Why do customers say they don't like talking to offshore centres and yet companies keep moving contact centres offshore?  What can make the difference?

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Peter Massey, managing director, Budd

 T: 07802 793 515  E: peter.massey@budd.uk.com  

The headlines are always grabbed by consumer stories of offshore's unpopularity. Indeed a number of businesses have now made it overt in their advertising that they do not offshore their contact centres. But global business is a reality, so what's the balance that you should strike between:

Do as I say, not as I do

If asked, we'd probably say we want to speak to someone who speaks the same way as we do. We are prejudiced by awful outbound calls, selling double-glazing, usually after you've got out of the bath to answer the phone. Add to that, dialler delays and unintelligible patter in a strange accent from overseas and it is no wonder we say that we'd rather not have offshore call centres.

However this ignores the fact that most people say they'd rather not have onshore call centres either. Your 'down the pub' conversations tell you this, as well as surveys like Accenture's which found that customers spends an average of 6 minutes on hold when they call a company, who then ask them to repeat the same information again, and again to different staff.

So it's no surprise that when surveyed, 9 out of 10 people say they don't like cat food.

It further ignores the fact that many customers asked about good service experiences will quote things that have happened in a service environment such as a call centre.

Can we love and hate call centres at the same time? Yes we do. We love anything that does the basics well - still a differentiator. We hate dumb call centres, on or offshore.

It ain't what you do it's the way that you do it

Are call centres a good thing? Well, we complain about IVR menus that take forever to get through, and about being transferred a million times to someone who doesn't know what they're doing. But it was often a lot worse before there were call centres.

This doesn't excuse how companies today inflict "dumb things" on customers in greater volumes using fewer people with more technology.

When call centres are well managed and the end to end processes beyond the call centre are defined to simplify things for the customer, then customers love it.

Even IVR implemented properly (hen's teeth.) isn't noticed by customers.

• The challenge is "how do we stop doing dumb things to customers?"

• The answer lies in listening to customers who know what's wrong with your services.

• The obstacle is management and leaders who haven't yet learned to drive their business using the customers' feedback.

Whether on or offshore, the customer experience issue is the same.

Those who try to save cost, do not save cost

The objection we hear time and again is that better service costs more, requires more investment and takes longer to achieve.

True you have to recruit the right people, train them properly, give them the right tools, and respect them as human beings. That takes time and money, isn't a sexy management consulting fashion and takes stamina. Sorry, but that's called doing business well regardless of call centres, regardless of where in the world you are.

You have to have processes that work for the customer end to end, not the ones that are easiest for you in your particular silo of the business.

But you can hear the bean counters clicking away at costs.

The answer lies in managing demand - "the best service is no service" as we say.

The customers have better things to be doing than sitting on their mobiles keeping your agents busy. They'd rather not be chasing a cheque that didn't come, a bill that didn't make sense or a problem that wasn't of their making.

So if you don't make them call, they will think you're good at what you do. And you'll save lots of money.

At least 20% of your budget in the first year in our experience, - a figure backed up by findings in our 2006 annual "Fast+Simple" research (see www.budd.uk.com for copies).

If you have the stamina to work on what customers tell you needs fixing, you can save as much as Amazon did - 77% in 3 years. They called it WOCAS - what our customers are saying. A simple concept that addresses the dumb things rather than letting them run on and on.

And, of course, you don't need to sack the staff.. you can avoid building another call centre - either on or offshore!

Or you can put the time, when customers call you, to better use like:

• listening to customers some more, so you know what to sell to them

• educating customers on how to help themselves more easily

• researching what your customers want to buy from you.

Lies, lies and damn statistics

The data we collect today on customers is myriad. It usually lies rotting in a lap top somewhere, rather than being used weekly to drive next actions.

Here's a couple of bits of data you probably know inherently but don't have the evidence for. Customers don't always tell you what they will do - because they don't always know and because what's true today isn't necessarily true at the point of purchase.

Customer satisfaction isn't linear. Moving the score from x to y doesn't correlate with moving buying behaviours from x to y.

So what? The 'so what' is you have to work out what drives two very different things - not just one. Not satisfaction. But dissatisfaction ("Dissat") and purchasing/word of mouth recommendation ("Vsat"). They have different drivers.

This is why we can love and hate call centres - on and offshore.

The few clients who have done the hard statistical work to examine the drivers of Dissat and Vsat know this. They know what to drive. They know how to balance perception, service and economics to optimise the experiences customers get.

The need to call at all, the resolution they get and the knowledgability of the agent are critical.

So do we care about offshore accents?

Not if we get resolution from a knowledgeable agent. But yes, if we don't get resolution, and hell yes, if they don't sound like they know what they're doing!

A call centre's ability, irrespective of location, to provide a fast, knowledgeable response to customers, is a reflection of how well the call centre - and the company - understands what drives their customer Dissat and Vsat.

Contacts:

Peter Massey, managing director, Budd

07802 793 515 or peter.massey@budd.uk.com