Contact Center Conundrum.

Let’s start today by thanking the contact center for all the food it puts on the table. Outside of the millions of agents it provides employment for, it has long fed the coffers of various telecom mainstays: 

Carriers, Manufacturers, ISV’s, VAR’s, Developers, Consultants – you name it, suppliers of all kinds get their kick at making call centers more cost effective, more customer friendly and more ‘communications-enabled’.

And by the looks of this survey – commissioned by Alcatel-Lucent and executed by Ovum recently, there will be plenty of work to go around for many years to come. The customer – that is the one calling the contact center – is not yet happy. It’s no surprise; in principle the contact center and its customers are at odds with one another. One aims to deliver services as cost effectively as possible, while the other still demands one (very expensive) thing more than anything else: a live phone call, with a well trained agent. The conclusions of the study include:

• A large number of people identified telephone conversations with live agents as that the most satisfying channel of customer service, and further identified better agent training as one of the customer care industry’s top needs.

• Consumers want to be able to conduct self-service via the Web or interactive voice response system and then get live assistance from an agent if needed without having to re-enter information already provided.

• Consumers still largely prefer to interact with customer service via the phone, followed in second by email; Web self-service finished a distant third.

So what’s the real problem here? With all the smarts, technology and money thrown at the contact center, how it is that we regularly read surveys like this one that suggest dissatisfaction at the consumer level? Technology has tried for 20 years now to wean consumers from their addiction to live service, and yet the customer seems to still to want it above all else. Is it time to give in and just hire more agents? Unlikely.

Having spent time of late with a startup in the customer interaction space, I’ve concluded that technology – or a lack of it – is not to blame. Nor are any of those in the contact center supply chain. No; there are bigger forces at work here:

For one, many companies have outsourced, or shipped overseas, portions of their contact center environment. This results in disparate systems, platforms and processes that are not easily synchronized. And to begin with, contact centers are beasts that have been built over time – often in pieces – so getting systems to talk nicely with one another is a full time job. If even possible.

Furthermore, there are silos in the contact center decision making process. Operational types actually run the centers, Web teams run what happens on the Web, and Marketing, while sensitive to how the contact center impacts customer relationships, has little say in the operation of it. Yet increasingly, the innovation coming from new and older companies alike now delivers features, functionality and value propositions directed at all three of these stakeholders. Imagine for a moment the sales process. My sentiments, exactly.

Perhaps most telling from this study is that integration and interoperability between systems remains – if maybe indirectly – the single biggest roadblock to the adoption of modern forms of customer interaction. We’re all too familiar with the dreaded…’Please give me your account number’…only seconds after you entered it into an IVR. Well, this very same issue is now haunting the evolution of multi-channel communications.

Respondents in the survey noted that while they would like to use these other channels, they dislike nothing more than to ultimately reach a live person (which they want sooner or later) only to have that person have no context on earlier interactions. Same problem, different channel.

So unlike the pure web environment where disruption has been known to quickly turn an industry on its head, in the contact center arena we will need patience. And along the way, plenty with benefit from trying to fix it. Particularly anyone who has a fix for interoperability.