April 29 2008
Comment - Call centres are dangerous, ban them now
Call centres are becoming the clearing house for all your business problems but none of them were designed to work this way, and ultimately they end up costing you significantly more than you than you think.
I hate call centres, they're costly and they achieve little that an intelligently designed and implemented website can't solve for a thousandth of the cost. They belong in the dark ages, and I'm sure I’m not alone in thinking this. But are they disappearing? No, call centres are getting more and more prevalent and they're becoming an unacceptable drain on the bottom line.
Like millions of others, I tend to use the phone when I need to solve a problem that a businesses website can't solve. And while I acknowledge that there will probably always be a need to talk to someone on the phone, the number of reasons and the number of people in the call centre should be reducing over time, not getting greater. However that's just not happening and it's costing you, the retailers, tens of millions, because, instead of acting on the customers complaints and feeding back into the system, most of the answers to the problems are being lost in the call centre, and are being re-enacted over and over again.
Here's an example. I'm forever forgetting my 3G dongle so I regularly need to get a £1 all-you-can-eat daily mobile service setup on my Orange phone. The correct way to do this is to select the option via the phone, but unfortunately it has never worked. So once a fortnight for the last four months I ring up Orange customer service and spend five minutes getting the service setup via the call centre, and every time I get the same response. “Sorry, it's a known problem, and you're the 1, 3, 5,10th person I've had to do this for today.”
It would take two minutes for someone in IT to add this as an option on the accounts section of the website, it would take twenty minutes to add a FAQ to this on the website and I'm sure it would take no time to fix the problem on the phone, but at the moment it’s not happening. So in the meantime for every one pound in revenue gained from this service Orange are losing £5-10 or more – The only figures I can find on costs come from a NAO report from 2002 http://www.nao.org.uk/publications/nao_reports/02-03/0203134.pdf which gave costs of calls at 60p to £5 per minute.
This is not an isolated incident just think how many times you've gone to a call centre to get a problem fixed, or to get a question asked. Wouldn't it have been easier if the question was answered on the website? The idea of having a website was to make purchasing a simple fast and straightforward process for the user, and to automate your processes, and to cut-down the overheads involved in shopping. It has never to my knowledge been there to add more problems and increase costs.
So how can you reduce the problems? There are plenty of different ways. Add some feedback opportunities on your website, and additionally get the basic and advanced questions answered online. Shareen Campbell of Bazaarvoice speaking at Catalyst gave figures of reductions in call centre call rates of up to 22% just by adding reviews to your site, and in general the more reviews you have the fewer the call centre calls.
But if you really want to improve, then start to listen to the call centre and if you feel brave start to set targets for reducing your call centre staff. Firstly make sure that the call centre staff are empowered, the last thing you want is a bunch of automatons that just answer questions by wrote, and can only talk from an approved script. Above all make sure that they're linked into the company at all levels, let them have access to other parts of the company, and make sure that all problems are escalated to the right people. Lastly make sure that the departments understand the true cost of a problem. The IT department at Orange probably aren't bothering about the thousands of £1 bundle problems, because it's only £1, if they knew it was actually costing tens of thousands then they would probably quickly spend the £500 it would cost to solve the problem.
