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Customer support over telephone or e-mail is often a bitter experience for the customer. This arises out of the misalignment in the objectives of the customer, the call center taking the call and the vendor

The call centre agent, a creature we all love to hate, has become an indispensible part of our lives.

There is hardly any aspect of modern day life that remains untouched by the ubiquitous call centre agent, the first point of contact between a customer and the entire back-end support paraphernalia that is offered to you when you buy a product. Often, however, our experience with this invisible friend, who is supposed to offer us timely support, leaves much to be desired, at times even leaving a bad taste in the mouth.

Today a call to customer support invariably involves three parties—the customer, an outsourced call handling agency or BPO, and the vendor who engages the BPO as the interface with the customer. Each one of them has different perspectives and objectives when it comes to a support call or mail. The issue is very simply and clearly one of a mismatch between customer expectation of help when things go wrong, and the management of the same by the support mechanisms. Simply put, the slip-up is nothing but a misalignment between what you, the customer, are made to expect and what you actually get. This happens because there is a fundamental mismatch between the customer’s quest for a satisfying experience and an immediate answer and that of the BPO and the vendor, who look for maximum efficiency and minimum cost, respectively.

This piece is based on a dipstick survey of randomly selected people, so as to gauge where customer support systems are found wanting. These issues were then posed to senior executives both in the BPO industry and vendors whose products require the back-end support.

The problems that people face are diverse and specific to the product or service and the support they require. Yet in the course of the exercise, across domains, several generalisations emerged. One of the biggest problems customers face is that either the customer care executives never come online or it takes inordinately long for them to get across to an executive—an issue related to the number of deployed telephone lines and agents. Another problem that occurs often is that the person taking the call is either ill-equipped to deal with the problem (the problem may be beyond his mandate) or is unwilling to help the customer beyond a point, as there is no incentive for him to do so. In either case, there is a perceptible hesitation on the part of the agent to transfer the call to a higher executive (for that leaves a negative mark on his performance matrix). Other persistent problems faced by consumers include fears of data theft, not knowing where to turn for third-party add-ons, non-toll free numbers, etc.

Customer’s expectations

Immediate access

Immediate solution to problem

Expected resolution time

Information on status

Access to person directly dealing with the problem

Ability to escalate if expectations not met

Continuity – not having to explain the problem from start every time they call in

In private, industry insiders concede that such perceptions are not off-the-mark and that “an ever-expanding and fast developing eco-system” is the crux of the problem. The main issue in the customer-BPO interface, which causes problems like over-emphasis on procedure and inability or unwillingness to solve a complaint that may be taking longer than usual to resolve, concede top executives, has to do with the way the performance of the customer care executives is measured. The performance matrix includes parameters like the average time they take to handle a call, number of calls handled in a specified time period, number of problems resolved, etc. “There is often no incentive for the agent to go out of his way to resolve a problem,” says the head of analytics of an IT major that runs a captive BPO. Problems like lack of comprehension of the complaint occur because executives are often not trained properly, an area where BPOs are found wanting. Another area where BPOs often do not fare well is that of security of data (“info-sec” in industry parlance). This leads to data theft, the most inane yet irritable consequence of which is the unwanted calls you get, selling you everything from insurance policies to that dream vacation. In the gravest cases of data theft however, money worth millions of dollars has vanished off bank accounts. While the bigger BPOs have learnt how to deal effectively with the problem, the smaller ones are found wanting.

The agent’s dilemma

Broad parameters on which the performance of call-centre agents is measured

Number of calls taken in a stipulated time-period. The more the better for the agent, while the customer wants more time spent on her problem

Average handling time or average time taken per call. The BPO wants to spend less and less time per call

Call closure rate. In how many cases was the complaint resolved at first call. No one measures how happy the customer was at the end of the call.

This narrow parameterisation leads an agent to often ask: “What is in it for me if I go out of my way to resolve the customer’s complaint?” The answer is not just nothing. The agent may actually be penalised for doing that.

On the other end, there are gaps in how BPOs interact with their vendors or clients. While such incongruencies are specific to company-to-company relationships and intra-domain technicalities and therefore out of the purview of this analysis, they mostly occur because vendors have a tendency of looking at back-end operations as a cost centre and hence do not pay the required amount of attention on this area. The vendor, having outsourced customer support, may not be alert to newer support issues rising up through the system till they cross a critical threshold. Many vendors are known to narrowly straitjacket issues that can be handled by a customer support mechanism, consciously choosing to lose customers who face a problem outside the defined ones, unless the customers are part of a privileged set (high spend, influence, etc.)

Some vendors are beginning to realise that such back-end operations can be revenue generators as the agent can make auxiliary sales to customers even while his complaint is being redressed. So, you, the customer, may be complaining about a hard disk problem and the agent may be trying to sell you more RAM or you may be complaining about the high rate of interest for your home loan while the agent is trying to sell you a new insurance policy. Very clearly, there is a possible clash of desired outcomes at work.

So, is customer service always messy? Not necessarily. An analysis of recent tweets about customer service response of a leading telecom vendor was revealing. There were comments from both extremes—there were customers going gaga over the excellent service and there were those tearing their hair out in frustration.

Our point is that if the objectives of the three players—the customer, the agent and the vendor—can be better aligned and if customer expectations are better understood and managed, then there would be more customers going gaga than tearing their hair out.

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