Multi-channel revelations

Foviance has just completed some research with call centre consultancy RXP, and its managing director Paul Weald and I presented the findings at the CCF/Customer Strategy Conference. Together we researched the travel industry to establish how well it delivered a multi-channel customer-experience. The research followed a similar piece carried out late last year and early this that focussed on the performance of 25 retailers.

Foviance has already conducted a range of multi-channel research, but this was the first work we have carried out in conjunction with a call centre consultancy. RXP is interesting because it focuses on the experience the call centre provides rather than simply performance metrics. I found that surprising, given the loathing the vast majority of consumers have for call centres. This was reason in itself for us engaging with RXP.

Most call centre consultancies appear to provide expertise in the areas of throughput, call centre staff motivation and operational infrastructure and management. These are all worthy causes but are all supply side and perhaps explain why service in call centres is considered so shoddy. To an extent this was supported anecdotally when I availed myself of a free massage provided to speakers at the conference. The young lady who took on the challenge of un-knotting my shoulders revealed that she finds call centre work fascinating – mainly because she can now see what goes on from both sides of the call. That moment when you are put on hold for some inexplicable reason becomes clear when you see the call centre operative using the self same moment to gather their thoughts and use the stress relief of a quick curse!

What surprised me most about the research was how utterly incompetent 90 percent of the companies we looked at were. Before we even examined whether the multi-channel experience worked – did the experience join up? did the call centre operative have the same view that the online customer did? – we had to get over the basics.

The usability issues were amazing. We found architectural and navigational problems that may not have surprised me seven years ago, but today, after so much education and such improvements in understanding, beggar belief. Some of the functionality failings were also staggering: instant messaging functionality that never got answered; call back technology where no call ever came; email facilities that in one case, nearly nine months later, has still to generate a reply (a major high-street supermarket, before you ask!).

Once we got our teeth into the call centre it was even worse. In quite a few cases I wondered why the organisation was providing a call centre at all. It must have been on someone’s list: “Website? Check. Call centre? Check. Okay, we’re done here.” The service offered no value add to the customer at all. The organisation itself often had even less access to information than the customer. Staff were not trained to up-sell, cross-sell or handle difficult calls. What purpose could any of this serve?

The recurring nightmare that the research revealed time and time again was that organisationally, many call centres, websites, and any other channels for that matter, are on the whole, managed by entirely separate functions. In many cases the channels actually compete with each other and the customer is in no way the centre of attention. If you want to find out more you can download the white papers from either the RXP or the Foviance websites.

As the economy tightens I cannot see how organisations that fail at the basics are going to survive. If spending is tightened, improvements won’t be made and customer loyalty and conversion will suffer. My hope is that this economic slow-down, like many before it, will force organisations to make dramatic changes and that ultimately the customer will benefit.