Empowering the Customer Service Representative

Providers must overcome a number of technological hurdles to empower their customer service representatives (CSRs). Today, CSRs must field queries from a number of different billing and OSS systems and deal with multiple channels of communications such as voice, email and the Web. A unified desktop and consolidating billing across the enterprise might be the goal, but for now it’s still difficult for many providers.

“It seems like there’s a lot more vision than reality out there,” says Chris Olin, director of products at Kana Software, whose Web-based products address personalizing customer interactions. While giving agents great information tools, and having all the information on one screen and automating all the processes is the main goal, he believes “it’s everybody’s vision, but it seems like it’s nobody’s reality.”

What empowering the CSR boils down to is allowing the right person to do the right work for the right customer with the right information—and getting it right the first time.

The Simplified Desktop

Cory Wiegert, senior product line manager for Siebel Contact Center, Siebel Systems, recently met with three major wireless carriers. Wiegert reports that each of them had two key goals: to consolidate billing across all business units in order to provide a single bill and to increase customer service and customer loyalty by consolidating the CSR’s desktop.

Wiegert says he has seen agents toggle among as many as 12 different applications on one screen. He says each CSR must deal with an average of four to five applications, which can include order management, billing and campaign management systems.

When the agent comes in at the beginning of the day, he or she must sit down and log on to each application. If their system crashes during the day, the agent must login again. Wiegert says he knows of one wireless company whose main CSR system goes down an average of 3 to 4 times a day.

Often, CSRs make decisions with customers based on a manual consolidation of information from various screens and information in their head. “An agent is doing that 75-100 times a day,” Wiegert says.

“A lot of providers really depend upon the skills of the CSR,” says Mark Hayward, chief technology officer at BusinessEdge Solutions. The representatives must deal with a lot of cryptic information, he says.

To obtain a more unified desktop, providers either will build a portal interface to support the desktop or focus on integrating the back office systems. The first method hides the complexity of back office systems, while the second involves consolidating databases and performing direct extraction of information from the back office.

The goal is to have one screen in front of each CSR that would detail all relevant customer information, such as propensity to churn, propensity to call the call center again and an up-selling strategy. Wiegert explains this involves putting a “temperature gauge” at the agent to detail the customer’s possible actions based on analysis of the customer’s historical data.

Many providers are moving from traditional client-based systems to Web-based desktops, says Olin. This allows for upgrades at one location that can be replicated on every CSR’s machine versus the costly and time-consuming process of upgrading each physical desktop.

In addition, tailoring the screen to the CSR’s viewing preferences without changing the functionality behind it is another strong initiative for providers, says Peter Hurst, vice president of marketing at Amdocs, adding that CSRs must also be able to take and record notes into the desktop.

Qwest Communications, which uses an in-house call center and CSR desktop solution, enables both sales and call center consultants to use one application that integrates many back office systems behind it. The system, Consulting Plus, was implemented in the summer of 2002.

Qwest’s challenge in the contact center was tasking CSRs with handling questions from customers in 14 states. There were different versions of the in-house billing system depending on the customer’s location.

Qwest’s Senior Vice President of Consumer Sales and Customer Care for the Consumer Markets Mary Lynn Ziemer says the most pressing issue is making sure the system is user friendly. To accomplish this, the company tests the system with CSRs and asked them what they would like to see on the desktop. The company turns out quarterly releases to update the system’s GUI.

Making Data Communicate

Communications between back and front office systems are critical, explains Hayward. When a CSR completes an order in a CRM interface, the system must be able to send that request to an order management system. The order status must be replicated in the CRM system so that a CSR knows the status should the customer call in again. And, when the service is activated, the CRM system and CSR must know this as well.

“It’s the syntactic alliance of the data,” Hayward states, that is the most difficult hurdle for providers. For example, credit class A may not mean the same thing in the CRM system as it does in the billing system.

Mergers and acquisitions inevitably increase the complexity of back office systems. In many cases, providers do not want to spend the money to combine the back office systems. Yet, if the company wants something like a single 1-800 number for customer care, they might not be able to do that unless the back office systems are properly integrated.

“It’s almost like a business reengineering,” says Karen Hardy, director of product marketing at Aspect. “I can’t really name a business today that’s been able to bring all those [systems] together,” Hardy says.

Zack Taylor, general manager for contact center solutions at Avaya, says that for the incumbent, sometimes just finding the data is a challenge because data is spread around. A customer that subscribes to many products with one provider, for example, may have to deal with multiple contact centers.

A major obstacle in data integration is ensuring that systems have a common understanding of who each customer is. Every system, for example, may have its own unique customer identifier. A provisioning system may have an eight-digit alphanumeric ID, while a billing system may have a 10-digit ID along with a campaign system that has a seven-digit ID. Providers struggle to find and match the customer in each system with the account information that resides in other systems.

In addition, the various systems often store customer information differently. This data must also be correlated and translated to appear correctly on the CSR’s desktop. Siebel’s Wiegert says 25 percent to 50 percent of a company’s total information technology is spent just on plugging these system together.

Multiple Channels

A Forrester survey of 697 contact center managers across a number of industries shows that in 2000, only 6 percent of firms said they shared data across five or more channels, but nearly 15 percent say they share customer data across five or more channels today. In addition, about 39 percent say they share customer data across all their channels today. Yet, despite this growth, many telecom providers still struggle with integrating data from multiple contact channels.

“It’s made it ten times more complex,” Siebel’s Wiegert says, explaining that customers often fish for answers in different channels and that providers often have little to no knowledge about a customer’s interactions from one channel to another. One solution for this is to store all channel contact information in one database to have a complete picture of customer interaction history. The system would know how many times the customer has called in and via which channels.

Wiegert notes that about 90 percent of Siebel’s deals in the pipeline in the past 6 months have included consolidation of channels as one of the key decision criteria for choosing software.

“It is a real challenge, but it is an important one,” says Amdocs’ Hurst. If a customer orders something on the Web, the customer expects an agent to know what was ordered and when. “It’s a critical area right now,” he says.

Avaya’s Taylor says the goal is normalization of customer channels so that “the way the customer is treated is indifferent to the channel.”

“It still seems to me that the Web and the online channels are very different from what the agent sees,” says Kana’s Olin. Agents typically have the same data but not always in the same format. And, other problems can occur: For example if a group writes a promotion and sends it out via the Web, the customer may call in with a question about the promotion or to accept it, yet the CSR may not know about the promotion or be able to offer it.

While integrating data from multiple channels is orders of magnitudes simpler than reengineering the back office business data integration, it is still an area that most providers must face.

Metrics

Providers also grapple with how to measure agents’ performance. Traditionally, CSRs have been measured on switch metrics, such as average speed of answer or number of calls a day. Kana’s Olin says average call handle time is the number one metric. For example, he says a provider may state that its goal is to reduce its average call handle time from 5.5 minutes to 5 minutes. In doing so, the provider may be able to save $7 million based on the sheer volume of calls it fields. Olin says providers may be justified in focusing on average call handle time, he adds, “If the top metrics they are valued on is call time, they are probably going to have a poor customer experience.”

Other metrics are also being used by providers to measure success. First call transfer rate, or how many times does the customer get the answer to a question on the first call without being transferred has been a major focus for Qwest. Ziemer says Qwest looks at transfer rates down to the employee level and coaches CSRs to handle a broader range of customer problems. “We have had in the past six months tremendous success with that,” Ziemer says.

Still others may look at the abandonment rate, or how many people get into the contact center queue and hang up after waiting a while. Remedies for this include dealing with staffing issues or giving people better tools at the desktop. One Aspect product feature even allows providers to perform scheduled call back. That is, if a customer calls into the call center and is left on hold during a peak call time, the customer is given an estimated wait time. Several different times may be presented to the customer indicating when they could be called back. The customer could choose among given times or could request a specific time to be called back. Some communications companies, including Cox Communications, are using this technology, according to Aspect’s Hardy.

Siebel’s Wiegert says tomorrow’s measurement of agents in the call center may include telling an agent the meaning of these measurements set by the upper echelons of the call center management and how they as an agent impact these metrics. Their view on the desktop could even include whether or not they are meeting their metrics.

Ziemer says that Qwest has hoards of data that it can use to measure success in the contact center, but states that Qwest would never just use the transaction scores of how many calls a CSR fields throughout the day as the single measurement for success. “If you look at one metric or two metrics, you drive the wrong behavior,” Ziemer warns.

Bringing it All Together

Because so much growth in the telecom industry exists around extending the customer’s existing relationship to include that next piece of the bundle, this real-time information is key to trying to cross sell or up sell to customers.

To effectively empower the CSR, providers must deliver a single view of the customer in a consolidated desktop. They must integrate back office systems to push information out to the CSRs, and they must better understand the customer interactions that are occurring in multiple different communications channels.

To date, Kana’s Olin says some providers may have one or two pieces of the empowerment equation, but “finding all these things in one place, I haven’t seen it yet.”

Avaya’s Taylor says that improving contact center technolgy is a valuable goal but, “the richest thing is still the dialog between two human beings… technology can enhance that… but it does come down to the dialog.”