By Paula Rosenblum, Managing Partner
March 2, 2010
As frequent readers of RSR’s newsletter know, we don’t just put ourselves in retailers’ shoes, we also often find ourselves wearing the glass slippers of the customer. And reading a Wall Street analyst’s coverage of LivePerson, Inc started me thinking about cross-channel customer service, and how the Call Center fits in. I had lots of questions. Luckily I have a “friend in the business,” Steve Kowarsky, Chief Financial Officer of Cosmocom. So I gave him a call.
First, I’ll say a few words about Cosmocom. Cosmocom offers complete multi-media call center technology including: telephone, web chat, and email, all in both inbound and outbound flavors. The application is often used for collections and telesales. The company was formed in the late 20th century, originally focused on “click-to-talk.” Today, one of its primary competitors is Cisco. Unlike LivePerson, which is service-based, Cosmocom is an application suite installed behind the firewall at a client’s site, or a third party service provider’s platform technology. BT is its primary US service provider.
Now let’s get back to the Call Center Customer Experience. Like most consumers, I’m baffled by the apparent lack of integration in the Call Center. How many times do we give our account numbers when calling banks? Our phone numbers when we call our phone, cable TV, or internet provider? We all have caller ID. Why doesn’t the Call Center have it too? Why must I dial six different phone numbers for technical support? Why must we find ourselves in Voice Mail Hell? Interactive Voice Response (IVR, or Voice Mail Hell) is an analog to the web because it’s “self-service.” Mr. Kowarsky has believed from the beginning that self-service may be useful, but it must be backed up by a real person and the person must have the context of the self-service interaction. That’s the true essence of customer centricity. To provide a keyword like “agent” that exits you from the IVR and gives you a human to talk to.
So what’s wrong with Call Center technology? It turns out the answer is not so complicated. Like so many of our technology infrastructures, the state of contact center technology infrastructures is generally primitive and fragmented. They’re “integrated,” but the integrations are complex, costly, fragile, and often unreliable. When you’re asked to repeat your phone number a second or third time on a call and dare to ask why it wasn’t passed along, the Customer Service Representative (CSR) might say, “It didn’t get there.” He or she might be lying, or it really may not have worked!
The complexity of these architectures finally gets so cumbersome and costly, there’s a rip-and-replace opportunity. The strategy of choice for replacing them is “Cap and grow.” Essentially, the Call Center will stop adding seats in the old application and bring in the new in a separate Call Center, for example. How did it get to be such a mess? It was built on telephony, and was plugged together with CTI (Computer Telephony Integration). The cost, complexity and unreliability of CTI, generate very fragmented technologies in the call center.
The way it should be, and the way it can be done is to be unified rather than just integrated. Of course it should always keep track of what you’ve done, regardless where you came from. Mr. Kowarsky took this a step further than I’d anticipated. He believes if you’ve started a conversation on the web using live chat and shift to the phone, supporting technology should allow you to pick up the conversation exactly where you left off. I don’t think I’ve quite ever had THAT experience.
Obviously a unified, positive Call Center experience is important to the customer, but it’s also economical. It makes CSRs much more productive. They don’t have to spend the 15 seconds entering my phone number, and then another minute and a half explaining why they had to ask.
Technology might not make it easier for a customer to actually find the Call Center phone number, but a clean technology infrastructure can help reduce frustrations once she gets there, however she might find her way.
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