Competition
amongst contact centres becomes tougher and tougher each year. Gone
are the days when contact centres, could be justified merely as
a means to provide new “direct” businesses, providing
extra customer choice and convenience.
Not only are contact centres more widespread, but there is competition
- from web-based businesses, from other contact centres operating
in the same sector, and perhaps most threateningly, from offshore
outsourcing. Indeed, the Amicus trade union believes as many as
UK 200,000 jobs could go overseas by 2008.
Indian contact centre building
Plainly the UK industry has to compete, but the opportunities for
further savings to be made by simply closing down branches are limited,
and many of the benefits promised by the CRM revolution have failed
to fully materialise. Therefore contact centres are faced with finding
ways of delivering better quality, greater efficiency, supporting
increased volumes of transactions, or delivering more revenue generation,
without increasing costs.
Clearly there is no single solution, but the UK industry has some
real strengths: A recent USDAW survey showed that UK agents handle
25% more calls per hour than their counterparts in India, with a
90% first touch resolution rate, compared with only 66% in the Indian
operations. |
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Loyalty is much higher in the UK too – with staff staying
on average 3 years with an employer, as opposed to 11 months on
the subcontinent. A recent report by the BBC's Sunil Raman indicated
that Indian operators were having to change recruitment practices
to deal with extremely high staff turnover rates, as ambitious young
employees flit between companies to improve their salaries and prospects.
Companies also have to consider the potential adverse effects on
its customers of outsourcing services to offshore operations. A
UK study earlier this year by ‘ContactBabel’ reported
that one in seven UK customers who used an offshore call centre
in the previous year protested by taking their business to rival
firms. Three-quarters of those questioned said they felt more negatively
towards their supplier if they used offshore agents.
In a hypothetical scenario, the study’s report calculates
that a typical high street bank with 12 million customers and revenues
of £225 per customer each year would save £9.26m by
replacing 1,000 UK call centre workers with the same number in India.
The report claims it would only need 0.343 per cent of customers
- still over 41,000 people - to defect in protest to cancel out
those savings, and that last year 1.09 per cent of UK banking customers
changed supplier as a direct result of customer service offshoring.
So when it comes to customer retention, relationship building services
and complex customer interactions, |
|
UK
contact centres seem to have the edge.
This is borne out by announcements from major organisations such
as the Nationwide and Northern Rock emphasising their commitment
to a UK based contact centre strategy.
However, when it comes to the cost-quality equation, the UK’s
advantage is eroded when skilled agents spend time dealing with
routine non-value adding transactions, such as balance enquiries,
interest rate queries, transaction histories, and so on. This is
where intelligently deployed automated services can play a part,
giving customers 24x7 access to basic services, and allowing agents
to concentrate on the more rewarding, value enhancing transactions.
The opportunities are further enhanced by the falling cost of IVR
and speech solutions, and the ability to re-use a web infrastructure
to support a voice channel. Speech recognition based applications
also allow a broader range of transactions to be automated, with
generally higher transaction completion rates, and customer satisfaction
ratings.
The offshore operators are aware of these issues and will continue
to develop their offerings. At a recent Nasscom strategy summit
it was revealed that 77% of Indian operations were looking to take
advantage of technologies including IVR and Speech recognition.
If the UK is to continue to compete, then companies must evaluate
if they can exploit these technologies as part of the overall customer
contact strategy and as an alternative to offshoring contact centre
operations. |
