The Problem With Contact Centres

A few years ago, I was lucky to be given the opportunity to lead a Contact Centre for a well-known progressive digital organisation in Melbourne, and I was given carte blanche to challenge some of the myths and preconceptions around Contact Centres.

You don’t need to have worked in a Contact Centre to understand how frustrating it can be dealing with them; we have all been on hold for hours or transferred from person to person until someone can solve our issue. In theory, those Contact Centres are supposed to enhance Customer Experience; but in reality, this is not the case.
 
Well, having been behind the scenes of a few Contact Centres I can tell you why those things happen. The problem is that Contact Centres are set up to “manage calls (or contacts)” and not to “manage customers”.
 
If you ask any Contact Centre manager, they will be able to tell you how many calls they receive per day; how long they go for; how long their “agents” spend in idle time between calls and how many emails are in their queues. But the first question I ask those managers is: how many of those calls did your customers actually want to make?
 
Most organisations believe that Contact Centres need to be set up for efficiency; and in the majority of cases, they are seen as a “cost centre” for the organisation. That is why, a few years ago, we saw an uptake in offshore Contact Centres where people are paid less, so organisations thought they could reduce their costs. Well, guess how those third-party offshore Contact Centres usually charge you…yep, you guessed it; by the number of calls they manage. Therefore, they had no interest in reducing the number of calls the customers of the company they represented did not want to make.
 
I believe that Contact Centres should not be set up for efficiency; but instead, they are in the best position in their organisation to understand and predict customers’ needs. They should be set up with Customer Experience in mind and as close to the rest of the business as possible. Luckily, we have seen how organisations are starting to realise this, and more and more organisations are bringing their Contact Centres back onshore.
 
So, how do you set up your organisation’s Contact Centre with the customer in mind?
Well; as I hinted before, by going from managing calls to managing customers. Rather than measuring number of calls; understand what the calls your customers are making that they don’t want to make and create a constant dialogue with the rest of the organisation so the product; sales; marketing; finance areas can fix the problems for those customers.

Let’s face it; who wants to call a Contact Centre? Who wakes up in the morning and says I am going to spend 30 minutes on hold trying to resolve an issue with my invoice and my internet provider?
 
When I led that Contact Centre, we focussed on creating a culture of customer-centricity and therefore stripped all the traditional Contact Centre metrics. Instead, we worked with the business to measure and eliminate the types of calls our customers did not want to make. The result? Well, it is funny because by not focusing on reducing calls and efficiency we actually achieved exactly that. In a business that was growing 20% year on year, we were able to reduce the number of calls every year by 25% and therefore not increase costs for the organisation.
 
When you put costs at the centre; cost usually goes up. When you put customers at the centre; costs go down.