PUBLIC SECTOR

Tick the boxes and ask the people

Our Deputy PM wants local councils to make contact easier for council tax payers. Paul Hartland and Colin Stebbing, of SITEL Consulting, have some advice

Question: When is a call centre not a call centre?
Answer: When it's a switchboard. Boom, boom!

A NUMBER of large central government departments have enthusiastically, if not always entirely successfully, embraced call centres as their primary method of communicating with customers.

And most local councils also support the idea of carrying out business by phone. However, many still do so through their switchboards and within compartmentalised processes.

Each year, local authorities report on their e-government activity to the Deputy Prime Minister. The 2003 returns suggest that most are either considering setting up a call centre or are in the implementation phase.

Even those who say they are in this phase, a significant proportion of the questions at our conferences comprise:

"How many people do we need?"
"What comes first -- technology or people?"
"What approach should I use for implementation -- big bang or phased?"
"Do we need CRM?"
"How can we convince the remainder of the organisation that we can efficiently deliver services for which they are currently responsible?”

The answers? It's all in the planning and execution. When looking to open a call centre, the first question to ask yourself is: "Why are we doing this?”

Perhaps the biggest potential benefit of all, though, is the availability of a single number for a customer to call, and the confidence that the first person the customer speaks to will have access to the information they need to be able to answer the question.

If we haven't already asked our customers how they feel about our services, now is perhaps a good time to do so, since this will then give us a benchmark against which to measure our call centre operation.

In order to achieve all of the potential benefits, we need firstly to understand the current workload, and factor in any known changes. Ask:

· What work do we actually carry out?
· What are the associated back office functions?
· Is there any fulfilment requirement?
· What are the possible outputs from each transaction?
· What is the impact on other departments?
· What are the interfaces with other departments, and what service level agreements do we have/need to have?
· What delivery channels do we want to support?

Most importantly, how do all of the above impact on the customer? Having defined what types of work we intend to undertake in our call centre, we need to have robust end-to-end processes in place to carry them out. Questions we need to ask at this point include:

· How do we do it now?
Is it efficient?
· How can we measure whether people are following the defined processes?

Most call centre managers understand the need to forecast call demand and plan to meet it; often overlooked is the forecasting and resourcing of non-telephone related activity.

Location for most local authorities is likely to be driven by current location and availability of space in current facilities, however suitability in terms of internal environment and external infrastructure (transport, parking) should be considered.

Having identified why, what, how many and when, we need to think about the technology we need to support our vision - as opposed to making assumptions around what we would normally expect to see in a call centre.

Where to start? Back to strategy. If strategic vision defines the direction in which the business is heading, it must also define the technology required to get there. So, our original premise - "To handle 90pc of contacts electronically by 2006" -- defines our channel strategy, and tells us we need the technology to handle e-mail and possibly web based transactions.
How do you currently manage your contacts? By reviewing what we have now, we can identify the gaps against where we want to be. The current telephony and data set up may just need some minor tweaks to allow it to perform some of today's automated functions.

For example, do we need CRM? If you are implementing CRM do you need a whole new database or is it compatible with your legacy system? Or do we simply need a database that everyone can access without the bells and whistles? This is where you may need assistance from a technology consultant - the problem with going to a salesperson is they will sell to you! What technology do you need (as opposed to would like...) to deploy to achieve your vision? To achieve the stated targets deploying the right technology is essential and this is identified through the due diligence process where contact types can be categorised into Commodity, Complex, Comfort.

The next step is to allocate technologies to the respective types. For example, commodity calls - such as checking council tax -- are easily handled by IVR.

The ultimate goal has to be to improve the customer experience whilst increasing the efficiency of your business processes, and reducing the amount of manual attention needed to complete a customer transaction.

For example, if a caller needs to know the status of a planning application, they should obtain an instant response from the advisor who answers the telephone. From the advisor's point of view they should be able to search the system by typing in an appropriate personal identifier - such as the postcode -- and obtain the information with the minimum of key strokes or mouse clicks.

This approach should enable you to stay focussed on the objectives of implementing technology and not get drawn into the detailed debates about the functionality of each piece of kit you require.

Having ticked all of the above boxes, the next big decision is, what implementation approach to choose (see chart).

Big Bang is a great low cost option for a small and uncomplicated operation, where there are fewer people to upset and there is less to go wrong.

A phased approach is a great way to reduce the risk if the operation is large and uncomplicated.
If, however, as is often the case, we are working with a complex solution based on a degree of assumption, particularly in a risk-averse culture, a pilot gives us greater opportunity to identify and resolve issues with a relatively small group of customers and staff. A model office reduces this risk even further by completely removing live customers from the equation.

Partnership is an approach rather than a true methodology in its own right, since the actual implementation options are the same regardless of whether one or more organisations are involved.

However, almost every implementation involves partnership on some level, even if this is limited to supplier relationships.

A true partnership approach with a supplier with specific call centre expertise offers unique advantages, especially if call centres are a necessary communication tool as opposed to a core part of your business.
Access to call centre expertise from the planning stage onward means that specialist experience can be brought to bear which, providing advice is heeded, results in fewer unpleasant surprises when it comes to implementation.

The final question is: "Were we successful?"

The answer will, of course, depend on how effective we were when we formulated our strategy. If we identified critical success factors, and decided how we were going to measure them, our post implementation review will rely on fact rather than opinion.

The only thing that remains is to validate whether or not we had the positive effect on our customers, our people and our cost that we planned to.

The cost comparison is a straightforward spend vs. budget calculation.

As to our customers and our people, why not ask them?!

Profiles Paul Hartland
and Colin Stebbing

SITEL Consulting is part of SITEL Corporation, whose call centres handle 2m-plus customer contacts a day.

Paul Hartland, senior consultant, held senior positions - including call centre manager - with a utility company before joining SITEL in 1996. Among his projects was to set up a 100-seat call centre. He joined SITEL Consulting in September 2000. Part of his job is to project manage for a major public sector body and he has also has been involved in a number of local authority projects. Colin Stebbing, consultant, joined SITEL Consulting in 2001. He was previously with two big field service where he managed new technology projects, business process improvement and call centre relocations. He has wide call centre experience in the public sector.

Mr Stebbing is also course director for the Certificate in Call Centre Management, validated by the Open University Validation Service.

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