Contact centres get a bad ‘rap’ no matter where they are based. It used to be commonly accepted that a happy customer would tell three people about their experience, an unhappy one would tell 14. That was bad enough. Then came the internet and social media, giving disgruntled customers a platform on which to be heard – by millions.

If contact centres are at the coalface of customer service interaction then their staff have the power to make or break every customer’s early experience whether it is over the phone, email or social media channels. But how can you tell if your customers are happy, especially when you outsource or offshore your contact operation?

Measure to manage
Surprisingly, the industry bodies in Australia and New Zealand have not adopted any standard benchmarks for contact centres. “CCiNZ [Contact Centre Institute of NZ] doesn’t endorse any benchmarking systems,” said vice chair Kathryn Starr, who is also general manager of contact centre outsourcer Phoneplus. It is the same story at the but the CCiNZ and CCMA are separately planning to prepare or endorse sets of benchmarks.

While contact centre performance is often thought of in terms of metrics such as hold time, this seems to be an outdated position. When it comes to monitoring performance, “all roads lead to NPS [Net Promoter Score],” says customer management company Convergys’ international director of sales Geoff Dutt. That makes sense: why ensure you can answer calls five seconds faster if it doesn’t make customers happier? Convergys has monitoring systems for measuring NPS, he says, though clients sometimes do their own surveys. It does also track traditional metrics, but although clients have live access to these figures Dutt says they rarely look at the detailed statistics after the first few weeks.

It’s a different story internally: “BPO [business process outsourcing] is an industry that’s run by the numbers… we slice and dice data until the cows come home,” Dutt says, pointing out that there is no point measuring quality unless you also analyse and fix any shortcomings in processes and operations, “so that’s what we do”.

Lisa Roos, general manager at Merchants (a Dimension Data company which provides contact centre solutions) tells a similar story: for her clients the primary metric is customer experience, whether that’s expressed in terms of NPS or some other system. Old-school measures such as wait-time are falling out of favour, she says.

Yellow braves off-shoring
An outsourced and offshored contact centre is working for New Zealand based–Yellow Pages Group according to CEO Michael Boersen. The company offshored its 018 directory enquiries call centre in 2009, when Bruce Cotterill was CEO),as a cost-cutting measure. “It just wasn’t realistic for us to keep running the service out of New Zealand,” Boersen says of the decision.

O18 was first outsourced in 1998 when Yellow was still part of Telecom. In 2008 it changed provider from Sitel to TeleTech – the contract was up for renewal and Yellow invited proposals from other outsourcers as part of normal commercial due diligence. “A year later, we off shored – still with TeleTech – to Manila in the Philippines,” Boersen says.

“It’s been nearly five years since we offshored, and it was in the media a bit at the time, so I think people who call 018 know they’re talking to someone overseas – we definitely don’t hide it.”

Indeed there was more than a bit of media about it at the time, with the move eliciting a veritable hue and cry. First there were complaints about the loss of New Zealand jobs (140 in Palmerston North) and then came complaints about poor service (incorrect numbers provided, inability to answer queries, language difficulties), but eventually the furore has seemed to die down. Boersen concedes that a few people are fundamentally opposed to offshoring, but these days most people who call 018 just want someone who can find the number they’re after.

The transfer from New Zealand to the Philippines was done gradually over approximately three months. An increasing proportion of calls were routed to Manilla as TeleTech ramped up the number of trained staff at that centre.

“We’re pleased with the service we receive – we aim for a short call time, high satisfaction rates and low abandonment rate,” says Boersen, which is what you would expect for a directory service. While there was an initial dip in service levels, that was rectified by improving agents’ knowledge of New Zealand – notably geography, government departments and community services. “A lot of people think that the team in Manila will struggle with Maori pronunciation, but it’s the opposite actually as there are some similarities between Tagalog and Maori. The guys tend to breeze through this section of the training with flying colours,” he explains.

Technology and metrics don’t merely allow contact centre off-shoring, they also make it easier for the client to make sure everything is running smoothly. Yellow receives daily, weekly and monthly reports on a range of metrics. Call recording and screen capture software mean any problems that do arise can be solved remotely, and the company uses Skype and WebEx to keep in touch with staff in Manila and to provide guidance from afar.

Outsourcing, offshoring and brand considerations
While Yellow managed to weather the storm, it’s not the same for all organisations that offshore. Starr says that some that do so for cost reasons subsequently discover that the cost of managing the relationship and maintaining consistent quality mean it is more cost-effective to bring the operation back onshore.

There’s also a risk to brand reputation, as offshoring is a ‘water cooler’ topic, she says, and she also recommends consideration be given to the political stability of any particular offshore location.

Brendan Jones (a pseudonym we’re using for an individual with long and intimate involvement with contact centres) says Australians still have some issues with Indian voices but contact centre workers from the Philippines are generally well accepted. Dutt goes further, suggesting that any objections to ‘foreign’ voices at contact centres are merely “the tail end of parochialism”.

“We’re pleased with the [offshored] service we receive – we aim for a short call time, high satisfaction rates and low abandonment rate.”
Michael Boersen, CEO, Yellow

Jones suggests a sea change is underway in the way organisations are looking at contact centres. Saying they want ‘good customer relationships’ is really code for ‘selling more to their best customers’. The oldschool model – tightly scripted contact centres with high attrition rates – is still used by telcos, financial institutions and so on, he says, but it doesn’t mesh with the ‘customer is king’ philosophy. Progressive organisations are turning away from lowest-cost solutions and are instead moving skilled staff into contact centres and allowing them to make decisions, and this means running an in-house, onshore contact centre in order to cultivate much better customer relationships.

These new contact centre staff are being givenan opportunity to make perhaps 50 decisions in a day rather than the five they currently make in a branch office “so that’s a promotion,” he says. The pitch is that the company is investing in ‘customer-centricity’ and has picked these employees to take on more responsibility.

Engagement
Convergys’ Dutt also thinks that clients of the better providers are looking for customer value rather than just cost reduction. He says providers offering bums on seats at the lowest price experience a high churn rate of clients. And if an organisation outsources a contact centre just to reduce the amount it spends on people, the project will typically fail, he warns. He gives the example of an unnamed second-tier Australian telco that chose a low-end contact centre provider after which its customer churn “went through the roof and their NPS went through the floor”.

In contrast, tier one contact centre providers look at their clients’ total processes: why are people contacting the company, why does the contact centre exist, and what are the corporate goals? For an outsourcing arrangement to be successful, the provider must work in partnership with the client. Dutt says it is better to identify what he calls “the good guys” in the industry, talk to them about what is required, and then use those conversations to develop a short list of perhaps just two candidates before going into detail.

Agent selection
As Yellow discovered, having the right people with the right skills in your contact centre is important, so the better contact centre providers tend to hire agents specifically for a client. Convergys, for example, determines the type of personnel that is required, recruits the agents specifically for that client, and provides comprehensive training.

This quickly pays off, according to Dutt who says a Convergys operation had the highest NPS among all of one customer’s contact centres from the day it went live, and he claimed that the company’s large Australian clients achieve lower NPSes at their own onshore centres than those operated for them by Convergys in India and the Philippines.

Merchants, which operates outsourced contact centres in Europe and South Africa for clients around the world including Australia’s iiNet, takes a somewhat different approach to staff selection because the formality of the relationship varies considerably between clients, Roos says. In some cases, a client CEO will only talk to Merchants’ CEO and so on down the hierarchy, while others prefer using social media for an open dialog among everyone involved. Consequently, during the recruitment process “the single biggest thing we look for is cultural fit” with the client, although technical knowledge and experience are also considered.

Furthermore, “culturisation” is an important part of getting staff ready to work for a particular client, Roos says, and ongoing training is mostly about new products and services, as well as any changes in terminology. One way of easing new agents into a particular client’s contact centre is to initially have them working on nonvoice communications such as email, as that gives them a chance to become accustomed to the client’s business before having to deal with phone calls.

Dutt says customer service is ingrained in Philippine culture, making it “one of the best locations globally” for handling such calls. Convergys finds it easy to recruit staff as people in the Philippines derive cachet from working for wellknown companies.

Conversely India is the best location for technical support as the mix of education and commitment is “second to none,” he claims.

Good providers should also enable their clients to listen in to calls when they wish, and offer regular meetings to ensure that the provider and the client have the same opinion of the way the interactions were handled. Issues can also be delat with informally via social media, email or phone calls as they arise.

What clients want
Clients based in Australia and New Zealand basically want the things they can’t do themselves, Dutt says. This can be at a technical level, such as applying analytics to determine how to mitigate calls, or demographic analysis to describe who is calling and why. Voice and email services are the most commonly requested by Australian and New Zealand organisations, Roos says, and mostly in the customer service area rather than more complex processes. That said, Merchants has taken on increasingly technical work for some clients and “that has definitely worked for Australia”, she says.

“For an outsourcing arrangement to be successful, the provider must work in partnership with the client.”
Geoff Dutt, director of sales, Convergys

Roos notes a cultural affinity between Australians and South Africans, and also points out that the time zone difference means South Africa is well positioned to be part of a ‘follow the sun’ operation as its working day starts as eastern Australia’s is finishing. Recently she has seen tenders for offshored 24×7 contact centre operations in South Africa, mostly for first-line customer service – the country has the right culture and is cost-effective, she says.

Thank you, and call again
The customer-centric pitch with ‘hand-picked’ agents is fine as long as it is true, Jones warns, otherwise the likely outcome is the same old poor service being delivered to frustrated customers. Organisations “have to stop reading the dreadful script” or risk a landslide loss of customers to anyone that provides better service.

Jones believes organisations will fund this new and more expensive model by commoditising the other two-thirds of customer contacts through offshoring and moving them to channels other than voice (eg, web chat and email).

“People want the result,” he says, so they will be patient as long as you can show you understand their problem, even if you are handling the enquiry electronically.

The contact centre handover and beyond…
For Lisa Roos, general manager at Merchants (a Dimension Data company), taking a contact centre live for the first time has to be a partnership between the provider and the client. Senior representatives of the client should be onsite at the time, and she also advocates using some agents with the native accent of the target country in the centre during this period.

Roos sets great store by ‘brand attachment’, encouraging agents to identify with the client they serve. This is partly because a good proportion of calls to most contact centres are negative: customers usually ring only when they have a problem, so it is important that agents are also exposed to the positives. She advocates regular (say twice yearly) visits from senior managers, sharing news about the client’s financial results, industry awards and so on with contact centre staff, distributing branded merchandise, and arranging for the temporary exchange of agents between the client’s onshore and offshore contact centres and then encouraging them to maintain those personal contacts.

During the last few years, demand for resources produced by mines has outstripped supply. The emphasis has been on developing new resources and getting product to market as quickly as possible. Mine technology suppliers have consequently had a really good period of growth, although traditionally the mining industry is not a big tech spender, especially for software. In fact, it spends less than half of the average for all industries, and one-fifth as much as technology-intensive industries such as health or aerospace.

As the boom has slowed the industry’s strategic emphasis has moved from a focus on maximising output to minimising costs, with a need to invest in solutions that will improve the efficiency of existing operations.

“IT can help with these new realities that miners are facing,” says Mark Batina, managing director of Precise Business Solutions a business software solutions provider. It can assist them to find smarter ways of working, such as adopting lean principles, removing non-value-adding processes, and more closely integrating operational and business systems.

Surveys of chief decision-makers show that current priorities are around controlling costs, reducing redundant processes, and getting information to on-the-spot decision makers. “That’s not unique to mining,” says Batina, but it does indicate “the foot is coming off the accelerator” and the time is right for taking a strategic view.

Mining your features
Some of the functions miners require are common to most industries — financials, project costing, asset management, maintenance, inventory, supply chain management, logistics, human resources, occupational health and safety, and so on. In that regard, a well-run mining company or mining service provider is not that different to any other wellrun company.

Despite that commonality, Erica Low, a product manager servicing the sector at Pronto Software, suggests miners’ exact requirements for these horizontal applications will vary according to location (eg, to cope with government reporting requirements) and the minerals being extracted.

Furthermore, processes are not as defined as they are in a manufacturing environment. Phil Edmiston, commercial manager at Minemax says mining is quite variable in terms of the materials, market price and demand. Risk and uncertainty abound, and although there may be estimates of what will come out of a mine, the reality can be different. Consequently, the dynamics are different in mining compared with other industries.

“IT can assist miners to find smarter ways of working, such as adopting lean principles, removing non-valueadding processes, and more closely integrating operational and business systems.”

An important differentiator is the way corporate objectives are achieved in mining, which is highly reliant on technical expertise. This includes some highly specific processes, such as geological modelling, ore body analysis and mine planning. James Braatvedt, a director of Ventyx, an enterprise software provider, says that the real value comes from the technical side, not an ERP system. He claims Ventyx “has the broadest portfolio of technical mining software,” which means it is well placed to help miners.

All tied up
In fact, according to Rob Stummer, managing director of IFS, an ERP solutions house, the mining industry was late to catch on to the advantages of ERP. Consequently, there are still a lot of opportunities for ERP systems to be integrated into mining operations. IFS offers software with broad ERP capabilities plus strong project management so users can manage everything from go to whoa in near real-time. IFS includes project management because, in Stummer’s opinion it is “the glue that holds all their [clients’] applications together”. There are various highly regarded point solutions for the mining industry, so integration “has got to be watertight” as it is very important that systems talk to each other; from planning through operations to decommissioning, “it all comes back to project management”.

Other important aspects include asset management (“absolutely critical,” according to Stummer) and occupational health and safety (“probably elevated above anything else in the mining industry”).

Batina of Precise Business Solutions agrees. “It’s entirely possible to link all these together,” he says, referring to planning, production management, supply chain, and so on. It is important to remember that, while there is a cost to integrating, there is also a hidden a cost of not integrating the systems, such as increased manual processes, inaccuracies and delays. As such, he expects that integration will become easier and more common over time.

With the boom slowing and the emphasis shifting from maximising output to minimising costs, SolveIT Software has chosen to take the ‘value chain perspective’. James Balzary, the company’s director of natural resources, says they look at the whole process from the material in the ground right through to the customer. This allows people to see how the decisions they make impact on the rest of the chain. The company’s software also fits in with other enterprise software, which helps explain the attraction for top-tier customers such as BHP Billiton.

By sitting between the software involved in low-level operations and the ERP system, SolveIT “becomes the place where decisions are made”. For example, the mine planning software can decide how to extract the resource from the ground, taking into consideration information from the supply chain. Planning and scheduling for people and assets can also be incorporated as part of this process. Handling all these aspects in one place makes it easier to achieve business KPIs than it is with separate applications, Balzary explains.

Optimum strategy
Software that supports mine planning and optimisation plays an important part in helping the industry to extract resources as economically as possible. Andrew Pyne, senior VP at Gemcom Software International, which provides specific mining software and solutions, agrees. He points to the company’s InSight product for mine production management which, he says, gives a good understanding of costs. When targets are missed it shows not only the size of the variance but also its cause. The optimisation side of the application allows new plans to be created when parameters such as price change.

“Software that supports mine planning and optimisation plays an important part in helping the industry to extract resources as economically as possible.”

Part of the planning process involves creating wireframe models from drilling information that can then be converted into block models showing the quantity and quality of the material available. Mathematical algorithms are then applied to determine the most appropriate approach to mining it.

Each parcel of material may have as many as 50 attributes to take into account in the planning process, says SolveIT’s Balzary who claims his is the first company to offer block-to-port optimisation. The SolveIT engine uses artificial intelligence techniques, including neural networks, to determine the best sequence of extraction to meet multiple objectives, while taking into account the inventory in the rest of the supply chain including stockpiles, processing plants, on trains or barges, at the port, and even on vessels that have already sailed.

Data typically comes from seven or eight systems – some of which may be supplied by parent company Schneider Electric – including laboratory systems (for information about the minerals), ERP (sales and marketing considerations), and HR (availability of people with specific competencies). “It’s a heavy integration implementation,” says Balzary of block-to-port optimisation.

“Mine planning is critical,” says Ventyx’s Braatvedt, as it has an impact on production, workplace safety, and equipment (through the risk of damage). Plans must be updated in line with the latest information, but if you don’t have the right software, a lot of that information is held by individuals and not readily available.

Boom time
SAP Australia’s principal of mining and resources Peter Hodgins says that the past few years have seen demand for resources outstrip supply. This has meant the focus was on getting as much of the product out of the ground and to the market as quickly as possible. In those years there were plenty of changes in the industry too and, thanks to the boom, the mining industry in Australia is now substantially larger than it was five years ago. Mincom was acquired by a private equity firm and then sold to ABB; Gemcom went public, was purchased by a private equity firm and then acquired by Dassault (triggering a revaluation of smaller private companies in the sector); and aerospace modelling and simulation company CAE diversified into the mining sector.

Even if further expansion is delayed, mining has moved to a different level.

Although the boom maybe slowing, IT companies that focus on mining have always struggled to hire good people, so Minemax’s Edmiston thinks retrenchments are unlikely. Furthermore, any downturn seen in the coal or iron ore markets has had little effect on the oil and gas industry: “they’re quietly forging ahead,” he says, even if they are getting relatively little attention. And parts of the mining industry are still doing well – “gold is booming along,” says Edmiston – so there are still hundreds of mining projects that are worth doing.

Bust? What bust?
The period of growth has certainly helped IT vendors. It increased the number of opportunities to win deals, but software is still a pretty small slice of a miner’s expenditure and there continues to be many opportunities to use IT to improve the efficiency of existing operations. That optimism seems widespread. “We’re getting quite a few big wins,” says Balzary, “it doesn’t seem to be slowing down.”

Similarly, Pronto Software’s Low does not expect the current disruption in the mining industry to cause a downturn for the part of the IT industry that supports it, largely because mines typically have a 10¤15 year life. There is no sign of adverse effects on Pronto’s business at this stage, she says, as mining is still very strong.

Now that the demand for minerals has slowed, miners’ attention is shifting to cost control in order to maintain profitability, says SAP’s Hodgins. Instead of developing new sites, the focus is on things like automation, providing field workers with access to information, and mergers and acquisitions. “I don’t believe it [expenditure on IT] is going to be significantly different,” he says, but “we will be having different conversations [with customers].”

Australian miners are especially exposed to market changes, says Pyne of Gemcom Software, due to relatively high labour costs and the continuing strength of the Australian dollar. This means they are particularly prone to turning off the expenditure tap as quickly as possible. That said, IT can help by reworking production plans to extract minerals as efficiently as possible rather than as quickly as possible.

Triple Point Technology’s Phillip Spencer, (director of global support for coal and mineral supply chain solutions) agrees, and says that while some projects have been put on hold, software is just as useful for minimising costs as it was for maximising output.

Lean and mean
The challenge is to support miners as they try to improve efficiency, in part by more closely integrating their technical and commercial operations, says Hodgins. SAP is now developing software more specifically for the mining industry such as analysing telemetry data from mining equipment, which will involve working more closely with equipment manufacturers.

Process control and automation also needs to be integrated with technical and production software, says Vantyx’s Braatvedt, in part because of the high cost of outages. These can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour. Not surprisingly, “we’ve seen a lot of interest in this,” he says.

Triple Point has a department specialising in integration. They look after projects that, for example, take data from instrumentation systems and feed it into scheduling and replanning processes.

SAP’s Hodgins also notes an increase in remote operations. One aspect of this is the provision of ‘expert on demand’ services, where off-site specialists receive photos, video and other data, from which to advise their colleagues in the field, something that SAP’s software, in conjunction with mobile systems, can assist with.

More widespread automation can lead to a safer and more efficient environment, but it needs the support of a well-optimised software suite. When mines introduce remote operations therefore, it can be a catalyst for increased integration.

Edmiston predicts we will soon see companies such as Rio Tinto saying how ‘smart’ they have become – more efficient, better health and safety outcomes, and so on – through the use of remote operations and autonomous equipment.

There is also the emerging mining segment; new companies with greenfields operations and often with no existing technology beyond Excel and MYOB, says IFS’s Stummer. Return on investment is especially important for these players that need to keep upfront expenditure on a tight chain, so the option for a modular, progressive build out is a key feature.

“Edmiston, commercial manager at Minemax, predicts we will soon see companies such as Rio Tinto saying how ‘smart’ they have become – more efficient, better health and safety outcomes, and so on – through the use of remote operations and autonomous equipment.”

Triple Point’s Spencer also sees small miners using little more than Excel, but as they mature they need tools to manage their resources “and that’s where our software fits,” he says.

Key to the future
Stummer says he thinks the end of the boom has been blown out of proportion. Large miners may be putting big projects on hold, but they generally have mature systems that would be brought to bear on those projects. “We’re not seeing a slowdown in the emerging miners space,” he says.

The mining industry, like others, is getting smarter, says Pronto’s Low. Features such as business intelligence, reporting, analytics and dashboards are of increasing interest. “We’re trying to make sure the modules are streamlined and integrated really well,” she says. Spencer has a similar view, pointing out that the massive amounts of data generated by mining needs to be distilled in to key metrics.

Mobility and beyond
Mobility is a major part of mining as mentioned by a number of vendors. “It’s definitely a focus at our company,” says Spencer, with mobility options being added to various Triple Point modules such as vessel operations. A number of Pronto modules already support mobility and there will be a new version of the company’s mobility software in the Pronto release scheduled for May 2013. Given that so much mining takes place at remote sites, mobile capabilities need to be very strong and fully integrated with the other systems, suggests Stummer.

The move to tablets and smartphones is a hot topic and a real trend for the industry. “We’re leaders in this space,” he says, highlighting features such as real-time expense management and job scheduling for technicians, thanks, in part, to the acquisition of 360 Scheduling and Metrix.

Ruggedness also needs to be considered when it comes to using mobile devices at mine sites. While there continues to be a need for more durable smartphones and tablets, protective cases are available for some popular models. And despite the current wide use of iPhones and iPads, “we see [the mining industry] moving towards Android,” says Stummer.

Cloud technology has improved, he adds, and can now reach even remote sites within Australia.

“I think it is important to look at a cloud-based approach,” says Stummer, but he notes that security is an issue for miners so they typically prefer on-premise systems. Whether cloud really is less secure than on-premise is debateable, but Stummer does expect attitudes will evolve over time.

Spencer agrees that internet connectivity “does not seem to be that much of a problem in Australia,” and Triple Point’s software can be deployed in the cloud to support a dispersed workforce. It is a different story, however, in other areas: one customer had no real alternative to an on-site deployment at a site in the Kalahari region of South Africa.

On the horizon
Looking further ahead, automation may play an important part in keeping costs down, suggests Gemcom’s Pyne. Labour and diesel fuel can account for half the operational costs of mining, and automation can reduce both aspects.

Gemcom’s parent company Dassault is strong in the field of simulation, and the company thinks this can be applied to mining automation. Changes to the software will be needed, but Dassault has 4000 programmers as well as simulation experience in various industries. “A lot of our competitors don’t have that sort of horsepower,” he says.

SolveIT is also working towards benefitting from increased interest in automation and, like Pyne, Balzary believes his parent company’s involvement in automation will help it to integrate decision support systems with automated operations. In two to four years he expects a transition to true decision systems, where a lot of routine decisions are made completely automatically. Faster decision making is “one of our core value propositions,” he says, and the reason why Schneider Electric acquired SolveIT.

But for that to happen, the time the software needs to reach a decision must be slashed from a couple of minutes to less than a second through a combination of increased hardware speed and improvements to the algorithms.

Nevertheless, the future heralds a new breed of leaner, meaner and intelligent mining software.