July 2007 Archives

Hawaiian Airlines might be the latest company to discover that outsourcing your call center operations to overseas isn’t always the greatest move. According to an article in the Honolulu Advertiser and reprinted in USA Today, Hawaiian Airlines’ customers are facing average hold times of 30 to 45 minutes when they call the airline’s call center in the Philippines – and apparently many of them are quite irate.

Although a representative from the airline claimed in the article that the delays were due to a spike in call volume, and would have occurred even if the call center was based in the U.S., he did admit that some of the agents in the call center are new trainees and that this was contributing to the long hold times.

According to the article, the airline’s call center operator, Citel, is hiring 40 additional workers to handle the increased volume. In addition, it is providing additional training to the agents to help them handle calls more expeditiously.

We’ve seen this happen before – where an airline farms out its call center operations to the Philippines or India and the level of customer service plummets. As the article points out, the airlines are more financially challenged than ever – with fuel prices and labor costs now rising – so it’s no wonder that they’re looking to cut costs whatever way they can.

At the same, though, it can be argued that they are causing more damage to their business than they are helping it. The call center is your customer touch-point – the front line between your organization and your customers – and if you make people wait on hold for 45 minutes and then give them lousy service on top of it, you’re going to lose customers. Even though most airlines get the bulk of their ticket sales through travel agencies and the Web, those customers who have bad experiences with the call center tend to tell their friends and family members about it. Plus, customers today have powerful new channels for spreading the word about lousy service, including social networking sites like MySpace and YouTube (not to mention blogs).

According to the article, Hawaiian Airlines started transferring its reservation call center to the Philippines in April, eliminating 200 positions in Hawaii. The airline, which said the move was necessary to cut costs, reportedly offered its customer service reps new jobs within the company or buyouts. Considering the current state of air travel in the U.S., this certainly isn’t the type of publicity that Hawaiian Airlines wants.

I will in no way suggest that the agents in the Hawaiian Airlines call center are poorly trained and that this is the source of the problem. It could be that they really are facing a spike in call volume that they didn't anticipate. But in my view the overall problem of poor customer service in overseas centers stems from a lack of adequate training. It is not that the Philippines and India have a lack of skilled workers, they do. The problem is the companies and third party outsourcers which are opening these overseas centers aren’t spending enough time training their reps before they put them live on the phones. Furthermore, I see language barrier problems contributing immensely to the problem of insufficient training.

I have a friend who works for a company that delivers training programs to call center employees overseas. He said one of the biggest challenges is finding skilled coaches and trainers who are fluent in both English and the native language(s) of the trainees. He explained that no matter how good the content is for a particular training program, if the coaches don’t thoroughly comprehend it, they can’t convey the concepts to the trainees in a way that’s meaningful. As a result, the finer points of customer service become “lost in translation.”

And when the agents don’t understand the finer points of delivering good customer service, and customers start yelling at them, there is a “cycle of shame” that kicks in and the agents eventually lose their desire to do a good job. We’ve seen this happen in the call centers here in the U.S., too.

The solution, in my view, lies in providing better training, and preparing the agents to handle every type of customer service scenario up-front. That means hiring coaches and trainers who are able to convey the finer points of customer service to the trainees - and who are able to provide continuous coaching to reinforce the initial training. From where I sit, and based on my few experiences dealing with overseas call centers, the elimination of language barriers, coupled with complete and thorough training of all agents, is the only way overseas outsourcing is really going to work.

It took while – and who knows why they’re just now figuring this out - but many call centers are now learning that well-trained agents are happier agents. And happier agents work harder and deliver better customer service. And better customer services leads to higher customer satisfaction. I don’t know about you, but I am yet to talk to a “happy” agent in an overseas call center. I know I’m stating the obvious, but something needs to be done about this.

Contact center solutions provider Amcat has reportedly developed new enterprise IP contact center software -- Amcat Interactions -- that, according to the company, “enables contact center managers to overcome the architectural restrictions they face with current systems.” This comprehensive suite, which is based on open standards, offers ACD, IVR, inbound call handling, predictive dialing, email, SMS and other software bundled on a single platform. This powerful IP-based solution provides voice and data communication for the entire enterprise.

From this news it sounds like the company has developed its first fully “virtualized” contact center offering where all end-points on the network are in effect “equal,” thus breaking down the boundaries that have, until recently, kept call centers “centered.” These new SIP-based offerings are what finally enable call centers to make effective use of remote agents. With these new “virtualized” call center environments, all an agent needs in order to get on the network is a PC, a broadband connection, a headset, some SIP-based telephony software and his/her log on. That’s why they are so ideal for facilitating the remote agent model.

This type of solution is also ideal for facilitating the “informal contact center” model, where other knowledge workers across the enterprise are connected to the system and can help out with specific customer problems as they arise. In this sense, the solution provides a true enterprise communications platform.

Because it is centrally managed, the solution is also ideal for managing multiple call centers in different locations. Through its centralized user interface, call center managers, supervisors and executives can quickly and easily view data about which agents are working, who is on break, queue hold times, first call resolution and other agent performance metrics from multiple, geographically dispersed call centers. In this sense, they can view the operation of all of their agents in all of their centers - remote agents included – simultaneously. That means you can look at how your call centers are performing as a whole, or separately for comparison purposes. (Hopefully Amcat will be adding an executive dashboard to this solution so that high level execs can get instantaneous views of every aspect of the operations of their centers.)

Another advantage of this system is that, through the power of IP, you can intelligently route all voice and data traffic to the most appropriate agents, based on predetermined business rules. That means you can route calls and other contacts to the agents with the best skills to handle those calls – no matter where the agents are located on the network. Furthermore, Amcat’s SIP/CTI acts like a “comprehensive nervous system” and is aware of all resources available throughout an enterprise (i.e. it delivers “presence” for the contact center and across the enterprise).

In addition, the system is highly scalable, which means you can add new agents to the system rapidly without having to worry about additional equipment or software licenses. According to Amcat, the system can expand to “thousands of agents,” if needed.

Amcat said it developed this new IP model based on specific customer requests. Specifically customers were looking for a way to manage multiple contact centers using a streamlined method; deploy distributed human resources, particularly remote agents controlled from a single center; control human resources over a virtual enterprise - increasing efficiency and reducing costs; integrate voice and data in contact centers with the rest of the enterprise; leverage new interoperability/integration techniques associated with IP; and expand to accommodate new technology.

(It could also be that they did it because most their competitors are doing it.)

“Amcat expects an accelerated deployment of home-based agents over the next five years,” said Jim Texter, Amcat senior vice president and chief technology officer, in a press release. “Amcat Interactions embraces distributed resources. We are making full use of SIP-based standards to create an enterprise IP system that is fully aware of all resources, and can route and manage voice and data contacts over an enterprise.”

Texter added that this new offering “also provides an excellent foundation and migration path to a Software as a Service environment for both the call center and the enterprise.”

Amcat Interactions can be deployed with the public switched telephone network (PSTN), with IP Trunking or as a hybrid IP/PSTN configuration. Deployment and configuration is facilitated by Amcat Portalis Gateway, which can attach to any protocol required.

For more information, visit www.amcat.com.

Interactive Intelligence -- a pioneer in computer telephony integration and unified messaging, as well as one of the leading makers of contact center software and phone systems -- is gearing up to launch a nifty little application that alerts users of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging that they have received a new voice mail message via an indicator light on their office phones.

The new standalone app, called Interaction Message Indicator, is just one more way that Interactive Intelligence’s advanced software solutions can be integrated with Exchange Server 2007. The app works with existing third-party phone systems, including the Interactive Intelligence IP PBX, and monitors Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging mailboxes so that users are alerted to new voicemail messages as they arrive via the indicator light.

In other words, if you are at your desk but your PC or mobile computing device isn’t turned on, you can still be alerted when a new message arrives on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging via a light on your desktop phone. The application offers a Web-based interface for easy set-up, administration, monitoring and reporting.

In a press release, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Joseph A. Staples said Interactive Intelligence developed the Interaction Message Indicator “as a direct result of customer requests.”

“This move underlines our commitment to offer Microsoft customers critical functionality backed by more than a decade of experience developing applications for the Microsoft platform,” he said.

Staples said Interactive Intelligence plans to roll out more complementary applications for Exchange Server 2007 UM based customer demand, such as personal notification features, in the near future.

Interactive Intelligence is demonstrating its Interaction Message Indicator at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, being held this week at the Denver Convention Center. The app will be available in Q3 2007 through Interactive Intelligence’s global channel of more than 250 value-added resellers.

For more information, visit http://www.inin.com/Products/imi.