Why should a retail contact centre be given attention?

This report endeavours to provide tips and recommendations to ensure that your retail contact centre is working as effectively as it can. Improvements will increase your caller’s satisfaction levels, provide a more user-friendly, productive resource, improve your customer service delivery and employees morale and set you apart from your competitors. These improvements lead to an increase in sales and reputation.

This report is based upon the conclusions of a retail contact centre study, which used a management theory and interaction research framework. The study included listening to live and recorded interactions across a range of services and producing detailed transcripts.

Training documentation and procedures were also taken into consideration as well as discussions with operators and supervisors.

Why should a retail contact centre be given attention?

• If a retail contact centre is the first point of communication between a customer and a retail organisation then the agent becomes the ‘mouthpiece of the organisation’, holding responsibility for the impression given and the quality of service for the customer. A retail organisation’s reputation and value is under examination with every agent a customer talks to so any interaction should be as effective as possible.
  
  
• For the retail sector it is of primary importance to ensure that call centre interaction addresses callers’ needs efficiently and effectively. Call centre agents can be dealing with a range of products and services, therefore it is important that they are properly equipped with the interactional tools they will require- for example well organised scripts. This will result in a service that is user-friendly for both a call centre agent and the consumer. This will in turn improve customer service, increasing the level of customer satisfaction, which will result in an increase in sales.

The Call Centre Industry-

There has been an increase in academic literature concerning call centres during the last decade, due to the massive growth in the industry as a whole, which looks set to continue. One research report estimates that between 2010 and 2013 the number of call centres in the UK is expected to increase from 6254 to 7038- an 11% increase (Market Review 2004-2008, accessed 21st June 2009). However, surprisingly, there has been little research with a focus on language despite call centre work being reliant on verbal interaction between agent and caller. It is important to ensure that customer-agent interaction is of the highest quality in order to retain a competitive edge.

However, surprisingly, there has been little research with a focus on language despite call centre work being reliant on verbal interaction between agent and caller. It is important to ensure that customer-agent interaction is of the highest quality in order to retain a competitive edge.

There is an increasing backlash towards contact centres in alternative geographical locations to the actual organisations they represent, particularly against contact centres located overseas, this commonly taking place for the purpose of reducing costs. This is directly related to-

• The lack of research into the level of English required. Actual call centre interactions are rarely analysed, leading to training programs for accents and grammar leaving agents poorly equipped to deal with the range of calls that they will be receiving.

Many companies now make use of the fact that they have British-based call centres as a marketing tool.

For British-based bureau contact centres it is important that impression management is carefully handled. Agents can then act as representatives of an organisation as effectively as possible. It is a common general public belief that retail contact centre interaction is a frustrating and confusing activity so it is important to develop any solutions that can help to change this.

Key findings

1. ‘Discourse Technologisation’-

We live in an age of ‘discourse technologisation’ (Fairclough 2003), meaning the increased awareness of language and the effects it can produce. Consideration and emphasis is increasingly placed on ‘customer-employee’ interaction. The shaping of customer- employee interaction is called ‘styling the worker’ (Cameron 2000).

‘Styling the worker’ in the retail contact centre industry is most commonly achieved through

• Training procedures
• Frequent monitoring
• Scripting to standardise and manage the agents delivery of language

The language used by agents in retail contact centres is used to gather customer information relevant to the topic of the call and ultimately complete the interaction. If a script is provided for the agents it is one of the most, if not the most, important way of projecting a retail organisation’s values.

Script Construction -

Issue: Scripted parts of calls are delivered in a different way to unscripted language. For example, when going through an extended piece of script agents tend to rush this and deliver it in a monotonous tone. This can be registered by the caller and leads to an ‘unnatural’ conversation.

Recommendation: Unless strictly necessary, scripted interaction should be limited and, where required, agents should be monitored to ensure they are interacting in the most natural way possible. During the closing moves of a script- also indicated by agents’ tone, pace of voice and lexical choice (i.e. alright then, well), it is not of benefit to put any important or extended amount of information relevant to the customer. This is because they are also in the process of closing down the conversation. Closing moves are often heard as general practice and not registered as containing anything of real significance.

Issue: As scripts are written, a formal version of English is often used, when in reality, speakers probably wouldn’t choose to speak in this way. When conversations are broken down and examined it is often the most mundane features that move an interaction forward successfully.

Recommendation: To carefully consider the language used in the construction of scripts. It would also be beneficial to spend a significant amount of time listening to the scripts being used ‘live’ with a focus on how the interaction seems to flow after certain stages of the script and particular ‘hot spots’ of information delivery. It is important to do this, whether you use an in-house retail contact centre or whether you choose to out-source.
Out-sourcing holds an advantage here, as they are more likely to be able to invest the time and hold expertise in this area.

Issue: The agents are crucial for whether they believe scripts sound natural, because they are using them most. The research also reflected that customers are less likely to respond to artificial formality leading to a decrease in rapport throughout the exchange- a factor crucial to an enjoyable customer experience.

Recommendation: When creating scripts it is of benefit to not only consider the goal of the exchange but also the caller profile and the retail organisation’s target markets. In everyday, spontaneous interaction, we are constantly adapting our speech due to whom we are interacting with. Although it is impossible to tailor a script for each individual caller it would be possible to use features that would be relevant to certain types of groups.

Issue: Agents being asked questions that they are not equipped to deal with leads to stress on their behalf and inconvenience for the caller. It also provides the most obvious indications that the agent is not a direct employee of the retail organisation.

Recommendation: If a retail organisation chooses to outsource, it is very important that they supply their selected call centre provider with the most comprehensive background information about their service as possible. Any information that is not included in the script will be accessible in an FAQ section. Equally, if this information changes at any point, it is important that the retail organisation informs their contact centre to allow for the update of the FAQ section.

2. ’Constructed personalisation’

‘Constructed personalisation’ refers to the artificial relationship that is constructed between agent and caller during an exchange. Call centre work also involves ‘emotional labour’2 (Hochschild 1983) from the agents. Sometimes emotional labour can be an expression of performed emotions as opposed to genuine emotions. If not managed carefully, this can lead to an increase in stress on the worker and after longer periods of time, it can lead to emotional dissonance³.

Issue: Agents often prefer calls where they are required to perform a higher level of emotional engagement as this is more likely to allow for self-expression. If a caller has a problem, the agents genuinely empathise and wish to help and prefer this to the straight-forward data capturing. This aspect greatly contributes to their job satisfaction, which in turn improves the quality of the rest of the calls they will take during the day.

Recommendation: It is clear that agents feel the empathy that would be desired by management, although it does not seem to be the case that this has to be specifically engendered in the agents. Instead it appears that the agents draw on interpersonal skills already possessed before it was required in a professional capacity. This highlights that recruitment and selection processes are vital in selecting employees that already hold these soft skills.

Issue: Sometimes agents draw on emotional labour to protect their inner identities and maintain impartiality. Through mentally registering the fact that they hold an institutional identity this leads to an increased ability to be able to deal with emotionally intense calls. Understandably, when callers push agents capacity to feel empathy over the limit, this actually decreases the help agents are willing to give.

Recommendation: Supervisory staff should be aware of the level of emotional demands placed on agents and these need to be effectively managed. If not, then it will have a direct impact on the agent’s attitude, which will inevitably have an impact on the calls they take.

3. ‘Striking the Balance’

Agents are not solely responsible for the emotional labour that they perform through the display and management of emotion. It is a common misconception that it can be decided what degree of rapport an agent displays. Because interaction is a joint activity it is the responsibility of both the agent and caller to determine the level of emotional reciprocity⁴

It is important that agents are effective at ‘reading’ people-

• Rapport-building is often seen as an important aspect of an agent’s skills. This is difficult to achieve without adapting stricter scripts that only focus on data capturing. Agents being given more independence through unscripted interaction, supported by monitoring and training, will allow rapport to be created more effectively. This would also limit the affect of ‘cargo syndrome’ (Jefferson and Lee 1992) 5, which can make the customer feel as though they are not being treated with care. It is important to consider that language is a system of choices, not a system of rules: language and soft skills are inextricably linked.
• Rapport-building limits the affect of ‘cargo syndrome’ (Jefferson and Lee 1992) 5, which can make the customer feel as though they are not being treated with care. It is important to consider that language is a system of choices, not a system of rules: language and soft skills are inextricably linked. Furthermore, if rapport has been successfully created callers are far more likely to accept an up-sell or to consider additional purchases.
• Where agents are heavily restricted by scripts and the data capturing process, callers repeatedly attempt to give information before it is required. To combat this, agents have to draw upon their institutional identity, which allows them greater rights to influence the order of the call. At this point, phrases such as ‘We will be getting to that stage of the call shortly/ If I could just take your name first’ prove most effective, in extreme cases a slight increase in volume on the part of the agent increases the likelihood of speakership.
   
• Over familiarity can be as damaging as indifference. Callers do not expect to be treated as though they are a personal friend of an agent they have had no previous social interaction with, yet at the same time, do not wish to speak to an agent who sounds like an automated machine. It is important to ensure that scripts and agents ensure an effective achievement of striking the balance.

Conclusion

In summary, this report was produced with the aim of improving retail contact centre interaction - the recommendations provided and the issues discussed are all directly associated with this.

At Direct Response we are constantly monitoring and improving the services we provide in order to ensure that we remain a market leader in this field. For more information about the services we can provide and how we could help your organisation, please contact our business development team on: