1. You just keep me
hangin’ on.
Can cloud-based solutions
solve the call centre customer
service dilemma?
GROUP
OX YGEN
2. Contents
Hello...............................................................................................................5
Call management – theory and practice............................................6
Three key challenges for corporate call centres.............................8
1 The credibility gap......................................................................8
2 The sales gap................................................................................8
3 The technology gap..................................................................10
It doesn’t have to be like this...............................................................12
You can have it all.................................................................................... 14
Conclusions...............................................................................................16
About Oxygen8.........................................................................................18
You just keep me hangin’ on 3
3. hello.
About the Author
Simon Brennan has more than 14 years’ experience in the telecommunications
sector working with a wide variety of companies from tech start-ups to FTSE100
organisations. He is an expert in improving corporate customer communication,
using technology to supercharge internal processes and deliver increased sales
through the customer contact centre channel. Simon has a strong track record
of successfully delivering cross-channel payments and communication solutions
for Oxygen8’s corporate customer base, across multiple divisions within
an organisation.
You just keep me hangin’ on 5
4. “Executive mandates to reduce
costs and improve efficiency
are a routine within the contact
centre. At its base, the contact
centre seems a calculable
formula of seats, calls and
resources … [which] are the focus
of reduction, streamlining
or automating.”1
IBM: The Customer Focused Contact Centre
Call management – theory and practice
The theory was simple. In an increasingly time-starved world people wanted the convenience
of interacting with companies via a brief telephone conversation, during which the customer
service representative would have all the necessary information at his or her fingertips and
the whole thing would be over in less than five minutes.
We would order the weekly shop, renew our car
insurance, complain about the lumpy hotel bed we
stayed in last week, check our bank balances and book
our holidays. All we had to do was tap in a few numbers
on a keypad and quote a reference code.
As a result, the call centre or contact centre, call it what
you will, became the hub of a company’s operations; the
frontline in the war to maintain and grow the customer
base. New entrants to sectors rid themselves totally of
bricks and mortar operations and went wholly into online
and telephone customer service. Within two years of its
launch in 1989, First Direct, the UK’s first telephone bank,
had over 100,000 customers.
As the call centre grew and evolved, it began to
encompass a much wider variety of customer
interactions, including email, online and social media.
Customers were demanding connectivity across all
multiple channels. If we order it today online we expect
to be able to speak to somebody about it tomorrow.
The busiest call centres nowadays can be interacting
hundreds of thousands of times every day with its
customer base.
Greater automation was part of the answer, with voice
connectivity and interactive voice response (IVR) which
offers pre-recorded voice prompts and menus which
segment and direct call traffic to suitable locations within
the call centre, leading the way. However, technology
upgrades have placed ever greater stresses on the
traditional call centre model and its IT infrastructure.
Clunky hardware and software based ‘on premises’
are increasingly unable to offer the degree of flexibility
required to scale up and down based on traffic,
seasonality, employee resource and the customer’s own
choice of contact channel.
What’s more, the investment in new IT, its maintenance
and upgrading, is a burden which many senior managers
are unwilling to countenance for a function which is still
widely regarded as a ‘cost’ rather than a potential sales
generator.
The result is that many companies feel as if they are on
the horns of a dilemma, trying to balance the competing
demands of customers wanting an ever-faster and
efficient service - which can only be delivered by
increasing human resource or upgrading IT - against the
wider organisational need to keep already significant IT
and wider call centre costs under control.
This paper outlines the problems facing call centres and
answers the following question: how do you provide
great customer service, at a reasonable cost, across
multiple channels?
You just keep me hangin’ on6
5. Three key challenges for corporate
call centres
1 The credibility gap
We’ve all heard the phrases which are supposed to reassure that their first and last priority is you, the customer.
“For us, our most important stakeholder is not our stockholders, it is our customers,” or “Customer service is not
a department, it’s everyone’s job,” or “The customer is the centre of our universe.” Even, “We see our customers
as invited guests to a party.”
This is all very well as long as the actions match the rhetoric, but all too often the experience of using a call
centre fails to match the brand promise. Recent research in the UK demonstrated that 85% of missed calls will
not call back and 75% of people will not leave a voicemail. What’s more, four out of five people say that they
have lost patience or hung up when faced with a lengthy call centre queue.3
In other words, you have one chance to get it right.
2 The sales gap
So, we have determined that poor call handling procedures can affect your customer credibility but what affect
does this have on sales? Putting an exact figure on lost sales is difficult, but the different surveys and reports
available all agree that it is a big number. Research suggests that UK business is losing £1.6 billion every year
due to poor call handling.4
However, this figure only looks at callers with a high intent to buy, in other words those who are already willing
to pick up the phone and make a call. But, what about potential customers who are lost much closer to the top
of the sales funnel, during the information gathering phase, due to negative brand perceptions? How many of
us have made buying decisions influenced by reports of poor quality aftersales support or slow call handling
amplified by a negative review on a website or social media feed? These lost sales are unquantifiable but
ultimately could do even greater harm to a company’s long term sales prospects.
There is of course a third ‘lost sales’ issue, namely the inability to lead generate, upsell and cross-sell, and
keep customers informed of new developments, using multiple devices and channels, which only become
available once customer trust has been gained. The potential for this sort of activity is enormous, with research
suggesting that 16-20% of callers make a purchase based on an on-hold offer, but this activity is all-too-often
largely untapped.5
“Customers should vote with their feet if they are tired of
waiting or fed up with the service they get. We want the
worst offenders …. to raise their game by answering the
phone quicker and improving staff training to demonstrate
they really value their customers’ time.” 2
Richard Lloyd, Executive Director, Which?
You just keep me hangin’ onYou just keep me hangin’ on 98
6. 3 The technology gap
The third issue facing call centres is the limitations of legacy technology which is having a direct impact on call
centre performance.
Research by the Aberdeen Group identified four key objectives when call centre operators looked to deploy
alternatives to on-premises IT solutions, with more than half identifying IT costs and lack of flexibility with current
software as a key inhibitor.6
So what is standing in the way of call centres embracing different IT structures?
In our experience, it comes down to entrenched IT infrastructures and fear of change which manifests itself in
phrases like, “we’ve always used this software,” time, which results in comments like, “I don’t have the time to
look for an alternative and manage the implementation,” and money, which leads to, “I don’t have the budget to
replace the existing solution.”
The result is either inertia or a costly jump in the wrong direction which does little to improve customer service.
“We had a very challenging period following the introduction
of a new £200 million customer IT system and we apologise
to customers who experienced issues.” 7
UK utility spokesperson
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Figure 1: Key objectives when deploying alternatives to on-premises IT solutions
Source: Aberdeen Group, December 2012Percent of respondents, n=101
Improve customer
experience
Improve agent
productivity
45%
32%
26% 26%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
7. It doesn’t have to be like this
The problems of the ‘traditional’ call centre are leading to what can only be described as
a revolution in the sector, with the concept of a cloud-based solution gaining real traction
amongst, CEOs, IT Directors and FDs, eager to utilise cutting-edge technology to deliver
outstanding customer service solutions at a fraction of the cost normally associated with
renewing and upgrading IT infrastructure.
According to research by DMG Consulting in the
United States, cloud-based call centres are significantly
outstripping the on-premises sector in terms of growth
rates.8
So what is driving this growth? The first reason is upfront
investment cost. Cloud-based solutions can be deployed
quickly without costly investment in new hardware and
software, and with no need to load new applications or
compete with other projects for IT resources. What’s
more cloud providers usually offer customers creative
and flexible pricing options, such as tiered a-la-carte
pricing, making it easier to offer solutions tailored to
business needs, whilst matching value with cost.
It is not only upfront investment cost that can be saved.
On-going costs can also be slashed because cloud
solutions require less maintenance and management
from IT, allowing resources to be reallocated to other
projects in the business.
Once installed there are a number of key business
benefits which can enable call centre operators to offer
a vastly improved service to customers. Operators can
benefit from lower abandonment rates via the use of ‘Call
Queuing’ and ‘Call Routing’ functionality which ensures
that calling customers are managed effectively, reducing
the risk of callers hanging up. These systems allow
users to accept more calls and deal with inbound callers
efficiently at peak times – all of which helps to project a
positive brand image and maintain high customer service
levels.
Automation is another major plus. It is impossible to
personalise the customer journey and treat callers
as ‘individuals’ unless call centres have the tools and
processes in place which, in turn increases brand loyalty
and customer satisfaction. Automation is the lifeblood
of personalisation, enabling call centres to ‘smooth’ out
call volume spikes by using customer data gleaned from
multiple touch points, from calls through to emails, social
media and information about the individual products and
services that the customer has purchased or previously
been interested in.
The cloud can also help call centre users to future-proof
their businesses, by making the call centre flexible
and scalable dependent upon volumes and customer
growth. The cloud allows companies to make fast and
cost-effective capacity adjustments, scaling up and down
depending upon traffic, seasonality and business need.
As a minimum, voice connectivity software should have
dashboard reporting that illustrates the biggest pain
points in a call centre’s processes.
Whilst basic historic reporting, live queue views and
agent reporting are a necessity, the cloud enables
contact centre managers to have more granular business
information at their disposal. By monitoring Network
Level management intelligence, managers can track
engaged, failed or unanswered calls in real-time. Taking
things a step further there is also the option of having
full mapping of a customer’s journey through the use
of touchpoint reporting. Touchpoint reporting maps all
customer interaction within the IVR, and can importantly
highlight potential snag points, improvement required,
and key information areas within the IVR. It’s one of the
many reasons “the cloud is king”.
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0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
2008 2011 2015
(projected)
2.2%
5.9%
18.1%
Figure 3: Cloud-based call centre adoption rates
Source: DMG Consulting
8. You can have it all
I’ve talked a lot of theory but what
happens when a call centre does go over
to the cloud. “Put some metrics on it,”
I hear you cry.
Very well then. Let’s take the Aberdeen Group
research quoted earlier which demonstrates a more
than 20% increase in first contact resolution rate with
the cloud compared to traditional call centres or a
+13% year on year improvement in annual company
revenue compared to just 4% for the traditional
model.9
Or what about the decrease in non-compliance
incidents versus the increase?
The truth is that cloud-based call centres not only
promise improvement but also deliver it.
“Customers increasingly demand effortless customer service
over a range of touchpoints and communication channels.
Customer service executives face the constant challenge
of simultaneously meeting customer expectations and
business cost goals.” 10
Kate Leggett, VP, Principal Analyst Serving Application Development and Delivery
Professionals, Forrester Research
You just keep me hangin’ onYou just keep me hangin’ on 1514
Figure 2: Better Performing Contact Centers are
more Likely to be Deployed on the Cloud
Average Performance
Cloud-based Contact
Centre Users
• 51% first contact resolution rate
• 13.1% average year-over-year improvement in annual
company revenue
• 3.2% average year-over-year improvement (decrease) in
non-compliance frequency
Traditional Internal
Contact Centre
• 30% first contact resolution rate
• 4.0% average year-over-year improvement in annual
company revenue
• 1.2% average year-over-year worsening (increase) in non-
compliance frequency
9. “This is not a passing fad. It is the fastest growing sector of
the contact centre infrastructure market, and cloud-based
solutions are going to account for an increase in percentage
of new purchases in the future.” 12
Donna Fluss, DMG Consulting
“Cloud-based solutions, omni-channel interactions, natural-
language speech and the use of mobile devices are forcing
enterprises to re-evaluate their approaches to self-service
and interactive voice response. IT planners should examine
how IVR technology can increase revenue and customer
satisfaction.” 11
Gartner, Market Guide for IVR Systems and Enterprise Voice Portals, 2015
Conclusions
At the start of this paper we identified a problem, namely ever more demanding customers
wanting a fast and efficient service which demands investment from call centre operators
who are, at the same time, under pressure to keep costs under control. But, we also
identified another issue, namely a perception problem, that the call centre is a cost, not a
potential revenue generator; and worse, that it is a ‘black hole’ which can suck-in ever-more
investment with no tangible return.
The truth is that the call centre dilemma and its perception in the organisation are intrinsically linked. Poor call centre
management is a drain on resources, damaging to brand perception and a turn-off for customers. Best practice call
centre management is flexible with resources, can bind customers in and offers the chance to lead generate, building
turnover and revenue.
However, there is one other ‘must have’ for all call centres, namely the provision of outstanding customer service
across multiple channels, from voice, to text (SMS), email or web. In the future call centres may even be forced to
embrace visual communication, such as FaceTime, if that is what the customer demands.
This is where the cloud can truly make a difference, converging multi-site applications onto a single, centrally
managed and administered platform promises in turn to reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction, improve
customer support and provide a boost to the bottom line.
A good example is Hermes, the UK’s leading consumer delivery specialist, which adopted cloud-based, multi-channel
technology to deliver real-time parcel information via a mobile app, e-mail and SMS messages. The multi-channel
approach enables them to find the most effective route to engage with individual customers and ensure those
customers are kept informed every step of the way. The business benefit is tangible, with a significant reduction in
the number of missed deliveries or collections and the number of parcel-related customer service enquires received
in their contact centres.
Crucially, management has a complete view of all activity and a holistic view of each customer’s history. Developers
work at a single interface to create customer-facing applications that combine the functionality of all systems.
Administrators have one central point of control for all resources.
Only the cloud can do this.
You just keep me hangin’ onYou just keep me hangin’ on 1716
10. About Voice
Oxygen8 Voice is a cloud-based suite of voice connectivity and IVR applications, which have unlimited potential to
improve business’ multi-channel communications. Voice enables you to set up and manage your voice services as
well as monitor and manage current activity. The platform also enables you to report and analyse call history, track
performance and critical trends.
“Thanks to Oxygen8’s Voice platform, and the
associated APIs in place, we can intelligently
handle our customer contact management
services, allowing our customers to confidently
and safely advertise goods and services whilst
having an anonymised contact channel.”
Dan Newman, Managing Director, Freeads
About Oxygen8
With offices in 10 countries, operations in over 27 countries, a turnover in excess of £90million and leading cloud-
based technology, Oxygen8 Group is a global technology provider of multi-channel solutions. Oxygen8 Group helps
businesses make smarter choices to transform their sales and marketing through innovative integrated platforms.
Our easy-to-use cloud-based solutions focus on results, giving clients performance management software that truly
integrates mobile, email, voice and payments. From sending bulk SMS to custom API integrations into your CRM
application, we make multi-channel communication simple. We’re proud to be working with some of the best brands
out there, such as Experian, O2, Travelodge, Unilever, Sony, play.com, PaddyPower, Sainsbury’s and Hermes.
For more information, visit: http://www.oxygen8.com
End notes
1. IBM Global Business Services, “The Customer Focused Contact Center” pg.5
2. “Most dreaded UK call centres revealed” Daily Mirror, 21st May 2015
3 How much are missed telephone calls costing your business? Answers4u infographic http://www.answer-4u.com/
news/missed-telephone-calls-cost-your-business
4. How much are missed telephone calls costing your business? Answers4u infographic http://www.answer-4u.com/
news/missed-telephone-calls-cost-your-business
5. Stan Rapp and Tom Collins, “The New Maximarketing” November, 1995
6. Aberdeen Group, “The Hidden ROI of a Cloud-based Contact Center” pg.3
7. “Most dreaded UK call centres revealed” Daily Mirror, 21st May 2015
8. Destination CRM http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/Columns-Departments/Scouting-Report/Why-Contact-
Centers-Are-Moving-to-the-Cloud-86627.aspx
9. Aberdeen Group, “The Hidden ROI of a Cloud-based Contact Center” pg.4
10. Forrester Research, “Transform the Contact Centre for Excellent Customer Service https://www.forrester.com/
Transform+The+Contact+Center+For+Customer+Service+Excellence/fulltext/-/E-res75001
11. Gartner, Market Guide for IVR Systems and Enterprise Voice Portals, 2015
12. Destination CRM http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/Columns-Departments/Scouting-Report/Why-Contact-
Centers-Are-Moving-to-the-Cloud-86627.aspx
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