Back in 1999 CRM equalled call centre: wall to wall stands at every CRM exhibition exuded the relationship benefits of the channel. But, in reality call centres have not equalled better relationships and dealing with modern ‘contact centres’ is high on the list of stressful experiences. Many customers would prefer efficient self service to talking to a run of the mill call centre agent.

At CallNorthWest’s directors debate on ‘Automation and Strategic Planning for the Future’ recently, Director Tim Kirby reminded the call centre industry that hearing your child was going to be a city trader would be wonderful news, whereas being told they were going to work in a call centre would be disheartening, to say the least. Yet in both roles they would spend all day wearing headphones to engage with people on the telephone in order to build up assets.

As companies return from India a little wiser, how to lift the image of the industry in the UK is taxing minds. On the expert panel with me at the event were Directors from Vertex, O2, arvato services, and Dimension Data. In the audience senior managers from SME’s, international companies and government pooled ideas - even a Government minister has promised an appearance at the next event!

Distilling all the thoughts the answer to this question is not easy and has several strands:-

• Beak the habit of micro management and spending excessive amounts of time reporting facts irrelevant to good service such as wrap up time and calls per agent; call answering is a poor proxy for customer service. Analytics are needed but should reflect customer outcome priorities, not transaction costs.
• Promote your strategic value. How does what you do meet company goals other than cost reduction? Where do you engage customers over the ‘customer journey’? For example, are you key to the renewal of service contracts. Do you detect customer attrition, or warm customers for cross-sales? If you don’t know your value how will others?
• Where is the future for customer contact in your organization? The call centre of today will not be around in 10 years time, and the changes will be driven by technology - real-time marketing, social software, virtualisation. Do you have a pilot team in place with IT and customer experts to experiment you way into the future of conversational marketing?

Paper on the past and future of call centres - Your call is important to us - prove it!