Change is coming to PH call centers

Change is coming to the Philippine call center industry, with a former newsboy who now heads the local unit of a US software company delivering the compelling message.

“Customers expect to receive service where, when and how they want it. By 2016, more than 60 percent of inbound customer service interactions are expected to come from devices other than your landline,” says Alfred Lallana Jr., country sales manager of Aspect Software, a world leader in call center technologies.

The rise of millennial generation, or individuals aged 18 to 34, to the corporate hierarchy is leading this change. These young customers want omni-channel experience, instead of talking to call center agents, in dealing with companies, says Jim Freeze, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Boston-based Aspect in a news conference at Makati Shangri-La Hotel.
Aspect Software executives discuss the future of call centers in a news conference at Makati Shangri-La Hotel. Shown are (from left) senior vice president and chief marketing officer Jim Freeze, senior director for marketing in Asia-Pacific Edwin Ong, managing director for South Asia and the Middle East Sanjay Gupta and Philippines country sales manager Alfred Lallana Jr.
Sanjay Gupta, managing director of Aspect for South Asia and the Middle East, says call centers are going through an interesting transformation. “The reason for this is that consumers are changing,” he says, adding that technology is also playing a role.

“Now, customers are looking at more information. They are looking at superior customer handling. The fact is that the role of agents is changing. This is a very interesting shift,” says Gupta.

Freeze says that instead of picking up the phones to talk to call center agents, the millennial population prefer browsing the interactive Websites of companies on their smartphones to avail of services, in the same way that they can now do financial transactions through banks’ Websites without dealing with a teller.

Lallana, who graduated with a degree in Electronics Engineering from Saint Louis University in 1990, grew up delivering newspapers in Baguio City as a young boy. At the news conference in Makati Shangri La Hotel, he delivered news about the changes coming to the business process outsourcing and call center industry, which may affect the employment of more than 1 million Filipinos.

Lallana knows the industry well, having a 25-year experience in the information technology sector, including 15 years in call centers. Prior to joining Aspect in January 2015, Lallana was a vice president at Diversified Technology Solutions International, a business partner of Avaya, which powers most inbound call centers in the Philippines. Aspect’s technologies dominate outbound call centers.

He was also a former overseas Filipino worker who served as a telecom engineer at the Electrical and Electronics Contracting Company Ltd. (Panasonic-Office Automation) in Saudi Arabia.

A new Aspect survey developed with millennial expert Jason Dorsey shows that companies need to quickly address the customer engagement preference of the millennial demographic or risk going out of business.
Aspect country sales manager for Philippines Alfred Lallana Jr.
“Nearly a third of consumers would rather clean a toilet than talk to customer service,” results of the Aspect Consumer Experience Index: Millennial Research on Customer Service Expectations show.

Results also show that 56 percent of millennials moved their business from at least one company in the past year due to poor customer service. About 73 percent of consumers say they should have the ability to solve most product and service issues on their own.

Freeze says companies that fail to respond to the generational shift will be left irrelevant. “Tons of companies are in the ashes of history because they did not respond to generational changes. Failure to do so will lead companies to shrink or ultimately become irrelevant,” he says.

Freeze says the big opportunity is for companies to enable consumers help themselves and let them do it with text and other digital channels. He says 65 percent of all generations and 69 percent of millennials feel really good about both the company and themselves when they are able to answer a question or solve a problem related to that company on their own.

Lallana says to help companies respond to the generational shift, Aspect introduced Customer Experience Platform or CXP 14.1, which has self-service and omni-channel features.

“It is my only seventh month in Aspect. When I started in the first quarter, when we started to preach our solutions, especially the CXP omni-channel, they were surprised. Companies asked can you do that? We told them yes. The banks we talked to, they now want initial workshops and discovery sessions. Our channel partners, they are now calling us to do presentations for their customers,” says Lallana.

Freeze says the Philippines is a key market for Aspect. “We invested heavily in completely redoing consumer service and interface to one that is browser based, incredibly intuitive and colorful,” he says.

“We believe that consumers are reimagining and redefining how they interact with companies that they do business with. We feel this very strongly. Customers are screaming that they want to solve problems on their own. Increasingly, we have a text savvy group of individuals,” says Freeze.

Freeze says customers, if possible, avoid talking to call center agents. “They want to solve problems on their own,” he says.

He says self service and excellence in customer service will define companies in the future. “The new standard for customer interaction is one-touch experience [which means] being able to touch a phone or screen as a way to interact,” says Freeze.

Freeze says within three years, millennials will control more of the economy than baby boomers [or those who were born between 1946 and 1964]. They are taking over our businesses. Their expectations are really impacting business,” he says.

Edwin Ong, senior director for marketing and alliances of Aspect in Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, says the millennials are more demanding than baby boomers. “The millennials are increasingly more impatient than baby boomers, because they grew up with instantaneous gratifications. They are probably more demanding,” he says.

Freeze says a survey by Aspect show that 55 percent of millennials have higher expectations in terms of customer service. About 61 percent of the respondents say they don’t want to repeat themselves, when talking to call center agents.

“Majority of millennials have switched doing business with companies because of bad customer service. There is no loyalty. If you don’t want to give them customer service the way they want it, they will go somewhere else. It has huge, huge impact on business,” says Freeze.

About 70 percent of respondents also say they want to solve issues on their own, he says.

“We firmly believe that today’s consumers are very different than five or even three years ago. When they contact you, they want you to know who they are. They are also mobile,” Freeze says.

Freeze says Aspect’s latest product―the CXP omni-channel enables companies to respond to the needs of the millennial customers. “That’s the kind of transaction customers want- to be able to go from one channel to another and they don’t have to repeat themselves,” he says.

“Over the past two and a half years, we have invested almost a quarter of a billion dollars in the US in acquisitions, investments in companies to bring these portfolio of omni-channel, consumer interaction capabilities, workforce optimization, back office optimization and cloud capabilities,” says Freeze.

“We think companies should increase the number of interactions, but they should do it in the way that consumers want, which is self service. And by doing that, you have more satisfied consumers,” says Freeze.

Freeze, however, explains that Aspect does not intend to steal jobs of call center agents. “The agents are not irrelevant. They are very very important. Our technologies will help them so that they are not doing the mundane, which consumers can do for themselves,” he says, adding that the role of call center agents will be elevated to more critical tasks.

Lallana says Aspect technologies can help customer service divisions of banks, utilities, airlines and other companies achieve efficiency and increase the number of interactions in the BPO industry, without necessarily affecting employment in the sector.

“The Philippines BPO revenues now seem to overtake OFW remittances. Next year, estimated BPO revenues would be $25 billion while OFW remittances would be less than that. So we can now call BPO employees and call center agents as the new heroes of the Philippines,” says Lallana. –Roderick T. dela Cruz, Manila Standard Today