Paul Scott is an advisor and director at Digital Village, General Manager at Evergreen Digital and co-author of the book Beyond Agile – How to run smarter, faster and less wasteful projects. But it is his experience creating the Middle East’s leading outsourced call centre operation and building a customer services organisation for over 200 million customers in India which informs his thoughts on developing and managing an organisation’s customer experience. He believes many marketers are overlooking one of the richest sources of customer data, their call centre.
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Transcription:
Darren:
Welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.
Today, I’m sitting down with Paul Scott, Advisor and Director at Digital Village, General Manager at Evergreen Digital, and co-author of the book Beyond Agile: How To Run Faster, Smarter and Less Wasteful Projects. Projects or project, Paul? Welcome, Paul.
Paul:
It’s projects for me, of course, because I’m English.
Darren:
Of course.
Paul:
It’s probably, projects for everybody else. But yeah, thank you. Good to be here, Darren.
Darren:
Well, look and thank you for taking the time or making the time, especially during a pandemic to sit down and have a conversation, particularly about the role of customer experience and customer service. And in an area that you’ve had extensive experience, especially I see in the sub-continent in the Middle East, and that is call centres.
How did you find yourself developing this sort of call centre technology management in of all places, the Middle East and India?
Paul:
Yeah, it’s a good question, Darren. And I think the honest answer is it was an accident and I think that I ended up working in these strange foreign places because there was probably nobody else in the business who wanted to do it, or there was nobody else who was dumb enough to pick up what looked like ridiculous impossible projects and was prepared to give it a go.
But that said, I was very privileged to be able to work with an extraordinary group of people at Dimension Data and Merchants, the call centre and outsourcing specialists. And they just gave me this opportunity to go and work in places like Bahrain, Mumbai, the Philippines, the USA and Europe, and a little bit of work in Australia as well, which gave me the opportunity to learn more about this country too.
Darren:
Well, that is interesting. And the reason I say how did it happen is that I don’t know many people that graduate from university or are enjoying a working career, and then suddenly go, “You know what, I think I’m going to specialise in customer experience, particularly call centres.” Because a lot of people have very negative attitudes towards call centres, don’t they?
Paul:
And I was one of those people. I think that growing up and in my early twenties, call centres were just becoming a thing. And I was very frustrated with the poor quality of service that I got from call centres. But the beginning part of my career was in marketing in the manufacturing sector and then in the IT sector.
And then I gravitated towards management consultancy and specifically into the call centre area. So, I wish I could say that there was a plan to it, but there wasn’t. But I do think that the years that I spent in marketing really gave me an opportunity to understand this gap that there is between customer service and marketing.
Which I’ve always struggled to understand because marketers are obsessed with understanding customers and wanting to know what are customers thinking, and what they’re doing, and how they can put together a proposition that’s going to meet their needs.
And customer services managers are absorbing this and trying to deliver a service against those customer needs on a daily basis. And as you know, they gather a lot of information and a huge amount of data now around customers’ perceptions, their feedback, how they think, and what their needs and wants are.
And my observation was that there seemed to be this kind of disconnect where every meeting I ever had with a marketing director, talking about what we were trying to do with a customer service operation, they didn’t seem to appreciate what was there and what was possible in terms of gathering insights and information from this extraordinary resource that is usually one of the most expensive operational costs in a business and employees usually in ─ well, particularly in the services sector, a large number of people.
Darren:
Because often, within the organisation, the call centre is controlled or managed outside of the marketing function, isn’t it?
Paul:
Indeed.
Darren:
I mean, an outbound call centre would be part of sales, for instance, whereas inbound call centres are often part of customer service or even sales as well. I mean, it’s very hard to generalise, but there’s inbound and outbound, and the two have quite different functions, don’t they?
Paul:
Yes, and I think it’s changed over time. I mean, certainly, we’ve just had the 20th anniversary of the internet and when the internet was developing, call centres were beginning to play a role in servicing customers that were beginning to transact electronically as well. And it’s obvious that there’ve been a number of instances and we came across this in Merchants during the mid to late two thousands.
That often, a CTO would be given responsibility for call centres because of lots of technology but also, a lot of people. And one of the examples I think I gave you, Darren, was that the time we worked with a large online travel business where the IT director was actually responsible for customer service. And we were really puzzled as to why that was the case.
But when we sat down with him and talked about what he was doing, it became obvious that he saw the way in which they were interacting with customers across multiple channels as being the reason why it made sense for the head of technology to be managing it.
And the CTO in question came up with this phrase, which has stuck with me ever since, which is he said “There are three things that I know about customers as a result of working with the call centre people now. And that is number one, the customer is rarely if ever right. And I know that to be true because I’ve got the data to prove it. “ And the data that, of course, he was gathering across customer interactions on the internet was the data that was basically providing insight around what customers really need and want.
And he was very, very scathing and sceptical about the use of things like customer focus groups and undertaking commission research with customers because he felt that you weren’t getting truthful answers from customers. There was a lot of group-think behind it, particularly in focus group situations. So, his belief was that the customer is rarely if ever right. And the reason is that we’ve got the data to prove it.
His second point was: “I love it when customers complain because every time a customer complains and picks up the phone, there’s an opportunity to learn more about what’s broken in the customer journey because they were usually phoning up when they couldn’t complete a booking or the tickets didn’t arrive, or they couldn’t find what they were looking for.”
So, he obsessively gathered qualitative information around the customer experience as well, to use that to improve what they did. And then you had an army of data scientists who were looking at the data in relation to how customers were moving through their application and then using this overlay of what customers were actually telling him about their experience.
The third thing was he said the other reason why he loved it when customers complained was that he knew if they could actually resolve the customer’s query, that customer would spend 12% per annum more than a customer that didn’t complain or didn’t get through to them to voice their complaint.
And he said on that basis alone, there was the business case for them to employ 5,000 people globally answering the telephone, in customer service, which was an astonishing insight for me.
I mean, it’s the first time I’d come across this extraordinary combination of data that they were gathering online, plus the data that they were gathering through the call centre, and using it in this way to actually drive improvements in the business and profitable growth.
Darren:
Paul, it’s interesting that third point, especially, because one of the big complaints that people have about the purely online experience is that you often feel that there is no one listening. When something goes wrong in the e-commerce shopping process, there is no one to talk to, or there’s a bot to chat to. The bot’s just responding to whatever you type in a pretty programmed way.
Call centres for all of the perceived nastiness about it, about being harassed or being put on hold or whatever, at least you’re talking to a human being, and that they can offer some level of empathy and belief that you’re being listened to as a customer.
So, of course, if you have that experience, you’re going to reward the business and the brand for listening to you. It’s part of traditional customer service, isn’t it?
Paul:
It is. And it has profound benefits for organizations who buy into the idea that it’s a good thing to be encouraging customers to call.
One of Australia’s most successful internet service providers is iiNet, and we worked with iiNet from the mid two thousands onwards. They’re still a customer of Dimension Data and NTT. And their CEO, Mike Malone was one of the early advocates of Net Promoter Score.
And Net Promoter Score is really the only KPI that has a measurable outcome on the profitability and the loyalty of customers. So, Net Promoter Score for those who are not familiar with it, I’m guessing the majority of your audience will be ─ Net Promoter Score is a measure from 0 through to 10.
And it’s based on asking one question with a follow-up. And the one question is based on the experience that you’ve just had with our company, on a scale of 0 through to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague? And if you score a nine-
Darren:
And why?
Paul:
Well, that’s the follow-up. So, the follow-up question is can you explain why you’ve given us this score? So, there, you’ve got it. You’ve got the qualitative and the quantitative information in a nutshell, in one conversation.
And organisations who take the verbatim comments that customers provide in that scenario and do something we call closing the loop in the call centre world, take that information, understand why the customer’s given us this score. So, if it’s something that’s in the sort of one to six category, you know you’ve got a serious problem, and fix that problem.
And then go back to the customer and say, “Thank you for your feedback. We would like to explain to you what action we’ve taken to try and improve that experience the next time around. And we’d be very keen to get your feedback on that as well, of course.”
So, Mike Malone started implementing this in the early two-thousands. And his belief was that if you could do this consistently, you would reduce customer churn and you would improve the number of instances of customers coming back for more. And you would improve the number of customers who would recommend to other customers. And he was proved right.
I mean, iiNet was the most profitable ISP in Australia year after year after year. And their Net Promoter Scores were consistently in the high fifties, early sixties. In fact, probably beyond the sixties at one stage as well. And that led them to be … when they were acquired eventually by TPG, they were still the most successful business in the ISP world from a profitability standpoint (where they are now, I’m not sure).
But I think that for me, was validation that there is real value in combining the qual and the quant, and using it in a way which is actually going to improve customer experience and the processes in the business.
Darren:
Well, Net Promoter Scores have become almost ubiquitous in many different companies. Boards and CEOs are sitting there looking at their Net Promoter Score. And we hear stories about certain categories ─ I heard once that financial services often track around in the minus results because I think a lot of the time, they’re actually applied in quite a flawed way. And I’ll give you an example.
I went to make an online purchase, which is basically searching, choosing the product, clicking on it to put it in the basket, clicked on checkout, went through … there was nothing extraordinary about it. You know, it was all up to me just to navigate their system. And as soon as I hit pay and the transaction was done, it came up with, we’d like to ask you how that experience was.
Now, why? Because the whole reason I purchased something was to actually receive it. I get that they have very little control over the logistics of Australia Post or whoever is delivering it to me. But at that moment, there was nothing exceptional about the experience that I hadn’t had a hundred other times buying products.
And so, I think Net Promoter has become almost overused or used in the wrong circumstances.
Paul:
Well, it’s used in the wrong circumstances or implemented incorrectly. So, I would say probably 7 out of 10 of the implementations of Net Promoter Score are not done correctly. And the reasons why are exactly the kinds of reasons that you’ve just described, which is implemented in the wrong way and without any context, not using the correct scores.
I mean, the number of times I’ve seen people score it 1 to 10, rather than 0 to 10, I’ve lost count of, and also recognising that actually there are two types of Net Promoter Score. There’s a relationship-based Net Promoter Score, which asks the question either once a year or perhaps twice a year; how are you feeling about our business? On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us?
And then there is a process or transactional Net Promoter Score, which basically is seeking to get feedback on stages of the customer journey. And that is the one that is probably the worst in terms of consistency of results because it’s not implemented correctly or it’s out of context. And the customer’s not clear why you’re being asked the question at this particular moment, because you haven’t completed the transaction, and you haven’t received the goods. Why are you asking me this question now?
So, I used to advise organisations to think very, very carefully about implementing Net Promoter Score in this sort of stage of the customer journey, because it can easily be … they’ll start giving some really false results and not really add any value.
And also, begin to put customers off, because why are you asking me this question now? I haven’t even got the goods. Let me see what you’re going to deliver for me, then I’ll tell you whether it was a good experience or not?
Darren:
Exactly. Did it turn up broken? Well, that’s not our problem because we dispatched it unbroken, it’s not our fault that the logistics company didn’t get it to you in time.
You quite rightly pulled me up on the point that the first is on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend? And then the question is and why, please explain why you gave that score.
But I’ve also noticed that quite a number of call centres in the mobile world are saying, “Would you mind staying on the line for a very short survey?” And then it’ll say to me, “Please give a score where 10 is absolutely and 0 is not at all by pushing the keypad.” And then it hangs up on you, as soon as you give that score. Now, in some ways, this is putting numbers out of context, isn’t it?
Paul:
It is putting numbers out of context. And again, it’s this kind of temptation that everybody has to take an established process and say, “Oh, I think we could improve on that. I think we can … yeah, we can improve on that. Let’s make it 1 to 5 rather than 0 to 10.” Well, that’s not going to help because all you’re doing is basically twisting the original idea into something that you think is going to be better.
But very rarely is. We’ll probably have the same conversation around agile. It’s just people cannot help themselves, but look at a process and say, we can improve on that. The fact that there’s nearly 20 years’ worth of data backing up the Net Promoter Score approach of 0 through to 10 with the follow-up question, why would you think you could improve on that?
I mean, 30,000 businesses around the world are using it, it’s working okay. Let’s just stick to what we know. And actually, when you’re trying to do this comparison, benchmarking is another thing that call centres are obsessed with because it’s obviously a measure of how you’re doing against your peers or call centres of the same size.
So, if you don’t have a benchmark, which is using the same measurement framework, you can’t really compare yourselves in a meaningful way to any of your competitors.
Darren:
Yeah, I actually read once that the modern term “benchmark” came from call centre technology because they were capturing huge amounts of data, such as the duration on call, number of hang-ups, number of people at home-
Paul:
Call length.
Darren:
Yeah, call length. All that sort of stuff was being captured, and this became a benchmark. But in actual fact, it’s a bit like on one side, what gets measured gets managed, but the other is not everything that can be measured is actually meaningful. Because I’ve also read that those benchmarks have changed or what’s measured has changed.
Darren:
Hugely.
Paul:
Because they’re starting to realise that getting people off the call, getting customers off the call is not necessarily a good thing.
Paul:
It’s absolutely right. And look, I mean, I think the industry has gone through a massive evolution there because 20 years ago, call centres typically would have between a hundred and 150 different KPIs that they’d be tracking and reporting on. And it drove the wrong kind of experience. And consequently, you would have a bad customer experience.
When call centres began going offshore in the sort of 2007, 2008 onwards, the customer experience has got worse and worse. I mean, how many times have you either heard from somebody or said yourself, “Oh God, I was on that call … I think, I think it was in the Philippines, or it might’ve been in India, but anyway, it wasn’t a very good experience?”
It’s not because those people are doing a bad job, usually, it’s because they’re being managed in the wrong way. And they’re being driven by a set of metrics, which are not meaningful anymore.
The call centres who’ve embraced a more customer-centric approach will do away with the majority of those 150 measures and just focus on the ones which are actually important around customer experience, which is why Net Promoter Score became so popular because it addressed probably another 20 KPIs that were in place beforehand.
Darren:
And the other thing that we’ve noticed in marketing is that with this move to e-commerce and the customer experience becoming increasingly online, marketers are increasingly asked to be taking responsibility for customer experience.
And the point that you made earlier, it’s interesting that there’s not, it doesn’t appear to be a huge move of marketers interested in call centres. But I would also say there’s not a huge number of marketers interested in walking the retail shop floor.
Paul:
So, that’s an astute observation, as well, Darren. I think that one of the things that changed perceptions among a lot of marketing managers that I work with was when we asked them to listen to customer calls.
In the days when DVDs were popular and CDs were popular, we used to give marketing managers and our clients once a week, we’d give them a DVD or a CD with customer calls on it and say, “Look, when you get in the car, just stick this on and listen to a few calls on the way into work.”
And the number of times that marketing managers would come back to us and say, “I never knew that happened. Oh my God, I’ve just learned so much around how customers perceive us and the issues they’re having with our products that I never would have known about until I listened to calls.” And then it becomes a habit.
So, it’s one of the things I’d encourage any marketing manager to do is go have a chat to your head of customer service and say, “Can you send me some files of calls so I can just listen and understand what customers are saying?” Because it is quality of information and it takes time. And I appreciate they may be time-poor, but just get it on your iPhone, get it on an iPad, listen to calls.
I guarantee you will learn more about customers that way than you will do through probably 20 or 30 seminars that you’ll listen to or podcasts you’ll listen to. And it gives you a different perspective. That’s the other thing; it gives you a rich perspective and deep perspective on what it is customers really think and feel.
Darren:
And Paul, I’d say your story about your CIO or CTO, in that you’re getting the real customer. You’re not getting the one that’s sitting in a focus group or being confronted by a researcher and asked particularly frank questions. This is actually their experience. This is them in many ways, the naked customer at either their best or worst point in time with your brand and business.
Paul:
And it’s in the moment, it’s fueled with emotion. It’s real, it’s not imagined. How many times in focus groups do marketing people or agency people say, “We’d like you to imagine X, Y …” No, no, no. What was it like actually doing it? What happened when you did this?
Because that’s when you get the authenticity, and you get real factual information around what a customer’s experience really is rather than what they imagine it might be or what their perceptions might be.
Yes, that’s valuable in some contexts, but if you really want to know, you’ve got to have a proper conversation with the customer to understand how they’re experiencing your product or service.
Darren:
You’re reminding me of when I was a creative director on Blockbuster Video, because typical of those big American service businesses, they had a policy that every employee and all of their suppliers would come and work at least one shift a month in Blockbuster Video.
And I remember having visions of being like Quentin Tarantino, who got the inspiration for many of his films from working in a video shop. Except it wasn’t like that. They always used us to phone up the customers that had the overdue videos. Remember when there were overdue videos before streaming?
Paul:
Yes.
Darren:
So, we were getting the worst: “Excuse me, sir, our records show that your copy of blah-blah-blah is three weeks overdue.” It was terrible.
Paul:
Well, it can be quite terrifying. I mean, similarly, in the Middle East, we used to get the management team to come down into the store which was next to the call centre, and in fact, one of the implementations we did. And that kind of face-to-face experience with customers or the experience that they got in the call centre was a game-changer.
And it changed the conversation that would then take place in the boardroom, it was a different kind of conversation because they’d all be wanting to throw in their anecdotes about, “Oh yeah, I was speaking to this woman and she tried to get a mobile device from us and it took five weeks to get there.” And they begin to get totally engaged with what it is customers are experiencing.
Darren:
You don’t think the problem is that it’s potentially where strategy meets reality, that marketers will often have this beautiful brand strategy. And the fear is that when it actually collides with the reality of the customer experience, it’s all going to go horribly wrong.
Paul:
That is a possibility, but I think we have to kind of temper it. And I’d hope that the opportunity to actually understand what customers are thinking either through gathering data from Net Promoter Score or by listening to calls, is it just broadens people’s perspective. And it gives them evidence that they can use to start driving their own decision-making process.
So, yes, there’s a ton of data that we can now get from social media and from online purchases. But it tends to be a little bit one dimensional. It’s not really, it doesn’t have the emotion component, it doesn’t have the real-world anecdote behind it. So, I do think it is a combination of these things. I don’t think it’s a good idea to just focus on one or the other.
But if you can bring the two together and start using those two sources to then drive decision-making, you’re going to end up in a much, much better place.
Darren:
Yeah, absolutely. One of the things and I think with your background, especially with technology, is I like the way this approach that you’re talking about uses unstructured data and structured data in that listening to these calls in many ways is reviewing unstructured data, which could stimulate thought or hypothesis (my science background coming out) ─ it’s an observation that leads to a hypothesis that could then be tested by the more structured data that’s collected by the call centre.
Paul:
Indeed. And a lot of call centres nowadays are doing data analytics on those voice calls. So, taking the voice calls, getting them transcribed, and then doing the analytics on what’s coming through. But again, the challenge is getting the emotional component of it.
So, you might be able to transcribe literally word for word, what a customer says on a call. But being able to get the inferred emotional component to it and the pitch, and their demeanour at the time that they’re making the call and the scenario that they’re in, a lot of that doesn’t get translated when voice calls get transcribed into unstructured data, which is then analysed.
Google Analytics has come a long way. And I know that Google’s very, very good at doing this. But you still need to be able to overlay the actual voice components. So, you can hear the emotional state and the pitch and the tone of the person who’s on the call.
Darren:
Yeah, I was talking to a colleague who is very into AI, artificial intelligence. He said that they’re doing a lot of work in this listening to people’s voices. He actually said that Australians particularly and their sarcasm makes it particularly difficult for the AI to program because so many of the programmers come from the US which sarcasm goes completely over.
Paul:
They have no idea what’s going on there.
Darren:
Maybe if we had more English and Australian programmers, they’d be able to crack them.
Paul:
Well, that’s it. I mean, there are so many different facets to a voice, and to the ethnicity of the person as well. Their race and background. So, there’s only so much at the moment that AI can do in this space.
It’s moving so fast now and I can see a situation in probably two or three years’ time when AI will be able to do as much as perhaps a human can do listening to a call. But in the meantime, I just think that there’s such a lot of value for marketing people in particular to use the data that they’ve got and to use the sources that they’ve got to be able to make decisions based on the combination of qualitative and quantitative, and that’s what you’re getting from a call centre.
Darren:
Yeah, absolutely. So, look, this is has been a fascinating conversation, Paul, because my experience of call centres is usually it’s dinner time, I’ve got two hungry children demanding to be fed, there’s food cooking, and then a number I don’t recognise pops up on my mobile phone and someone starts trying to quiz me about my financial telco utilities.
But clearly, there’s an opportunity for a greater customer experience out of this than just trying to flog me something at the least appropriate time.
Paul:
Yeah, I agree. And look, those unsolicited calls are really not welcomed and are becoming probably less and less prevalent as people are getting better at blocking calls, and there’s legislation around preventing those calls from becoming too much of a pest as well.
But it’s more to do with the outbound stuff. And I do think that I … I sincerely hope that organisations will see the value in maintaining strong customer service operations that can handle inbound calls from customers as part of the overall customer experience and the marketing mix, because organisations who do that have a profoundly better chance of delivering a great customer experience than those who say, “Don’t put the phone number up on the website, don’t let customers call us. If they can’t fix it with a bot, then we’ll send them off to a group site, a user site and they can fix it there.”
That’s a bad customer experience. People don’t like that. Yeah, I just think it’s kind of missing the point, which is you reach a stage in dealing with our customer service situation, where you need to speak to a human being.
Darren:
Absolutely.
Paul:
And to prevent people from doing that is really asking for trouble because people will complain and it goes out on social media. And then you’re dealing with a firestorm of more people saying, “Oh yeah, I’ve had the same experience. I couldn’t get through to the call centre. I didn’t even find their telephone number.” Not good.
Darren:
It’s interesting that you make that point because I think it’s actually the major social media platforms are the biggest offenders. The Facebooks and the Googles of the world are the ones that you’ll never find a phone number for. But then I point out to people that you are not the customer, you are actually the product, that you’re being sold, right?
Paul:
Yes.
Darren:
So, I’m sure they have a call centre for the advertisers that they actually generate their revenue from. But you, my friend, as a simple user of a technology platform are the product that’s being sold, not the customer that’s having an experience there.
Paul:
So, just to wrap up here down, I’ve got a list of companies and their Net Promoter Scores. So, you just mentioned Facebook, minus 21. Amazon-25 (not bad). Apple-47, Disney (and I’m struggling to understand how this happened) ─ Disney, minus 7. Google-11, Microsoft-45.
So, none of these are stellar scores. And although Apple scored 47, the highest of the bunch, they were scoring in the high fifties, early sixties, not long ago, but their score seems to have come down quite a bit.
Mcdonald’s, minus 8.
Darren:
Well, there you go.
Paul:
I think that what it proves is that there’s quite a lot of variance there, even in the same categories. You know, Facebook’s minus 21, Google’s 11. But there you go.
Darren:
But as you say, none of them are stellar, are they?
Paul:
None of them are stellar.
Darren:
So, there’s room for customer experience improvement.
Paul:
There most definitely is.
Darren:
Well, Paul Scott, thank you. I’ve just realised we’ve run out of time. This has been a fascinating conversation.
But because we’ve running out of time, I’m going to invite you back again for a future podcast on agile, and especially having a conversation based around your book Beyond Agile. So, I hope that you’ll accept the invitation
Paul:
Very kind of you, Darren. I’d love to come back and talk about Beyond Agile as well.
Darren:
Paul, just before you go, I do have a question; can you share with me probably the worst recording you’ve ever heard from a call centre.
Ideal for marketers, advertisers, media, and commercial communications professionals, Managing Marketing is a podcast hosted by Darren Woolley and special guests. Find all the episodes here