Call centres call for help

Staff churn means many contact centres are struggling to service customers well 

By Chris Martin Murphy

Around a third of all 180,000 call centre employees in Australia will leave their call centre in the next 12 months, after an average tenure of 23 months. And 40 per cent of those will leave the contact centre industry when they leave their call centre. This shrinking of the available Australian workforce has been used to justify taking financial contact centres offshore, whereas the primary reason for the move is usually to save costs with cheaper labour.

American Express now services Australian customer calls in Australia only, as does ANZ, owing to the increasing complexity of customer enquiries (and a fair loathing of Indian accents).  Furthermore, some 10 per cent of the 3,850 contact centres in Australia now permit ‘tele-working’ by home-based employees, and this is expected to double within the next year.

Stress will be the major reason for people leaving a contact centre job that has been described as “arduous, monotonous… a technological sausage factory”. Australians are easily stressed by repetitive hard work, more easily than most Asians are.  Call centre staff feel like ‘prisoners to the technology’.  They are controlled, monitored, corrected, and even dismissed by it.  Around 80 per cent of call centre staff require some help with stress management.  Perhaps this is why call centre locations can often be identified by the large number of cigarette smokers outside the building!

Financial call centre staff members are often inadequately trained, some for only 2 hours.  Many lack knowledge of the financial products they are meant to ‘sell’ as well as ‘service’. For example, in one banking study The Financial Research Company conducted, only 10 per cent of the CSRs (customer service representatives) knew the actual price of the product! Furthermore, anyone under 25 years of age is unlikely to have reached the age of ‘fiscal knowledge and responsibility’, and so probably shouldn’t be in a financial call centre.

Staff members also tell us that they are insufficiently supported by their managers. Inappropriate performance measures are set, and are measured and rewarded on number of calls or sales, rather than on measured customer call and service satisfaction.  The CSR job can also be made more difficult by incomplete or conflicting ‘CRM’ data bases, and by poor back office processes. Call centres are often understaffed at lunchtimes, or in the evening, at the very time when customers are ‘free’ to call them. Some financial call centres are understaffed at all times, and staff tell us that they regularly ‘bump’ (disconnect) incoming calls because they cannot cope with them. 
Australians are comparatively unskilled at cross-selling, and prefer to service than to sell. Many call centre staff (and bank tellers) have told The Financial Research Company that they don’t want to try and sell the customer something that the customer may not want, and probably doesn’t need. Staff members also say that it is hard enough to service customer enquiries, and they are therefore less likely to feel like selling to customers as well.

 The key to good contact centre performance is to sound interested in the customer, to sound pleased that they bothered to call YOU, of all people. Australian financial (and other) call centre operators do not do this very well.

Eight years ago, financial call centre managers interviewed by The Financial Research Company were fairly platitudinous or vaguely conceptual about what makes an ideal call centre.  They were organisation-centric rather than customer–centric (and many remain so today).  They talked about their customer service reflecting the corporate values and brand image of the company they worked for, yet most didn’t know what those corporate values were, either because they had not been explained, or because they did not exist.  Managers then and now set key performance indicators on productivity (calls per hour), quality of call, accuracy of information and call resolution.  But call centre staff are rarely fired, so customer service standards can remain ‘average’ at best. People who should leave, stay, and people who should stay, leave.

In 2008, financial call centre managers continue to feel insufficiently supported by their general managers or department heads.  Some say that processes remain insufficiently documented and trained. Most say that staff numbers are inadequate in relation to the number of customer calls received. Consequently staff members may be given time limits for customer service (for example, two minutes to service each business customer’s call).

 In 2008, financial call centre managers say that their greatest service challenges are:

1 Understanding what the customer is looking for/needs from the call.

2 Caring enough about the customer to satisfy those needs on that call.

3 Establishing credibility with the customer by demonstrating adequate product and service knowledge.

4 Having the authority or power to deal with the customer enquiry or problem from beginning to end.

5 Receiving financial and personal support from management in order to achieve the objectives set.

Australian financial call centre managers are hopeful of improving their customer service in future, but say that cost-cutting, outsourcing, staff member churn and management ‘distractions’ could all work against them delivering to their service objectives.

Chris Martin Murphy is managing director of the Financial Research Company