy we are seeing the average age of the contact center worker rise. Older workers bring more maturity and stability. Some studies show that the older the agent, the lower the turnover. While this may be true in virtual contact centers, the rising age in “brick and mortar centers” has yet to show meaningful results. For me the important issue is this: does this current trend reduce agent variation and produce a superior conversational product? While you may save a little money on reduced training and time to tenure the agent and call variation is still all over the map and in my opinion this is our biggest industry challenge.

 

People generally resist technological service innovations at first but quickly adapt. A great example is the proliferation of ATMs and airport check-in kiosks. People were afraid at first or didn’t trust them, but now they prefer them over waiting. People don’t like IVRs, but they deal with them as long as they don’t feel trapped and are easy to use. If you can deliver a solid self-service experience through the Web or an IVR, you should absolutely do it.

 

3.         Growing consumer and business reliance on mobile, and on text-based communications as opposed to landline, and voice

 

Contact centers are the ones that made chat / Instant Messaging common today. I do not believe they will have any difficulty adapting to mobile and text-based communications. Agents will have to deal with the street noise or a dropping cell signal but those have become acceptable annoyances with the ease of mobile communications.

 

4.         Well-publicized consumer and business dissatisfaction with offshoring, coupled with political concerns about jobs leaving the country

 

If the offshore agent can communicate clearly and effectively then it will happen. Right or wrong, capitalism will always trump patriotism. Jobs leaving? Look back to just a few years ago we moved call centers seats from Atlanta, Ga. to Macon, Ga. or from Denver, Colo. to Bismarck, N.D. in an attempt to leverage labor arbitrage. We didn’t see the laid off workers in Atlanta or Denver protesting. We did not hear of legislation being pushed through local government to keep those jobs in their current location. A 2009 survey of 400 of the largest firms indicated that 71 percent intend to explore offshore locations for their customer service this year. 

 

The reality is that we live in a global economy and offshoring is here to stay. In the 1700s, people working in the mills of Massachusetts were outraged when work was sent to the hinterlands of Georgia and called for boycotts. Protectionism ebbs and flows, but will never go away.

 

 

At Home Agents will continue to grow. It is an industry trend that some turn to limit the down side of offshoring. Firms can reduce support costs while providing local accents for customers.

 

Protectionism aside, I’ve found that most customers don’t care where the agent who answers their call is sitting. What they care about is the quality of that agent. Customers want three things and only three things when it comes to call attributes. 1. Respect my time. Do not leave me in a queue forever and do not place me on hold. 2. Be polite and professional and, 3. Give me accurate information. Again, if the customer cannot understand the agent, you are violating 2 of the 3 critical call attributes customers want.   

 

Turnover cripples the call center industry. A couple years ago in the US it was averaging 36 percent a year, but there were some centers that had over 150 percent annual turnover. In tight labor markets, turnover can be over 200 percent. How can you maintain quality when every day you are living the myth of Sisyphus…get the huge boulder up the hill where you want it, watch it roll to the bottom and start over.

 

Let’s face it. Call center jobs are some of the toughest white collar jobs there are. These jobs are repetitive, tiring and stressful. You can spend lots of money on pizza parties, free coffee and motivational speakers but until the repetitive and stressful aspects of the job are reduced, you will still have the negative effects of high turnover. 

 

 

DNCR was a blessing in disguise because it killed a marketing channel that was dying or would have died anyway with the rise of Twitter, Yelp, My Space and all the variants of Web 2.0.  Marketing and Contact Center leaders should figure out how to leverage these new channels. Many firms are already sorting this new media out.

 

 

In addition to sorting out these new media channels, companies have to figure out how to maximize the return on the old ones. When customers do contact you, how are you messaging them? Making them aware of and selling them new services?  Most large corporations have gotten much smarter and more sophisticated with their cross/up sell efforts. We are seeing firms easily justify slightly higher AHT for the opportunity to inform the consumer about new offers, upgrades or products. 

 

For all the work we as an industry have done to improve contact centers, the level of quality and inefficiency is still unacceptable. For a corporation, this is a sad reality. For an entrepreneur, this is an exciting opportunity. 

 

When my company was started it was called KomBea from the Spanish word, cambiar, which means “to change”, because that is what we want to do to this industry. Our primary product, ProtoCall, is a completely new solution category called agent-assisted voice technology.

 

Most call centers assume that every call is different and every agent is different and they attempt to coach those differences away and hope the agents do what they are supposed to. There is no single process to improve so centers try to improve each agent in the hopes that their overall metrics will improve. This is the paradigm KomBea is turning on its head. Every call is not different! The bulk of every call of a given type is the same… or it should be.

 

At KomBea, we start by taking a given call type, defining exactly what we want the agents to do in their systems and say to the customers, we build it out using ProtoCall and the agent drives the call using pre-recorded audio files and pre-programmed system actions. If the call goes as expected (based on thousands of calls before it) the agent may never need to intervene. If it varies in some unpredictable way, the agent is live on the call to verbally jump in and answer questions and direct the conversation back to the process. Customers welcome this approach and appreciate the attitude of efficiency it projects. This drives benefits for all three stakeholders: Agents, Customers and Shareholders.

 

Let’s start with the agents. Put yourself in their shoes: If you had to take 80 cell phone activation calls per day and you had to read all the disclosures in a second language eighty times a day, you would quit after a month, too! Talking all day is tiring. It is even worse when you are saying the same thing over and over again, and customers sense this in our agents’ voices. Instead of this approach, why not let the agents play a recording of those disclosures which is undetectable to the customer? Better yet, why not build out the whole process and let the agents drive that process using workflow automation and pre-recorded audio files? This is less stressful… it allows them to concentrate on making sure the customer is taken care of as opposed to worrying about whether the right box is checked in the CRM.

 

Customers want to talk to someone who they can understand, who can resolve their issue accurately, quickly and courteously. If we pre-build the process we build quality into the call before the call happens. The agent is going to follow the right process and only vary from it as they need to instead of varying every call every time. There is no inadvertent misinformation left out or distorted by the agent. If the customer has a unique need or wants more hand-holding, the agent is live on the call to spend as much time as possible with the customer.

 

By using pre-recorded audio for large sections of the phone call, the customers have no trouble understanding the agents.  Our largest customer found no difference in the customer satisfaction scores of offshore call centers who were using our tool and onshore centers, with no accent issues, who were not using it. In addition, there were no escalations due to accents when our tool was being used offshore.

 

Shareholders want to maximize revenue and minimize cost. Our solution addresses the revenue piece by always doing the right cross/up-sell at the right time to the right customer. We don’t have to teach agents what, when, how or to whom to make the offer. The predefined workflow automation will steer the agent to make the right offer to the right customer at the right time professionally every call.

 

On the cost front, the biggest components of call center cost are labor rate and talk time. If you have done everything to get customers to use self-service tools and if you are in the lowest cost labor market, the only lever you have left is the systematic reduction of handle time. With our tool, we are engineering the call. When we take words out or steps out, the call time is reduced, and those changes are instantly removed across the entire population of agents using the solution and thus, the entire population of call times all go down. Using the same Lean/CPI Steps Toyota used in manufacturing, KomBea took a call that had an AHT of 11 minutes down to less than 5 minutes with little to no variation in 6 weeks.

 

Taken together, this agent-assisted technology has the potential to dramatically improve the operating results for the call center industry, which is why we believe within five years, no world class center will operate without it.

 

I encourage other industry leaders to stop rolling that huge boulder up the hill. Do not struggle perpetually without hope of success. I recognize that there will be some that say, “But this is the way we have always done it.” If you accept that there is nothing more to improving center wide Year Over Year (YOY) Key Performance Issues (KPIs) outside of solely fixing one agent at a time, then you can and probably will find complacency in it. But if you don’t accept this, you can leapfrog your centers above the competition, as Toyota did against all the American automakers. Look where they are today! You can get each agent to do what you want them to do, when and how you want them to do it, on every call!