Customer Experience: Multi-media contact centres

On 7 August 2009, Foviance CEO Paul Blunden talked to Paul Weald, managing director of call centre consultancy RXP, and Penny Downs, customer service manager at Arsenal FC, about the challenges of delivering a truly future-proof multimedia contact centre.

The excerpt is just a summary of what we discussed. For more, listen to the full podcast.

Paul, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and the work RXP does?
PW: RXP is a contact centre consultancy, which means we help end user organisations who want to improve their customer contact. Our customers increasingly ask us to look at ways in which a multimedia contact centre can support that strategy.

And Penny, you are customer service manager at Arsenal Football Club.
PD: My role is very much hands on management of our multimedia contact centre.  We provide a completely cross-channel customer experience, from the old man that still wants to come up to the desk to buy his tickets over the counter, through to those that have every application on their iPhone and would like everything fully technological and ready to go.

And what initially made Arsenal decide that the contact centre needed to evolve?
PD: When the new Emirates Stadium was built in July 2006, it became apparent that it is a truly world-class facility in the world for football. So we had to look at the infrastructure that sat behind it in terms of how we worked with our customers. We had been working in silos, taking all sorts of different approaches, with different objectives, and all of these silos reported into different line managers, so there was no joined up way of thinking.

And what did RXP advise you?
PD: One of the key aspects was having a proper telephony system, then multi-skilling the staff so that they were able to answer all sorts of questions and queries across the different silos.  The call volumes under the banners of different products were vastly different. So, for example, during the summer closed season we ramp up on Emirates tours and season ticket enquiries, then we prepare for a football shirt launch, then suddenly home shopping goes shooting up, and so on.

Paul, tell me more about your recent webinar that discussed your work with Arsenal and the role of multi-media contact centres in customer strategy.
PW: We recognise that we’re still in the depths of a recession, and we were keen to understand what role the online channel and the multimedia contact centre can play in overcoming that. The latest research from IMRG Capgemini said that in May 2009 there were online sales of £3.7 billion, which sounds a large number.  However, online sales growth was only 8.2% compared to over 30% a year ago, so the research is telling us that the recession is having an impact on the growth of online.

And who is this of interest to?
PW: Our traditional audience consists of operational people who have to manage the contacts that arise from the website, whether that comes in as additional telephone calls, or as emails. But I think the marketing audience needs to understand this too because there are things that their colleagues in the contact centre can do to help them to drive higher conversion levels through the online channel.

Paul, what were the findings of the research?
PW: We talked with the audience about three or four different areas in which a multimedia contact centre could support the online channel. Beyond just simple email, more modern approaches could include offering call-back buttons in case people get stuck in using the site, offering web chat with a contact centre agent in real time, providing collaboration tools that enable a screen to be shared with an agent, and lastly providing chat moderators that work within a community to ensure that the conduct of users is acceptable and business outcomes are actually achieved.

If moderators are sitting in contact centres, will that increase overheads, or is this seen as a business generation opportunity?
PW: From the contact centre side, research showed that if those companies put a chat moderator into a virtual online bingo gaming hall, then players were more likely to stay longer and spend more. We looked at what attributes those chat moderators needed to have, and how they could manage the quality aspects.

And did the research cover measurement, ROI?
PW: Absolutely. We looked at virtual halls that didn’t have a chat moderator and compared them with those that did, and they found a competitive advantage by actually focusing on the development of chat moderators. The findings play well to the advent of social networking.

I was particularly interested in the difference between what people perceive their organisation’s channel’s responsiveness to be, versus what it actually is. What did you discover through the research?
PW: We knew the organisations that were going to participate through the registration process, and we went out and actually mystery shopped them before the webinar. We went to their websites, we clicked on ‘contact us’, we saw whether they offered an email function and how that worked. With the live poll, we asked the audience whether they thought their organisations gave a good email service or poor email service -  53% said yes, they thought their organisations gave good service.  We had found using mystery shopping that only 29% of those organisations were giving good service, and slightly more staggeringly, 51% of these organisations had failed to respond to our email within three working days. It illustrates that a company’s perception about the service it provides online is often far different from what a customer is actually able to achieve.

So Penny, where do you go from here?
PD: We’re still very much at the start of the journey. The statistics are impressive (e.g. complaints down 60% year on year), but we need to introduce and deliver more quality. Over the course of the next year we need to revisit all the points that a customer touches, and really understand where we’re losing our customers, or where customers lose interest in us.  We also need to have a look at the data management side of things.  We have to understand how we can do more in terms of profiling our customers, and then developing products that actually match those profiles. There’s no room for complacency at all.

Listen to the full podcast.

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