Alberta Business Marketing

As manager of a number of CMA’s Marketing Councils, I am surprised when I am asked – more frequently than you’d think, “Why does the CMA have a Contact Centre Council? What do contact centres have to do with marketing?” I can tell you that members of the Contact Centre Council see themselves as marketers – and this mindset likely correlates to an organization’s bottom line.

The Contact Centre Council collaborated on an article in the most recent edition of Contact Management, and in the magazine’s editorial, Ron Glen quotes a speech by Diane Francis that I thought was bang on. She said “The industry can have the smartest advertising campaign the world has ever known, but if the people answering the phone turn the public off and cost you customers it is all for not. To think that brand management stops with billboards, newspaper ad, TV commercials... is crazy.”

I’m not sure why contact centres are often overlooked as marketing tools. How many Twitter posts have you seen complaining about a call centre experience ending with a declaration that they are switching suppliers or will never do business with that company again? On the flip side, have you ever upgraded your spend as a result of a great call centre experience? I certainly have.

I wonder how people question that a corporate function with implications to brand, customer service and relationship building, and up-selling and cross selling, does not have to do with marketing. If marketing departments are embracing the use of social media tools, why is there question as to the marketing value of a live, relationship building touch point with consumers? Am I wrong?

Perhaps you can help me: where does your contact centre fit within your organizational structure – in the marketing department, or is it an operational function? Does this affect how your organization sees call centres as marketing tools?

Tags: Contact Centre
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Many of us tend look to industry standards when we want to improve a process to enhance the client experience when it may be of little to no value to most clients.

An example of a typical industry standard is the way we traditionally measure Service Levels in contact centres. Service Level is typically a metric of answering X percentage of calls within X seconds. This is deemed as an important indicator of service delivery and it has been in place for years. When contact centres evaluate the client experience from an organizational perspective this metric is an important part as it is a measure of how fast the majority of phone calls are answered and the performance of the call centre. What this measure doesn’t truly indicate is the clients’ expectations and what is most important to them.

Another example of an industry standard is Quality Monitoring (QM). This is a process of where calls are listened to, evaluated and scored. In some organizations we tend to spend too much time developing the process from the QM evaluation form to the scoring method and how calls are selected. All of this to ensure we are delivering the best experience to the client.

In our organization we have Calibration Session on the client experience. The intention of these sessions is to align on what a great client experience should sound like. We do this by listening to customer compliments; what we found out is the standard we had for a “wow” call and what the client thought was a “wow” call were not aligned. The truth of the matter is the clients’ expectations were much lower than ours. In these calls our Associates were friendly, efficient and helped resolve the client’s inquiry on the call. Our opinion was the calls were “average” as we expected the Associates to be super-friendly and ask a few more questions on the clients’ implied needs.

So here we are internally focusing on what we thought the client expected, when in fact the clients expectations were clearly lower than our own.

What this caused us to do was simplify our Calibration Sessions to be focused on the overall experience of the client, instead of meticulously evaluating each nuance of the interaction and scoring the call. Having said this, we have not changed our expectations on the client experience. We still expect our staff to be super-friendly, ask the right questions and completely resolve the client issue.

What we learned from this is it is critical to determine what is important to our clients before building, investing time and resources in a process that is not an important factor of the service experience for our clients. Industry standards are great as a guideline. What is more important is to truly understand the needs and priorities of your clients.

By David Bradshaw, Vice President (Head) of Sales & Service, ING DIRECT. David is a member of CMA’s Contact Centre Council.

Tags: Contact Centre, Customer Experience
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A recent article in the Toronto Star struck a nerve with me. Specifically, I was very disappointed by statements made by New Democrat MP Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre) who actually expressed “loathing of telemarketers”. I was compelled to write Mr. Martin an email, which I thought I would share. Feel free to share your opinions here, or with Mr. Martin directly!

Dear Mr. Martin:

As a professional in the contact center industry, and working for a very reputable private Canadian outsourcer, I must tell you that I was both shocked and unimpressed with your comments in the above mentioned article.

To say that "They (telemarketers) really are the bottom of the food chain in terms of commercial marketing" is both untrue and very disrespectful. As an industry, Contact Centers provide some of the largest opportunities for employment in this country*, and most operate with extremely detailed internal policies and procedures to ensure that all codes of practice and government regulations are followed.

I know that in Ontario specifically, we are working very hard through various different associations and organizations, to bring to light the professionalism and opportunity that this type of work offers. As members of the Canadian Marketing Association my own organization and many others have long followed a Code of Ethics with a stringent telemarketing component and the requirement to use the association’s Do Not Contact program.

The regulatory bodies such as the CRTC are in many ways, supporting this approach through the introduction of the National DNC. To my knowledge, all reputable contact centers in Canada adhere to these and many other rules and regulations, ultimately providing a professional and seamless experience to the end user.

In this day and age, and in light of our current economic situation, I would expect that someone of your standing would understand the importance of supporting those employment verticals that provide good jobs and sound education to thousands of individuals throughout the country.

Sincerely,

Jennifer McLeod
Member of the CMA Contact Centre Council

* CMA’s 2007 study, Marketing’s Contribution to the Canadian Economy, estimated that in 2007, the employment impact of telemarketing in Canada was 159,805 jobs and the correlating sales impact was $27 Billion.

Tags: Contact Centre
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