Paul Weald and Penny Downs podcast transcript
Interview with Paul Weald and Penny Downs
Speaker Key:
PB: Paul Blunden
PW: Paul Weald
PD: Penny Downs
PB: Hi, I’m Paul Blunden from Foviance, and welcome to our podcast on customer experience, with a particular focus on multimedia contact centres. Today I’m joined by Penny Downs, Customer Service Manager at Arsenal Football Club, and Paul Weald, Managing Director of call centre consultancy RXP. Penny and Paul, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today, and Penny, maybe if I can first turn to you, and ask – could you tell me a little bit about your role as Customer Service Manager at Arsenal Football Club, and what brings you here?
PD: OK, I think my role currently is very much hands on managing the contact centre, which is a multimedia contact centre covering all aspects of, really supporter contact, it covers a vast range of different areas within the football club. Ultimately my role will be a little bit more far reaching, and it’ll be touching on all aspects of anyone’s experience of coming to the Emirates Stadium.
PB: So proper cross-channel customer service?
PD: 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 download application on their iPhone, and they would like everything fully technological and ready to go.
PB: Fantastic, and Paul, obviously RXP and Foviance have worked together last year conducting a number of pieces of research in cross-channel customer experience, some of our listeners obviously may have downloaded one or two of those white papers, but for those who are not familiar with you and with RXP, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and the work RXP does?
W: Yes, RXP are a contact centre consultants, so that means we held end user organisations who want to improve their customer contact. I guess traditionally that started with the sort of telephone channel, but obviously with the rise in online utilisation, then things like email and text messaging and so forth suddenly now becomes part of a sort of contact strategy. What our customers are increasingly asking us to do, therefore, is to look at ways in which a multimedia contact centre can support that strategy, and the work that we did jointly with Foviance last year was based around using mystery shopping techniques, so in other words we put ourselves in the shoes of the customer, and we actually go and experience what it feels like to be a customer, the work that Foviance does is very much based on the online customer experience, and then the work that RXP does in mystery shopping is around making telephone calls and following up with emails, and again gauging and understanding about what it feels like to be a customer.
The work that we did was focused on two sectors last year, one was the retail sector, and the other was the travel sector, and I’m afraid we didn’t find terribly joined up customer experience, very much silo management.
PB: Right, you’ve just finished the webinar series with customer strategy, which looked like a very well advertised and well received campaign. Can you tell me a little bit about the research that you presented through that webinar?
PW: Yes, the context is, obviously we recognise that we’re still in the depths of a recession, and what we were keen to understand is how much the online channel is still important to actually overcome the recession, and the role that a multimedia contact centre can play, and to set the context, the latest research from IMRG Capgemini, their e-Retail sales index said that in May 2009 there were online sales of £3.7 billion, which sounds a large number. However, that 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 therefore the context for the research, or context for the webinar, was around what are people doing to try and overcome that, and he areas that we majored on were actually around how can you make the online channel more effective. So I think we all understand the concept of a leaky pipe, that people who become browsers, how do they get turned into shoppers, and at various stages as they go through a site, then they may actually sort of drop off, and so what are the ways in which the contact centre can help with those kind of moments of truth, and the real value is where the contact centre can become the human interface for the web when those common moments of truth can be overcome.
PB: And do you see that being of interest to marketeers or to operational people?
PW: Our traditional audience are more the operational people, so the people who have to manage the contacts that arises from the website, whether that comes in as additional telephone calls, or as emails, but I think the audience that needs to understand this is very much the kind of marketing audience, because they need to recognise that there are things that their colleagues in the contact centre can do that help them to drive higher conversion levels through the actual online channel.
PB: Penny, you’re nodding your head there – you clearly agree with that?
PD: Completely agree, we’re very fortunate in that, unlike other industries, there is a genuine – with a football club, people want to visit that website in their downtime, and they want to see what’s going on and everything to do with the football club is on our website, but we’re very very conscious that, for a first-time viewer on that website, it’s very very complicated – unless you really know how the membership schemes work, and this sort of thing, it is difficult to actually understand, so we did a piece of work with our marketing team, and actually looked at a real step-by-step understanding for a first-time viewer, of it takes them through, if you like, a display on how to join the membership and what benefits it gives them, so I completely agree with Paul there.
PB: Good, OK, and Paul – what were the findings of the research that you presented?
PW: Well, we talked with the audience about the range of potential solutions that a multimedia contact centre can support the online channel, so we mentioned three or four different areas. Beyond just simple email, and I’ll touch upon that later, but some of the more modern day approaches are things like offering callback buttons, so in other words if someone gets stuck in using the site, then the contact centre can make an outbound call to actually speak to them; the idea of actually offering webchat, so whilst the user’s actually on the website, a window pops up that allows them to type in a question, a contact centre agent deals with that in real time; also the idea of collaboration tools, so this is where a user shares a screen with an agent, and they actually work together in terms of either visually or textually, sharing information within that web session; and lastly the concept of, and this plays to the rise in social networking, the ideas of sites providing chat moderators, so again the contact centre provides a person who is working within a community to actually make sure that not only the conduct of the users is acceptable, but then the business outcome is actually achieved for that particular site.
PB: And that’s quite interesting, if moderators are sitting in the contact centre, is that adding more overhead? Or is this seen as a business generation opportunity?
PW: Well, we’ve worked with one of the online bingo companies, I know Foviance have a lot of background in gaming. From the contact centre side, which was basically we were asked exactly that sort of question, the research that the company had done showed that, if they put a chat moderator into a virtual online bingo gaming hall, that players were more likely to stay longer, that they were more likely therefore to actually spend more, and there was more of a sense of community within the online world that meant they were more likely to become advocates. So therefore what we looked at was what were the attributes that those chat moderators needed to have, and how did you manage the quality aspects, so really quite leading edge sort of research.
PB: And was then research into measurement, in terms of correlating specifically how long people stay with the moderator, so you can almost an ROI?
PW: Absolutely, they looked at halls, virtual halls, that didn’t have a chat moderator, and compared that with those where they put the chat moderator, and the reason why I can’t name the client, Paul, and we are very transparent about our customers, is they did find a competitive advantage by actually focusing on the development of chat moderators, but again I think that plays well to the advent of social networking.
PB: OK, with the research that you covered through customer strategy, 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: Yes, webinars are very useful, Paul, in being able to actually interact with people, so there’s a functionality that allows us to issue a live poll, so in other words we can actually get the audience to vote on a particular topic, and we did this in a couple of different ways: firstly we checked whether the area of online was actually relevant, or investing in online, was relevant for the audience, and the good news was 58% of respondents said their organisations were investing in online and multimedia contact centre, which again is reassuring in times of recession, and we also asked, of the potential solutions that I just mentioned, which were most relevant, and 54% said that callback was something that they saw an opportunity to take advantage of, and then 35% webchat, so again the more traditional methods of contact seemed to be those that the participants in the webinar said were most relevant. But the bit that was most interesting was how we use mystery shopping, so here we knew the organisations that were going to participate in the webinar through the registration process, and we went out and actually mystery shopped them before the webinar. So we went to their websites, we clicked on “contact us”, we saw whether they offered an email function and how that worked, and we, with the audience, shared what a good experience in our view would actually be in terms of having relevant information presented, being able to complete an online form, and then getting a timely response, so it does exactly what they’ve asked them to do, and is very successful, and we compare and contrast that with a poor response, where it’s very difficult from a user perspective to get to the right point in the site to ask your question, and maybe then you don’t get the actual response in a timely way.
So what we did with the live poll was we asked the audience whether they thought their organisations gave a good email service or poor email service, and the audience said 53% said yes, they thought their organisations gave good service. We then said, “Ah – but that’s not what our mystery shopping indicates”, because we had, within the previous week, gone to the websites, and used the email service. We found 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, so again what that illustrates is a company’s perception about the service they provide online is often far different from what a customer really actually is able to actually achieve.
PB: That’s fascinating. In many ways, when I hear the number 53%, thought it was good at all, it’s still not high enough, and then when it’s 29, it’s even worse. Penny, moving on to Arsenal, obviously Arsenal’s the case study being presented, but what initially made Arsenal decide that changes were needed?
PD: I think when the new Emirates Stadium was built in July 2006, when it was finished, it was very apparent, a world-class facility, and probably still is the best in Europe and the world for football, it was quickly realised that actually then, if you looked at the infrastructure that sat behind it in terms of how we worked with our customers, and our customer contact, we were very much working in silos, there were all sorts of different approaches, there were different objectives, and all of these silos reported into different line managers, so there was not a joined up way of thinking, and we wanted to deliver a world-class service that sat alongside the world-class team, hopefully on the pitch, and the world-class stadium, so it became really apparent that we needed to do a big piece of work, but within the club there was nobody at that particular time that had the experience and the knowledge of even where to start. So an initial project team was set up and quickly realised they needed to bring in the expertise of RXP, who came in and did lots and lots of groundwork to identify this is the path that would give you a joined up, and also future-proof you, for the advent of the true multimedia contact centre.
PB: And what were the key aspects then that RXP advised you on that you put in place?
PD: I think one of the key aspects was having a proper telephony system, multi-skilling the staff so that they were able to answer all sorts of questions, queries, and across the different silos. It quickly became apparent that the call volumes under the different products are vastly different, so during the summer holidays we absolutely ramp up on Emirates tours, everyone wants to come because we’re closed season, we have all our season ticket enquiries, then we get a football shirt launch, suddenly home shopping goes shooting up, so it was being able to actually then have a team of people that could deal with that, and deal with the peaks and troughs within that, but across all the media.
PB: Interesting you mention “multi-skilling staff”, in this new cross-channel, multi-channel world we live in, it feels like people are going to be the deciding factor on success or failure. How important do you think that was to Arsenal?
PD: Absolutely critical, Arsenal is a wonderful company to work for, and a wonderful place to work, so you tend to have people that have been there an awful long time. They’ve also been within a football club that was very much, and still is, a family feel club, but the staff had a lot of contact with the players when we were based at Highbury, there was far far fewer staff, it wasn’t the multi-billion pound business that football is today, so we’ve taken staff on quite a tough journey from moving from being able to pop and see Ian Wright and the players training on the pitch right through to really focusing entirely on the customer needs, be it email, be it white mail, be it telephony, throughout the day, so to take those staff on that journey has been a real challenge, but the work that Paul and his team did in sitting down and explaining and delivering a vision of where we would be soon got them all on side. Also we did have, I think it was really important that we made use of the different strands of people that we had, so we had a lot of secretaries who had been PAs to the various directors at one point or another, so they come with fantastic grammar, letter writing skills, absolutely brilliant for doing your written communication; then we’ve got the young people passionate about football, they’re great to go on and do the forum chats, they’re great to answer the phone on the ticket sales, so it’s a mix, a complete mix of people, but it is really important to recruit the right people to the right roles here.
PB: It sounds as much of an organisational change programme as it has been a technological innovation?
PD: Yes, it has, it’s been a real culture shift from, it really recognised – the struggle, I think, some people have had is recognising that every company, no matter how big they are, suffers in a recession. There are degrees of suffering obviously, but it was quite obvious, and I think one of the real key deliverables that Paul was able to give was to be able to say, “Look – this will assist and future-proof you, the work that we get in place now, for any downturn from when should we ever reach the point where the Emirates Stadium doesn’t sell out at every single game” which thankfully isn’t the case at the moment, but it may come to the point where that is the case, so it is very much a cultural shift in saying to people, yes, we’ve had exceptional times at Arsenal where really we haven’t had to look for customers, customers have been there, you have to plan and deliver the excellent world-class service so that when times do get bad, and people have only got a certain pot of money that they can spend on social activity, the feeling they get from Arsenal and the loyalty towards Arsenal means that that pot of money stays with Arsenal.
PB: And can you tell me about the results then, you’re sort of on the back end of the programme now?
PD: I think two key deliverables in terms of results that really really stand out: firstly, complaint management – Paul touched on the fact that email response times, people perceive that they get a very very quick response, in this day and age people also expect a very quick response in terms of complaints, if they phone up with a complaint they would like the complaint settling there and then, and try and deal with it. There is still an element where, if the complaint is serious, we do ask people to write in, but we do try and rectify the majority of our complaints there and then on the telephone. We also try and rectify them at the very first point of contact, once we’ve got all the information, so instead of an escalation of complaints, we’ve actually really put in place and empowered agents to make decisions to actually resolve complaints, so we’ve seen complaints year on year reduced by 60%, which is, we look at our customer base, and our customer base has become more demanding, so I think that is a real key objective that we set a target of reducing them by 30%, but actually over-delivered on that.
The other area that we have done very well on is productivity, so the productivity of staff, now they’re in a multimedia contact centre, and they’re not in their silos, we’ve actually managed to cut down by natural attrition, we’ve actually cut down the size of full-time teams, we’re now able to have the technology to be able to report and see when our peaks and troughs are, so we can actually staff and recruit according to those peaks and troughs, so we’ve actually seen 100% increase in productivity, which we were able to show by a huge reduction in the overtime that we had to offer staff, couple that with the reduction in the full-time headcount, and also the fact that email, we probably used to take seven to ten days to respond to email, it was not a priority within the club, that’s now down to an average three hour turnaround.
PB: Those are impressive statistics – where do you go from here?
PD: It’s still very much at the start of the journey, they are impressive statistics, but we need to introduce and deliver more of the quality. There is a big piece of work that we’re just about to start, Paul touched on “moments of truth”, and I think we need to revisit all the points that a customer touches, and revisit that over the course of the next year, and really understand where we’re losing our customers, or where customers lose interest in us.
The other piece of work that we need to have a look at is around the data management side of things. We have got quite a piece of sophisticated software that the marketing team use, but we need to really have a good review of that, and understand and be able to do far more of looking at profiling our customers, and then developing products that actually match those profiles.
PB: So no complacency then?
PD: No complacency at all, we just need the team to deliver on the pitch for this forthcoming season, a couple of big signings and we’ll be well away.
PB: Excellent. Well my final couple of questions concern innovation and what do you consider to be great customer experiences. Firstly Paul, I know you use the live poll, as you mentioned earlier in the webinar – what was the feedback about some of the innovations you discussed?
PW: Well, we were very keen to share with the audience where those innovations have actually made most business return, and I mentioned earlier the role for webchat, and how that potentially provides a way whilst the customer or user’s actually on the site to be able to interact with the contact centre, and if you go back to the concept of the leaky pipe, what our telco client has discovered is, if they’re trying to cross-sell a broadband service to an existing telephone customer, then there are certain moments of truth in terms of the journey through the site, and what that particular client has done is actually put live chat, configured it to be available only on certain pages where they know that it’s critical in terms of achieving conversion, and then if it got to be even further, and they only offer that page if you’re registered on the site, in other words you have to be an existing customer or prospect, and what they’ve found by doing that is that the conversion rate on broadband sales has increased from 5%, which it historically was, to 20%, so in other words targeted use of human contact through the contact centre, in this instance by webchat, is really seen to make a genuine ROI in terms of the business outcome.
PB: Fascinating. So finally, if I can ask you both – who do you think offers great customer experiences, in your opinion? Penny?
PD: I think, from a company that is on a par with us in terms of the leisure industry, I think Legoland is renowned for offering fantastic customer service, and the Premier League did actually take a group of football clubs, we often go to events with the Premier League, training events, and the last one was at Legoland, and although I didn’t attend myself, one of my managers did, and came back full of ideas and really very very motivated by what they were doing at Legoland. It was almost, and forgive me, Legoland, for saying this, a little bit of the Disney concept without the cheesy side of it, so I would say, for me, it’s Legoland.
PB: And Paul?
PW: No sort of ears then, you didn’t see any ears at Legoland? No, for me, Paul, the last question that we asked on the webinar was what was the one most important area to address that would improve the online, or would help the multimedia contact centre to improve the online customer experience, and 42% said that providing a more consistent multi-channel brand, so that was the highest ranked answer, and I remember going to the government sector, as an example of a company that, when we mystery shopped them as part of this on email, then the DVLA provided a very timely response, and I think that they are a leading government institution, particularly in terms of the online option that you have to renew your car tax, and I can’t think of any reason now why you wouldn’t do that online compared to historically having to wander down to the post office and find all the documentation, so my vote goes to the government sector, to the DVLA.
PB: Excellent, well my thanks once again to both Penny Downs, Customer Service Manager at Arsenal Football Club, and also to Paul Weald, Managing Director of RXP, and thanks to all of you for listening, please do come back to Foviance.com shortly to download the next podcast in our expert series. This podcast was recorded on August 7th 2009.