Just a short UK based blog today.

As you all *May* (Oh the awful pun) be aware, we in the UK have a General Election coming up in the next couple of weeks

From a personal point of view I think the right to vote (franchise) is one of the underpinning tenets of UK Democracy (Cue guffaws).

Without getting into my personal viewpoint or personal politics I was err… surprised by the results from the site below.

Who Should you Vote for?

As a personal observation I do work on the basis that if you don’t vote you’ve thrown away the right to complain for the next 5 years (not that I whinge about anything.)

Also there may not be anything you want to vote for, but there will always be something you want to vote against.

So use the vote you have, make time, or if all else fails you still have time to register for a postal vote (just)

DaveA

It’s been a little while since my last article here - I’ve been pretty busy with a new venture, trying to get it up and running and at the same time taking a little bit of a break from call centre matters. However, in my absence something really pressing has come up that I couldn’t resist basing this article upon.

This pressing something is the rise of call centre fraud, which has become particularly evident where offshore call centres have been involved. I’ve taken a little flak in my time from some people who seem to think that I’m anti-outsourcing. This isn’t true, though I do feel that outsourcing is often used too readily in the call centre when a more considered approach might be wise. However, I digress. Fraud in the call centre.

Yahoo News reports that outsourced, offshore call centre employees at Mphasis BPO have allegedly stolen £200,000 from the accounts of their customers, predominantly US-based. They have allegedly used the personal details of select customers to orchestrate the theft, and to-date despite the best efforts of the East Indian police, the vast majority of the money has not been recovered.

Earlier this year, another call centre in India suffered a similar outbreak of employee fraud, and several arrests were made.

Security is an ever-increasing concern for all companies making use of outsource call centres. It is those same companies responsibility to ensure that the outsource call centres are reputable and secure. However, it’s becoming clear that mismatches in regulation, business procedure and management are exposing customers’ personal information to the risks of misuse.

In the UK, much is made of information regulation. The Data Protection Act requires companies dealing with personal data to maintain certain standards and shoulder certain responsibilities over the way they treat personal and financial information. However, it would appear that there are (from the UK perspective, but probably more widespread) loopholes and regulatory failings which fail to cover these overseas outsourced contact centres.

Prevention is better than cure

It’s all very well talking about the effectiveness of monitoring and policing within outsource call centres, but it is up to us to ensure that whichever outsource call centres we use adhere to the very highest levels of security. If an offshore call centre cannot meet the most stringent security measures, then we should move to one that can. Price should take second place to security where personal and financial information is to be outsourced.

It saddens me that the sterling work of the great many outsource call centres is tarnished by the actions of a few ruthless and dishonest individuals whose actions create customer distrust and resistance.

John

I know a man who can….

As this is a family site all the swear words have been deleted from the following story. It’s been a while since I’ve blogged anything but things have been a bit hectic. This one isn’t really Call Centre related but I thought the general ideas might apply.

A couple of months ago I organised a surprise party for a friend of mine, using a local pub in Watford I hadn’t been to recently. It had the advantage of being easy to get to and having a separate function room.

Whilst sorting out the details with the (new) landlord the conversation go onto entertainment and Audo Visual.

From this I ended up offering (with assistance from a friend who’s a sparks) to install and align an old 3 gun video projector in the bar. Not a problem, I’ve not used this particular model before but the principal is the same for all of them.

We arranged to go in on Good Friday to hang the projector and do the alignment. Now I haven’t done one for a few years but I’ve probably done 50-60 in the past. OK I think, ‘This’ll take 3-4 hours’, and so it should have.

This was where the fun started.

In the weeks before I’d had fun getting a remote control so I could get the alignment grid up and trying to obtain a manual. In the end I ended up with a copy in PDF format for the next model up but no problem there. For what it’s worth Seleco’s customer service is non-existent. I’d say bad, but I couldn’t even get a reply let alone an answer off of them.

So we get to site.

And the projector is already on the ceiling. Ah…

The landlord had thought he’d help by putting it, and the screen up in advance. So I spent four hours trying to align the projector using every trick I could remember o make it work.

As a technical note, the screen size and alignment is VERY dependant on the distance and angle from screen to the MIDDLE of the projector.

Now here’s the diplomacy in action. How do you explain that the down angle should be 12 degrees and he’d set it to 20+; also the throw distance should be about 8′ for the screen size and it was nearly 12. The screen top was also higher than the guns rather than level with.

Having had a crash course in projector alignment my colleague (the sparks) went back last weekend and spent another 4 hrs moving it nearer the screen, changing the height and re-aligning as I’m in Manchester and not down every weekend.

So he moral of the story I suppose is.

Sometimes it may be a simple job but it can cause problems down the line. You may be able to do part of the job but what impact is that going to have?

Whilst it added problem s the landlord thought at the time he was helping but in effect he wasted a day of our time trying to work around the problem that wouldn’t have existed if he’d let us fly the thing in the first place.

At the end of the first day the mantra was “Why didn’t he just let us hang it?”

As an additional note does anyone have a manual for a Seleco SVT150?

I suppose this applies to all trades, how many tradesmen are making a living off of DIY disasters? So it’s not bad news for all.

DaveA

We’re not usually in the business of promoting services or products here - in fact most of us feel more at home when we’re rubbishing them. I think that’s what they call a British thing…

Anyway, I stumbled across something a couple of months ago that I think is quite good and I’m going to share it with you. I don’t know if the concept will ever take off and prove worth the money, but as I said, it’s cool.

Webgreeter.com
It’s called www.webgreeter.com and it’s a service that provides a live chat connection between the website user and an agent. Nothing new there really - web chat and collaborative browsing have been around for a while and as yet haven’t proven to be that popular. Why this is remains to be seen - although I believe that the problem is mainly due to sale reps not being aware of the capability of the systems available (One reason why business development should use the skills of consultants more)

The difference with webgreeter is that rather than wait for the customer to request live chat with an agent, you automatically open the session after the user has been at the site for a pre-determined period. Say one or two minutes. The philosophy behind this is that most users tend to leave the site within a couple of minutes, probably because they couldn’t immediately find the information that they were looking for. The idea is to catch them just as they are about to leave and ensure that they got what they were after.

Pushy?
At first this seems a little forward - but it is something that we already see in the real world. Often when you walk into a shop for a browse you get jumped on by a salesman. Annoying as it seems, this dialogue can convert a sale where a customer was too shy to ask, or where a customer misunderstood the service or product on offer. Furthermore, if handled correctly it can be very good customer service - although the line between customer service and sales is sometimes more grey than an accountants suit.

So the style of greeting is essential - but due to the technology this is easy to control. It’s also easy to capture and assess the conversations at a later date for training purposes.

Chat on the Internet…
…is now widely accepted - especially by people who are quite “shy” in standard society. The fact that it’s slower and more fraught with difficulties such as mis-understanding and identity confusion doesn’t seem to bother most people. I’ve working with many who’d much rather send an email than ask a question face to face or on the phone.

I never click on the chat button on a website - just the same as I rarely ever go and ask an assistant a question in a shop. However if I’m prompted I’m often quite happy for a conversation, and this usually ends up with me getting more useful information that I would have done otherwise, even if I was a little resistant to begin with.

Regardless of if the technology is “pushed” as webgreeter is, or a orthodox “push a button to chat” setup, I think we’ll finally see more of this in the years to come. Hopefully we’ll start to see many true multi-channel contact centres, where agents are automatically fed calls, sms, email, scanned paper or webchat depending on priority and queue time.

Regards,
DB