Is successful customer service delivery about reducing the amount of calls into a contact centre? Ihug’s GM for customer care Russell Stephens thinks it might be. He’s looking to the replicate the Vodafone experience of driving customers to web and text based information sources and therefore reducing the number of calls the ihug contact centre receives.
“If you look at every call that comes into the Vodafone contact centre and then look at the number of times that customers serve themselves (eg through texting), its 20 to one,” he says.
Vodafone has also invested heavily in an online knowledge base, which Stephens says gets around 80,000 hits a month. “That’s a potential saving of 80,000 calls into the contact centre,” he says.
Ihug is working on a similar knowledge base for its website as the Vodafone experience shows it provides self-service to 97 per cent of customers who use it.
Stephens, who has been at ihug since November last year, and who I’ve reported as saying in a previous blog that he is recruiting for around 80 seats, is now reluctant to say the exact number of seats the ihug contact centre currently has.
He says this is partly because the number of seats provides a window for their competitors to understand more about their operation. He also believes that the contact centre profession needs to get away from the idea that more seats equals better customer service.
“You continue to fuel the myth around the size of a contact centre versus the quality of the interaction with the customer,” he says. “There is an implicit link in people’s minds that if you’ve got more agents, you’re likely to be better at customer service.”
Note: The move to self service is part of Vodafone Group's international strategy. Vodafone Group self service development manager Adam Spence will speak about using automation to support customers at the Contact Centre Global Forum next month.