Call centre perfection remains elusive but Genesys tries hard

By Stephen Ballantyne, technology writer

Friday 19th July 2002

JAMES BROOKS: 'Isn't it interesting that good customer service experiences are still so rare that people talk about them as exceptions?'

Like many people, I've long had a not very secret loathing for customer relationship management (CRM). To develop such a loathing is easy - all it takes is one bad experience with a CRM system and you'll hate them for life.

I had my bad experience a few years ago and it was so preposterously awful that it has stuck with me ever since. The worst of it was that it was inflicted on me by a major vendor of CRM systems, so my perception of CRM is probably even worse than most people's, in that I see such systems as being not only inferior to some ideal standard of personal service but also self-deluding and perhaps even faintly hypocritical.

That experience wasn't inflicted on me by Genesys, though, so I had no qualms about turning up at Genesys' G-Force 2002 conference in Melbourne last week. Perhaps it knows how these things should be done?

San Francisco-based (but Alcatel owned) Genesys can reasonably claim to be the market leader of call centre-oriented CRM - no one has more sophisticated software or a more impressive roster of clients.

It turns out Genesys is keenly aware of the possible blunders that can be perpetrated by customer-insensitive systems. In his keynote address, chief executive Ad Nederlof not only spoke of the advantages of his company's products but also touched on the possibility of doing it wrong, and mentioned two of the things that made my call-centre experience so traumatic - time-zone sensitivity and failure to resolve a problem with a single call.

Australasian managing director James Brooks was similarly careful not to exaggerate the power of CRM: "Isn't it interesting that good customer service experiences are still so rare that people talk about them as exceptions?" He went on to point to the gap between customer expectations of the sort of service they should receive and what they were actually getting, and how important it was to work to close that gap.

What was service in the good old days? When you did business with your bank, you would deal with tellers and managers; an ideal bank manager would have a personal knowledge of his customers' financial affairs and would exercise real human judgment when it came to deciding if your application for a loan would be approved. Or if you bought a domestic appliance from a shop and it went wrong, you would expect the shop to fix it, which might involve a repair man being sent out to do the job. Too bad if the bank manager was a fool or the repair man an incompetent - you were probably stuck with them.

It's all different now - banks have centralised their operations (my branch doesn't even have its number listed in the phone book) and appliance shops are more like warehouses, with manufacturing defects handled by a return to the importer or manufacturer.

Genesys aims to integrate every point of contact between a business and its customers, so that any transactions a customer has had in the past, whether by phone, internet or direct personal contact, can be presented to whoever is dealing with that customer now. The new standard for good service may not have customers dealing with the same people every time but at least they can expect that whoever is handling their case at the moment will have all the necessary details at hand, or rather, popped up on a screen in front of them.

For a small conference, G-Force 2002 was a reasonably lavish affair, hinting at one of the factors supporting the continuing development of CRM systems: the enormous amount of money businesses are prepared to spend on them.

Big businesses usually have many customers and catering to their desires in the old-fashioned way is expensive; call centres look like an ever more attractive alternative for growing businesses struggling to keep their customers happy.

But even a small call centre solution isn't cheap in the ordinary sense. Consider Genesys Express, which was launched at the conference. This is Genesys' small system, produced in response to customer demand for something less intimidating than its full-blown multi-server, multi-site, multi-PABX-based monster systems: Genesys Express uses a single server, a single PABX, and runs on a single site using Windows 2000 and SQL. It is therefore ideal for the small user with only 15-75 customer agents.

So to set up such a system - and remember this is the small one - you'll need all the above plus a shed capable of accommodating at least 50 employees at desks with computers and headsets; you might as well build a lunchroom as well and don't forget extra toilet facilities, carparks and signage.

No wonder that Genesys, while not being specific about the implementation costs of all this, showed graphs indicating that something approaching $US100,000 would be about right. On the other hand, it also says such a call centre would probably break even in about six months, so if you've got the money it's quite a bargain.

Nevertheless, I'm still sceptical about the efficacy of this stuff. It's early days yet, and really finding out and meeting the needs of customers still doesn't seem to be fully part of the CRM agenda.

Automated service delivery can't really be said to have matured until CRM conferences draw specialists in human as well as engineering disciplines, even if only in the affiliates' hall.

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