e-touch
the human side of computing
Monday 17 March 2008, 10:04 PM
You Thought Call Centres Were Bad
E-mail is officially the UK’s worst channel for customer service - at least according to men in white coats at ‘eService’ provider Transversal. For e-business owners - and customers I suppose - this is bad news.
Transversal’s third annual ‘Multi-channel Customer Service Study’ has uncovered a growing crisis in e-mail response: e-mailing customer service staff is markedly less effective at yielding a satisfactory answer than using an automated online system or phoning a contact centre. OMG, we're all doomed!
Less than half (46%) of the routine customer service questions e-mailed to 100 leading organisations (in the banking, telecoms, insurance, travel, consumer electronics, grocery retail, fashion retail, CD/DVD retail, consumer electronics retail and utilities sectors) were answered adequately.
Additionally, the average time to respond to e-mail was nearly 2 days (46 hours), with 28% of organisations not even replying at all. What are these people being paid for? However, proving that fast, accurate responses by e-mail are possible, some companies responded with useful answers within 10 minutes. Overall these figures show a major deterioration since 2006, when e-mail successfully answered 60% of queries and kept customers waiting less time (on average 33 hours) for a reply.
The usefulness of e-mail replies has deteriorated year on year in 80% of sectors. Even though many have improved response times, this appears to be through sacrificing effectiveness of replies. For example, in 2006, utilities companies took an average of 102 hours to reply to e-mail with 70% of replies answering the question. While 2007 e-mail response times improved to 53 hours, only 15% of replies answered the question. The picture is even worse in telecoms. From 2005 to 2007, average reply time fell from 32 to 26 hours but successful answers fell from 70% to 20%. The pattern of improving response times at the expense of deteriorating answers is clearly evident.
Insurance companies came bottom of the survey: only one e-mail reply successfully answered the question and 50% of companies didn’t respond at all. The slowest response took 27 hours - and then asked the customer to call them! Utilities were nearly as bad, with only one answering the question successfully and one partially answering it. One utility even advised customers to visit third-party comparison sites to get information on current pricing. How funny is that!
Proving that fast, accurate responses are possible, in contrast 80% of CD/DVD retailers provided correct answers, with the quickest received within one hour. Fashion, grocery and electronics retailers as well as consumer electronics manufacturers also scored relatively highly - but still only around 50% of those surveyed responded satisfactorily. The fastest successful response was from a consumer electronics company which answered the question within 10 minutes. Showing the wide range of e-mail handling skills a rival company in the same sector took 13 days to respond to an identical query.
What lessons can we learn from this survey? First and foremost, don't sledgehammer your computer, it's obvious there are general failings in the customer service e-mail channel. Companies are playing ping pong with e-mail enquiries, pushing them back to the Web or forcing consumers to call contact centres. Tell me, what is the point in paying staff to respond to customers’ questions badly? With spend-thrifty consumers increasingly demanding personalised service, e-mail should be at the forefront of delivering tailored responses that help convert browsers into customers and bring in the reddies. Some organisations are doing this extremely well but the general picture is of lazy, generic replies - if companies even bother to respond ...
Too many companies simply use e-mail to push customers to other channels rather than even attempting to provide a useful answer. Inadequate replies direct customers to call a contact centre, while others push customers back to the Web site - where they started! Not only does this increase customer dissatisfaction but multiplies the number of contacts consumers need to make, with many having to telephone to resolve their enquiry.
If you run an e-business and are struggling to cope with e-mails, aim to reduce the sheer volume of e-mail you receive. A key way to accomplish this is to allow customers to first ask their questions through a customer service knowledgebase on your Web site. If customers then go on to e-mail from the knowledgebase, the agent will be able to see what they have searched for - there is then no excuse for sending customers back to the same Web site pages.
Also try to monitor the quality of responses, with a narrow focus on agents answering questions to hit service level targets rather than spending the time to properly resolve customer queries. With many contact centres outsourced this also has a financial aspect - companies that are paid a set amount for every e-mail answered have no incentive to ensure agents are providing detailed, useful responses. Equally, contact centre managers targeted purely on numbers don’t have a remit in their jobs to monitor content. Take a step back and overhaul your processes to ensure that the e-mail channel is providing what your customers want and need.
Sunday 16 March 2008, 10:46 PM
Where Have All The Women Gone?
The last day or two got me thinking, and the stack of outstanding invoices on my desk had nothing to do with it! There are not many women working in IT (marketing luvvies excluded), let alone running businesses in the sector. Why is that I wonder? Well, it’s a pretty boring industry full of geeks I guess. But there has to be more to it than that - doesn’t there?
There are actually around 620,000 majority women-owned businesses in the UK - that’s more than ever before but the number of such businesses winning corporate and public sector contracts is still shockingly low.
It’s pretty difficult for women to climb the ranks in IT, let alone run a business in the sector, as there just aren’t enough of them. As such, it can be quite hard as a woman, however talented, to win contracts. Put yourself in the place of a women for a moment. How would you like to walk through the door and there’s you and nine men after the same contract? The odds are often stacked against you...
I don’t think it’s totally dire, and the situation will change. If more women in the IT industry win contracts - and do a good job of it - then public awareness will eventually change and a virtuous circle will be created: more women will be attracted to the industry and, in turn, more women will win contracts.
One initiative that could help change this situation is WEConnect (or Women in Enterprise Connecting to Contracts), a Women’s Enterprise Task Force (WETF) scheme launched to critical acclaim at the House of Commons last month (February) - and which received strong endorsement in the Government’s recent Enterprise Strategy.
The scheme hopes to break down the barriers faced by women-owned businesses in securing corporate contracts (although 16% of UK businesses are currently women owned, only 3- to 5% of corporate and public sector contracts go to women-owned businesses).
The new initiative will put certified women business enterprises in touch with key procurement contacts in multi-national companies. This should encourage supplier diversity by giving large corporates the confidence to purchase from women-owned businesses which have achieved the WEConnect certification. Based on a successful U.S. prototype, the scheme has already signed up major corporates including Accenture, Microsoft, Bank of America and Pfizer.
I really do hope WEConnect gives women the chance to build relationships with large organisations that want to work with women-owned businesses by getting access to corporates at a level that they perhaps wouldn’t otherwise be able to. If it at least opens the right doors it’s a step in the right direction.
Interesting facts about women-owned businesses:
- There are approximately 1,013,000 self-employed women (7.6% of women in employment) and 2,706,000 self-employed men (17.4% of men in employment) in the UK. (Women’s Business Ownership, Professor Sara Carter, 2006)
- In the UK, women-owned businesses comprise approximately 16% of the business stock (1 in 5 businesses) and women comprise approximately 27% of the self-employed population. (Women's Business Ownership, Professor Sara Carter, 2006).
- In the U.S., the Women's Business Act 1988 put in place long-term infrastructure to support women's enterprise development. Since then women's business ownership has increased significantly. The growth in women’s enterprise in the U.S. has been aided by Federal recognition of its importance and a sustained commitment to its development over a 30-year period. Although there have been remarkable policy developments in the UK over the past five years, it will take sustained commitment to ensure an equivalent level of development in women’s enterprise within the UK. (Women's Business Ownership, Professor Sara Carter, 2006).
- If the UK could achieve the same levels of female entrepreneurship as the U.S., Britain would gain three quarters of a million more businesses (Gordon Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Advancing Enterprise Conference, 04.02.05).
- If women started businesses at the same rate as men, we would have 150,000 extra start-ups each year (Rt Hon Jacqui Smith, Minister for Women and Equality speaking at 2nd Prowess conference, 2005).
- The most entrepreneurial age group for females is 35 - 44 (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, London Business School, February 2006).
Tuesday 11 March 2008, 2:13 PM
Flood Season: Top Tips On Keeping Your Business Above Water
It’s this time of year when the winds and rain hurl their best at us. So here’s a practical guide on how your business can avoid becoming a victim of the floods (relocating abroad isn't an option...)
1. Make sure you have all relevant contact details for members of staff. The main lesson that came out of the flooding conference, that most staff lists were out of date and defunct in many cases.
2. Make sure you are aware of any medical requirements which people may have.
3. Ascertain the impact of both a potential loss of water and a loss of electricity on your business activities and respond accordingly. Should I stockpile water? Should I purchase an electricity backup generator?
4. Accept the fact that your company will not be high up the priority list of the emergency services and consider any measures which should be taken in light of this.
5. Stockpile key items on site (in a safe location not on the ground floor). These might include water, food, bedding, torches, medical equipment, soap etc.
6. If I have set up an emergency hotline facility in advance make sure that all staff are aware of this and carry the number on them (either put into their mobile telephone or carried on a separate card).
7. Provide all staff with a brief summary of the main points of the BCM plan that will affect them e.g., who is in control, what are the key contact numbers, details of rallying points etc.
8. Consider setting up a series of mobile telephones on different networks which are stored permanently in the office. If one network goes down you may be able to communicate on another network.
9. Make sure that you are aware of and, where necessary, signed up to all relevant information channels.
10. If key documents or IT servers are stored in the basement consider moving them to a higher floor to avoid damage from flooding.
It is worth noting that most companies impacted by floods tend to agree that communicating with staff off-site during a crisis was the biggest problem they faced. Floods can expose the inadequacies of communication channels used during an emergency. Most companies affected by floods rely on mobile phone networks to contact off-site staff and this over-reliance can lead to network failure.
Difficulties can also be experienced when staff members sought to contact family members and are unable to do so. In such circumstances, some can be unsure whether to let staff return home to confirm that their families were safe given the risks the floods posed.
On a cross-company level, communications with head office are also likely to be disrupted, making it difficult to either update senior figures on the current status of a particular location and also to receive direction/guidance on what to do. This lack of communication can result in different divisions within the company communicating different messages to staff leading to much confusion.
Thursday 21 February 2008, 1:23 PM
All hail dark fibre: the bandwidth saviour?
I think it’s fair to say that the ever increasing popularity of social networking Web sites and TV (video) over the Web are contributing heavily to our small island’s bandwidth problems.
Breath... And relax... A North West-based outfit called H2O Networks is hailing dark fibre as the solution. Dark fibre offers unlimited bandwidth connectivity yet surprisingly no carriers are willing to sell it.
Dark fibre is fibre optic cable that has been laid for use by telecoms networks, but which is not used. There are a number of reasons why fibre may remain dark: ill-judged over-investment in capacity (this was particularly bad during the dotcom boom); deliberate planning for future growth. My money’s on the former...
Deliberate building of excess capacity happens because of the difficulties involved in laying fibre optic cables: digging up the ground (or even worse, running cables through oceans) is very expensive (but more importantly I have to keep moving my Jeep!), so there is every reason to lay more than you need immediately, in order not to have to do it again in the near future. Dark fibre is sometimes sold, the buyers presumably having plans to make it ‘lit’.
H2O Networks is flying the flag for take up of dark fibre and is offering a unique local fibre service for £699 per month with no connection fee, offering virtual ownership of the fibre and a future-proofed network for at least the next ten years. And, regardless of your bandwidth requirements 100Mbps, 200Mbps or Gigabit, the price remains the same. Additional fibres will be charged at an incredible price of 0.25p.
Dark fibre is much overlooked, but is it a totally viable solution to solve the UK’s bandwidth needs? BT set the bandwidth tariff about 30 years ago and not only is it hugely expensive, it is also extremely restrictive. No-one could have predicted the current levels of demand for bandwidth, so does the future lie with dark fibre? H2O Networks uses a Fibre Optical Cable Underground Sewer System (FS) to deploy its cable via the UK’s sewer network. The company works with organisations to build bespoke networks while staying in line with its ethos of low cost leasing with no uplift charge on bandwidth.
The company says the low cost platform provided by FS can be implemented 80% faster than traditional methods and there is no need for the complex negotiations that come with getting the permission to dig up the roads and pavements. As existing networks become increasingly congested with cables of all types, it has become much more difficult for network companies to find new pathways.
The cost advantages of an H2O network mean that not only is it cheaper to install, but it offers a fixed term cost rather than bandwidth tariffs. The bandwidth is hugely scalable so should will cope with the evolution of technology and the capacity this will eat up for the foreseeable future. Apparently, every city and town has ready-made ducts that can be used without causing disruption. An additional advantage is that the cables lie at depths of up to 5m below the ground, compared with 450mm for conventional cables, making it far more secure.
I really do like the idea of no restriction on bandwidth and the fact that the customer is firmly in control with the ability to upgrade at any time.
Wednesday 20 February 2008, 2:42 PM
Harvard Uni Hack Made Me Smile
Monday's report on Harvard University’s Web site being seriously hacked - with copies of the main server database appearing on a BitTorrent file-sharing network - is a cautionary tale for anyone involved with IT security issues. It’s also pretty funny (sorry!).
Although it remains to be seen what Harvard’s IT department has to say about the site hack (its media office has been embarrassingly quiet of late), it looks like the hackers got everything from the University’s servers, including information from the back office and system file data that is not normally accessible to the public. The compressed 125MB file is said to include contacts details, as well as other files associated with Joomla, the open-source content management system. It’s currently doing the rounds on The Pirate Bay.
So how did this happen? Easy. The University didn’t use a data encryption system on its most sensitive files. If it did, the systematic site hack would probably not have occurred. The worst that could have happened is that the publicly-accessible Web site could have been downloaded and distributed, which is no big deal for anyone.
Database losses and hacks can, and do occur, often through human error, but the Harvard University hack apparently involves the complete site database - allegedly including hidden system files. This is a potentially worse-case scenario for any IT director as it means the complete site, right down to its root-and-branch structure, and, presumably, all system files, can be downloaded and cloned by just about anyone on the Internet. I'm about to try it...
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