The nature of service delivery by telecommunications operators whether voice or data is a system that allows service providers to install or set up telecommunications equipment at a particular location far from its operational base and deliver service to people within that coverage area.
What this means is that a Telephone or Internet Service Provider that is base in Lagos with its major transmission equipment installed in Lagos can give service to a location such as Abuja or Benin by simply installing another transmission equipment and trans-receiver station that will transmit calls from the sundry location to the major switch at Lagos.
Subscribers to the service in Abuja or Benin as the case may be will enjoy the service without having to see the people rendering the service but agents not directly employed by the service provider as well as their equipment. The question that arises is how can this subscriber reach out to the service provider when he or she has issues with the service? Such issues as recharging of phones, where recharge card numbers have been scratched off, SIM card issues among others. These issues are addressed through contact to the service providers’ call centre located mostly at major towns or at the operational base of the operator depending on the coverage of the operator as well as the technology in use especially for Internet Service Providers.
A call centre is a centralised office used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone. A call centre is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outgoing calls for telemarketing, clientele, product services, and debt collection are also made. In addition to a call centre, collective handling of letters, faxes, live chat, and e-mails at one location is known as a contact centre.
A call centre is often operated through an extensive open workspace for call centre agents, with work stations that include a computer for each agent, a telephone set/headset connected to a telecom switch, and one or more supervisor stations. It can be independently operated or networked with additional centres, often linked to a corporate computer network, including mainframes, microcomputers and LANs. Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the centre are linked through a set of new technologies called computer telephony integration (CTI).
Most major businesses use call centres to interact with their customers. Examples include utility companies, mail order catalog retailers, and customer support for computer hardware and software. Some businesses even service internal functions through call centres. Examples of this include help desks, retail financial support, and sales support.
Call centres are different from customer care centre, as the later refers to an office designated for physical resolution of issues associated with service provision.
Call centre technology is subject to improvements and innovations. Some of these technologies include speech recognition and speech synthesis software to allow computers to handle first level of customer support, text mining and natural language processing to allow better customer handling, agent training by automatic mining of best practices from past interactions, and many other technologies to improve agent productivity and customer satisfaction. Automatic lead selection or lead stearing is also intended to improve efficiencies, both for inbound and outbound campaigns, whereby inbound calls are intended to quickly land with the appropriate agent to handle the task, while minimising wait times and long lists of irrelevant options for people calling in, as well as for outbound calls, where lead selection allows management to designate what type of leads go to which agent based on factors including skill, socio-economic factors and past performance. The concept of the Universal Queue standardises the processing of communications across multiple technologies such as fax, phone, and email.
Few years ago some telecommunications service providers advertised none existence call centre numbers this was quickly addressed by Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC). But today, the issue is no longer none existence of call centre, but inadequate facility at call centres to be able to take inquires and respond to such inquires. The inability of telecommunications service providers to address issues associated with their service through contact centres led to NCC providing its own contact centres that will interface with subscribers and operators.
Mrs. Lola Emakporie, director, Consumer Affairs, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) said that the establishment of contact centre by the commission has became necessary in view of several complaint by telecom consumers of lustre attitude of service providers in addressing subscribers complaint about their service.
She added that calls to NCC contact centre is going to be toll-free and on 0800CALLNCC, with multi-lingual dedicated agents in English, Pidgin, Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba languages.
The contact centre is to be operated on behalf of the commission by Interra Networks that will handle phone calls and emails from the 43 million (and growing) subscriber base on range of issues, but will be primarily focused on resolving any disputes between the consumer and their service providers. The NCC will use Interras’ Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services to get "closer" to the Nigerian consumer.
Through their outsourcing service provider, Apherion Outsourcing, Interra provides a host of BPO services which include – Contact Centre Services, Document Management Services, Human Resource management & Payroll Processing and Data Entry & Processing.
Service providers call centres have experienced changes since 2002, then Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) operators were running the centre by themselves and provided enough staff to take calls though then subscribers were not as it is today. Then, callers to these centres were meant to talk to human beings and did not wait for a long time before they are answered. As subscribers of the operators increases the number of calls coming to their contact centres increased, and they found out that operating the call centres requires huge investment in human resource and in an attempt to operate a cost effective call centre, as well as to reduce what they classified as oaks call- calls that instead of presenting their problems seek for an interaction with lady recipient on the call centre, that some operators introduced Interactive Voice Response system at their call centres.
Interactive voice response (IVR), is a technology that allows a computer to detect voice and keypad inputs. IVR technology is used extensively in telecommunications, but is also being introduced into Automobile systems for handsfree operation. IVR system can respond with pre-recorded or dynamically generated audio to further direct users on how to proceed. IVR systems can be used to control almost any function where the interface can be broken down into a series of simple menu choices. In telecommunications IVR systems generally scale well to handle large call volumes.
It has become more common in industries that have recently entered the telecom industry to refer to an Automated Attendant as an IVR. This means that when discussing an IVR application, it is important to ensure that the person you are talking to understands the term to mean the same thing as you do. Generally-speaking, those with a traditional telecom background are more likely to refer to an Automated Attendant and IVR as separate things, whereas those from an Emerging Telephony or VoIP background are more likely to use the term IVR to define any kind of telephony menu, even the most basic Automated Attendant.
Call centers use IVR systems to identify and segment callers. The ability to identify customers allows the ability to tailor services according to the customer profile. It also allows the option of choosing automated services. Information can be fed to the caller allowing choices such as: wait in the queue, choose an automated service, or request a callback. (At a suitable time and telephone number) The use of Computer Telephone Integration (CTI) will allow the IVR system to look up the CLI (Calling Line ID) on a network database and identify the caller. This is currently accurate for about 80% of inbound calls. In the cases where CLI is withheld or unavailable, the caller can be asked to identify themselves by other methods such as a PIN or password. The use of DNIS will ensure that the correct application and language is executed by the IVR system.
IVR is often criticized as being unhelpful and difficult to use due to poor design and lack of appreciation of the caller’s needs. Some callers object to providing voice response to an automated system and prefer speaking with a human respondent. A properly designed IVR application should provide the caller’s needs promptly and with a minimum of complexity.
It is against this backdrop that telecom subscribers in the country are agitating to the use of IVR as they are expecting human beings to attend to them and not machines. In view of all these challenges, the question is how can telecommunications service providers improve on the efficiency of their call centre in order to meet NCC standard on it?
To this end, what readily comes to mind is outsourcing of the service to different company other than the operator. This initiative is presently being done by MTN while Zain is planning to embrace it as well. Some MTN and Zain subscribers are consistently complaining about IVR in almost all Telecom Consumer parliament organized by NCC, saying that they are being frustrated by machine answering them without eventually resolving the issues.
Industry watches that spoke to Nigeria CommuniccationsWeek are of the view that outsourcing is not a bad initiative as well as IVR by the companies that operate these call centre but that they should try and reduce the use of machine by giving caller the option of either talking to human or machine for those that are not well educated as to follow IVR considering the level of literacy in our society.