It’s about time the call center got some respect

Besides, it’s a great place to
practice 1 to 1 marketing

By Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D.

Just when you thought political correctness had gone about as far as it could go, here we go proposing a new taboo: No more call center jokes.

Actually, our motives here are less concerned with PC than with CS – that is, common sense. For years, the call center has been the Rodney Dangerfield of marketing. Belittled, denigrated and relegated to back office status, call centers literally got no respect, internally or externally.

Well, we’re here to tell you those days are gone. And for good reason. Almost any kind of company, of any size and in any industry, can leverage the untapped power of a call center to generate dramatic improvements in customer relationships, share-of-customer and the incremental sale of products or services. Call centers can provide marketers with a unique opportunity to learn from customers directly, without having to look through the filters of quantitative research, focus groups, or representative panels. The customers who call into a center may be a self-selecting sample, but those called on a proactive, outbound basis certainly don’t need to be. And every inbound call, properly orchestrated, can be a sales occasion, as well – it is a marvelous share-of-customer opportunity. Don’t just send me the manual or the spare part I requested. Engage me in a dialogue about your company and its services, and the additional products I might find useful in my own individual situation.

The call center is an ideal medium for building relationships one customer at a time. It can provide a single point of contact for addressing each customer’s needs, creating a true ‘customer manager environment’ to increase both the effectiveness and the efficiency of interactions. Orders can be placed faster. Shipping instructions can be predetermined based on customer profile and business policy. Many calls can be handled through automated, self-service interfaces, freeing live agents for more profitable customers, or for customers who prefer live interactions.

This is not science fiction. Chordiant Software of Palo Alto, Calif., has developed a system that enables fully differentiated treatment of customers in both live and self-service interactions. Shipping options presented to a mail-order customer, for example, can be adjusted based on the customer’s own previous purchase history and account status. VIP callers (or emailers or Web inquiries) might automatically have their orders delivered "next-day air" at no additional cost. Folks who’ve called for support more than three times of late will be auto-routed to a senior technician who’s presented with a complete view of their service history.

When a customer’s profile shows an overdue balance, the system might default to COD-only. A wealth of customer data and consistent service offerings allow telephone service reps to focus on listening to their customers and building relationships, providing added-value and cross-sell opportunities, letting the system handle the more routine tasks of messaging, fulfillment and confirmation.

Turning a lowly call center into a more automated and capable customer interaction center creates an environment in which a true Learning Relationship can be cultivated with each customer. It also turns a low-paid customer service rep into a directed, well prepared salesperson for the enterprise, equipping him or her with a flawless, in-depth memory of each customer. Unfortunately, this approach flies directly in the face of the most prevalent call center philosophies, which tend to read like something dictated by Ebenezer Scrooge to Bob Cratchit:

"Reduce talk time seven percent."

"Improve customer satisfaction 8%."

"Decrease call abandonment rate to 19%."

Sound chillingly familiar? It’s not surprising. Too often, the CFOs and COOs who oversee the call center only glance occasionally at any data not related to cost-per-station or cost-per-call. Quite often they have no real clue about the potential marketing and relationship-building power hiding in that small, expensive, often problematic business unit in the basement.

Let’s look at it another way: Consider the money spent on your call center not just as a cost of doing business, but as an opportunity to improve your business’s profit. Managed with intelligence and forward thinking, a call center can easily help your company:

Sell additional products and services, expanding your firm’s "share of customer;"
Support complex or expensive products, reducing service costs;

Provide ongoing ancillary services, increasing your customers’ loyalty to the basic product;
Pre-qualify sales leads, reducing your cost of sales;

Reduce the need to win new business with discounts, improving overall unit margins;

Perform low-cost market research, reducing the need for more expensive, outside research.

Some outbound calling operations are relying on "data infused dialogue" to create the potential for longer, more meaningful conversations. "Data infused" calls are designed less to glean information or sell product than to build or expand upon a relationship between a company and a high-value customer.

Sky Alland Marketing, which specializes in customer relationship management, has developed a capability called "Smart Talk." It stems from the premise that good dialogue is good marketing. At the heart of Smart Talk is good database management, because the technique won’t work unless you can readily "infuse" your calling script with relevant, one-to-one customer data. In a Smart Talk scenario, information captured during previous contacts with the customer is fed into the calling script, creating the potential for a true one-to-one dialogue. Sky Alland relies on Smart Talk to build customer relationships for clients such as Porsche, Mitsubishi and Owens Corning.

In the case of Mitsubishi, Sky Alland captures customer phone contacts verbatim, yielding a treasure-trove of information that can be passed along to a local dealer or worked into the script of a future outbound call. Smart Talk empowers the caller to engage in a personal, intelligent conversation with customers about their specific concerns.

Another rapidly growing area of interest is software that automates the fulfillment process. Many companies still handle fulfillment as a subterranean operation that is not well-tracked and not well understood – at least in terms of its potential for creating and managing hot leads for the sales force.

The more sophisticated approach is when you take the caller down a path during your script, ask them a series of questions and cater the contents of the fulfillment package to meet the caller’s specific needs.

Two of Sky Alland’s clients, Sea Doo (the marine recreation arm of Bombardier) and Merillat Industries (the nation’s largest supplier of wood cabinets for the home) make good use of specialized software technology designed to glean maximum usable data from each customer interaction and really zero in on the customer’s intentions.

The information collected by Sky Alland call center operators enables Sea Doo and Merillat, for example, to save money in the fulfillment process by mailing out only the materials that are immediately relevant to the customer’s expressed needs.

For example, a prospective customer who calls Kohler’s 800 number for information about faucets will be asked whether the equipment is intended for a new home or a remodeling project. Then the customer is asked if the faucets will be part of a do-it-yourself project or a professional installation. The fulfillment package will be customized to meet – and anticipate – the customer’s needs as closely as possible. For instance, the do-it-yourselfer will receive a brochure describing the installation steps. The customer who plans to hire a plumber will receive a brochure describing the best way to search for a reputable contractor.

"Instead of just dropping a brochure into an envelope and addressing it, we learn more about the customer," explains Mike Johnson, a regional vice president at Sky Alland. "This enables us to deliver information that is more specific to his or her needs. For example, if you call Honda, we’ll which model you’re interested in. If you’re looking to buy a Civic, we’re not going to send you a Prelude brochure. Instead of sending you everything we have, which can get tremendously expensive, we find out exactly what you want."

In the case of free trinkets, there’s always the danger that people will call in just to get the freebie. A better way is to identify your hot prospects and send them cards offering a free coffee mug if they agree to a 30-minute demo, test drive, sales pitch, or answer a questionnaire that will provide you with genuinely useful data.

As Mike Johnson puts it: "Instead of just mailing the trinket, we want something in return … after all, the key is to create more hot leads for your sales team."

We can see that as the demands of commerce change, smart businesses have allowed their call center operations to adapt and evolve into "interaction centers" that are capable of recognizing individual customers immediately and integrating new data affecting the relationship between those customers and the company.

One of the very highest-touch interaction centers anywhere is the American Cancer Society’s National Cancer Information Center – dubbed the NCIC – in Austin, Texas. This 90-seat center was built in late 1996 and handles more than a million calls a year. Inbound calls range from people making a $10 contribution or seeking advice on how to stop smoking to the overpowering, "Hello. I’ve just been diagnosed with an advanced stage of cancer. Help me."

To accommodate this dramatic range of callers, and to serve its noble mission, the Society threw out almost all the rules a call center normally runs by. Why? Its mission suggests that every customer is a most valuable customer, whether they’re contributing five dollars, working on a term paper, or coping with the devastating disease. In terms of call center operations, consider American Cancer Society’s rules as you rethink your own:

Every call is answered by a live voice, to make the center welcoming and warm, particularly for those callers in severe need.
Call durations are neither measured nor discussed.
Callers can be referred anywhere, and information specialists are encouraged to do one-off article searches and basic research to find any information a caller needs.
CSR’s are encouraged to take breaks and walks regularly, and to spend an hour or so each day learning more about the "product" by poring through the center’s extensive online databases.

An enlightened view, for sure, and one that’s no doubt brought considerable comfort to thousands of people in a time of great need. Given the fine examples set by the American Cancer Society, Canadian Tire and other cutting edge companies, it’s easy to agree that the often-demeaned call center has earned the respect it genuinely deserves.

Don Peppers and Dr. Martha Rogers are the authors of two international bestsellers, Enterprise One to One and The One to One Future. Their consulting firm, Marketing1to1/Peppers and Rogers Group, is based in Stamford, Connecticut. This article was adapted from their newest book, The One to One Fieldbook. Co-authored with Bob Dorf, the Fieldbook will be released in December 1998.

Chordiant Software and Sky Alland Marketing are strategic partners of Marketing1to1/Peppers and Rogers Group.

This article ran in November 1998 in Sales & Marketing Management.