A New Cingular Call Center Experience
Like many call centers, those of Cingular Wireless (now AT&T) contain the majority of the company’s employees, represent significant costs, and form the front line of company-customer interaction. Rising costs and a business desire to improve customer satisfaction had reached a critical point. The Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) needed 20 or more applications on the desktop – applications accumulated from organic growth and roll-up of other businesses, technologies, and processes. To handle customer requests, CSRs had to switch and tab through different applications, enter the same information repeatedly, and refer to conflicting information. What would you do? They called Matter.
To save call center operational costs, the business was overhauling CSR applications in order to reduce “average handle time” of calls. A few seconds less on the phone translated to millions of dollars in savings. They also wanted to reduce call volume by providing faster access to accurate information.
Matter was hired to develop and deploy a contextual research initiative to understand how CSRs were working and what to improve. In looking toward the development of a new application, our client wanted to know where to focus, what to emphasize, and what to dispose of. How were CSRs using their time? Where were inefficiencies? How should the CSR interface look and work?
Matter developed a unique set of protocols and techniques for listening to customer calls and documenting CSR actions on a second-by-second, click- by-click basis. Using these tools, Matter captured extremely detailed information about the calls and how CSRs used their applications according to the customer dialogue.
We also provided a more accurate accounting of the reasons customers called, something that had been severely out of date. These details added up to a tremendous set of quantitative data and a never-before-seen view into how CSRs spent their time. But that was only part of the story.
The most compelling information—and value—came from first hand observations, documented with audio and video, of how CSRs were using the applications, what customers were saying, and the underlying causes of customer concerns. A wealth of insights and opportunities became unmistakably clear and an im- proved application was just the beginning of where improvements could be made. Matter brought to the business a whole new way of thinking about call centers, a new perspective on measuring what made a “successful” customer interaction, and a new sense of priority about resolving customer issues.
What’s more, these insights were used not only to determine interface and application interactions, but also to help prioritize other corporate initiatives in both customer service and self-service in other channels. And Matter found even more opportunities in channels like communications, call data logs, retail, and billing, to make improvements that have enormous effects on reducing call center volume and huge benefits in company costs and customer satisfaction. (Satisfied customers aren’t the ones calling!)
In subsequent months, Matter indeed did what it set out to do – build a better CSR interface to lower costs. Additionally, that interface represented strategic changes to the business, brought about with Matter guidance: Our client established new business processes. It adopted a user- centered approach to its standard technology development methodology. It brought new levels of systematic guidance to its CSRs. And it has changed permanently to include an immersive view of customer experience as a key element of its business and technology strategy.
“Matter has always done an excellent job for us. They are very professional and deliver very strategic solutions. The company does a great job on user research and they always go beyond the assigned research and provide feedback on areas beyond eCommerce. Their feedback has many times changed the direction we were initially taking and instigated larger company changes. They have also delivered great work on the areas of information architecture and graphic design. They often develop several concepts and their final execution is very sophisticated. They are also great people to work with!” – August Sweeden, Director – Cingular.com, Cingular Wireless
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