StartupCamp Telephony co-founder and Bay Area emerging communications strategist Larry Lisser has a good post, “Contact Center Conundrum,” about the most challenging task facing contact centers: adequately servicing customers to their satisfaction. Years of whizzbang communications technologies may have increased efficiency, but not customer satisfaction. And the cost savings from business process outsourcing didn’t translate into happier customers either.

Yeah, there’s definitely something wrong. In Larry’s own words:

For one, many companies have outsourced, or shipped overseas, portions of their contact center environment. This results in disparate systems, platforms and processes that are not easily synchronized. And to begin with, contact centers are beasts that have been built over time – often in pieces – so getting systems to talk nicely with one another is a full time job. If even possible.

Furthermore, there are silos in the contact center decision making process. Operational types actually run the centers, Web teams run what happens on the Web, and Marketing, while sensitive to how the contact center impacts customer relationships, has little say in the operation of it. Yet increasingly, the innovation coming from new and older companies alike now delivers features, functionality and value propositions directed at all three of these stakeholders. Imagine for a moment the sales process. My sentiments, exactly.

Perhaps most telling from this study is that integration and interoperability between systems remains – if maybe indirectly – the single biggest roadblock to the adoption of modern forms of customer interaction. We’re all too familiar with the dreaded…’Please give me your account number’…only seconds after you entered it into an IVR. Well, this very same issue is now haunting the evolution of multi-channel communications.

Reminds me of a story I saw on TV once about the dabbawala of India. These are people who ride bicycles during the day to collect lunches from families to then deliver them to the respective office workers. Highly analog, nothing fancy. But here’s the impressive part:

In 2002, Forbes Magazine found its reliability to be that of a six sigma standard.^[4]

More than 175,000 or 200,000 lunch boxes get moved every day by an estimated 4,500 to 5,000 dabbawalas, all with an extremely small nominal fee and with utmost punctuality. According to a recent survey, they make less than one mistake in every 16 million deliveries, which makes it a Six Sigma (99.9999% error-free) organization^[5]

Indeed, it’s not always about the technology.

In fact, it’s more about the people, isn’t it?

Remember when offshoring contact centers was all the rage? Well, most of the time the rage turned out to be from callers as customer satisfaction indexes corresponded to the cheaper hourly rate of the agent.

The technology has been around many years to seamlessly (except the heavy foreign accents) establish an offshore contact center, but the way companies were taking that route in droves for the sake of the bottom line sort of made it an abuse of the technology. Companies started losing customers for the reason that their service representatives couldn’t really provide any service, or sometimes had difficulty understanding callers (and vice versa). That period of time was the Dark Ages of Customer Service.

Finally some company executives saw the light and started reversing the offshoring trend which was coined “onshoring.” Big corporations like Dell, HP, Monster.com, and AT&T started relocating their centers in India, the Phillippines, Latin America, and elsewhere, back to the United States. Gone are the days when callers would hear “MaryJo” with a heavy Indian accent handle calls. Onshoring proved to be a good move not only in customer service, but also general goodwill as these companies helped create domestic jobs.

And it turns out that onshoring is a trend in Asia, too — at least for Taiwanese companies like Canon Taiwan and BenQ Corp.:

Canon Taiwan has seen a rise in the level of customer satisfaction since it relocated customer service to Taiwan from Hong Kong in September last year, Su said.

This also helped the Japanese company sell more high-end cameras in Taiwan last year, Su noted.

BenQ Corp., a Taiwanese consumer electronics maker, also saw greater levels of customer satisfaction after relocating their customer service line from China to Taiwan, the report said.

Cultural difference is a major factor that hurts customer satisfaction when a company outsources its service calls from Taiwan to China, said Jerry Peng, the general manager of BenQ’s customer service in Taiwan.

The lesson? In order to service your customers, you want your agents to have similar backgrounds as the callers!

Gary Kim at TMCnet has an article on “How much can telecommuting cut carbon footprint?” which offers some insight into the cost savings related to not having to commute to a corporate office:

Lots of people these days are interested in telecommuting, at least in part because of its ability to reduce carbon footprint. Assume that a 100-person company could allow telecommuting three days a week.

Also, assume that employees commuting an average of 33 miles one day to reach their workplace, and that those employees switch to telecommuting three days a week. Also assume that all those avoided trips are taken by automobile.

That enterprise can avoid producing 6,351 pounds of hydrocarbons, 47,362 pounds of carbon monoxide, 3,146 pounds of oxides of nitrogen and 943,124 pounds of carbon dioxide, while saving 47,773 pounds of gasoline each year.

That analysis uses an average fuel economy of 21.5 miles per gallon.

Assume a fuel price of $2.75 per gallon. Workers save $750 in avoided fuel costs each week. Over a month those employees commuting three days a week save $3,250 in fuel costs and over a year will save $39,000 in fuel expenses.

That’s just the savings for the employees. There are savings for the company, too.

Now applying to the contact center business, is there a way to reduce carbon footprint?

Does a cloud-based contact center solution reduce carbon footprint? Not necessarily. Although there are immediate cost savings associated with deploying a cloud-based IVR, the solution provider still has to power its (massive) infrastructure and employ a sizable operations staff to keep the place running.

What about outsourced agents? Although this lowers your headcount and having to provide office spaces, it’s merely shifting the carbon footprint away to the outsource vendor. Plus, most of the time these vendors are far away — sometimes in India, Latin America, or the Philippines — where they pay even less attention to reducing carbon footprint. Their agents still have to commute to work and maybe use older computer equipment which draws more power.

What about on-demand agents? This is the business model for companies like LiveOps which has a platform for companies to expand and contract their contact center workforce based on demand. Most of these agents are home-based, so they save costs on commuting. However, they still have to power their PCs and broadband equipment, as well as home heating/air. Not so much of a reduction?

And during a solution implementation? Odds are you are flying in consultants from other places to work on your project. Air travel is definitely not carbon friendly. If your company has a green initiative and yet rely heavily on flown-in contractors, then you ought to raise this issue to executives. The company may have bought the greenest technologies, but still deficient in executing a green project plan.

Factors such as globalization, economics, and implementation make it difficult for a contact center to reduce carbon footprint significantly. Is there hope? It’s up to the companies to come up with their green initiatives and make sure everyone, top to bottom, is on board. Company processes and policies should be aligned to facilitate the execution of green initiatives: vendor selection, hardware procurement, telecommuting policy, travel policy, facilities management, etc. If enough companies insist on reducing carbon footprint in their contact centers, then the vendors will pay attention to this demand and adjust accordingly.