KEY POINTS:
Here's something to ponder next time you're on the phone to your power company with nothing to do but listen to tedious "hold" musak.
Think back to your last excruciating call-centre experience. Would it have gone any better if you'd been able to see the face of the stonewalling customer service agent on the other end of the line?
Your answer may depend on how old you are.
For Baby Boomers and Generation Xers, the option of videoconferencing over the internet with a company representative over a bill muck-up has limited appeal.
But for a growing number of Gen Yers - the under-30 generation of online social networkers - interacting through a web-based video link is a comfortable way of communicating.
Working out how to keep this demographic happy by communicating with them on their terms is something call-centre operators need to work on as the first Gen-Yers enter their 30s and begin flexing their financial muscle.
Communications software company Ayava, which is heavily involved in the global call-centre business, says its corporate clients are increasingly aware that keeping customers happy means offering them a range of ways to communicate with a call centre.
Avaya commissioned a survey which found that 59 per cent of New Zealanders said phoning a call centre and talking to a customer service rep was their preferred means of contacting a company.
But 22 per cent said interacting by email or the internet was their preferred option.
Smaller numbers preferred to visit the store or use other communication technology such as an automated touch-tone phone system.
The survey confirmed some other aspects of how New Zealanders feel about call centres: we hate talking to "company representatives" based overseas and we hate talking to machines.
Although only 16 per cent of those surveyed said they would be unhappy talking to a customer service rep they knew was working from home, an overwhelming 67 per cent were uncomfortable talking to one they knew was based overseas.
When it comes to talking to robots - or voice recognition systems as they are officially termed - only 2 per cent claimed them as their preferred means of corporate contact and 10 per cent rated difficulties with such systems as the reason why their last call centre experience had been poor.
Avaya South Pacific managing director Carlton Taya says that overall people want to talk to knowledgeable company reps who are able to solve the problem efficiently.
Taya has what should be good news for those who hate overseas-based centres (a concept which the survey found was more abhorrent to women than to men).
Avaya is plugging the concept of the "virtual contact centre" to its corporate clients.
This is the idea that instead of having your phone reps all seated in a room, possibly in some distant low-waged land, more incoming calls are directed to local staff with the skills to answer specific queries.
These staff could be branch-office workers who have other non-call centre roles but at certain quieter times of the day have the capacity to spend time taking calls.
Avaya's interest in pushing the virtual call centre concept is that it encourages sales of the company's sophisticated high-margin technology that enables calls to be routed to the appropriate and available staff across an organisation.
Taya says he has been pitching the concept to New Zealand clients and it has been met with interest.
A couple of factors are probably driving the interest Taya is seeing.
Businesses are picking up on the dislike customers have of offshore call centres and at the same time the economics that are involved in outsourcing that particular business function are changing with wages in countries such as India on the rise. Taya's news is not so good, however, for those who don't like trying to talk to speech-recognition computers.
Taya accepts that consumers may have had problems with the technology in the past but says it has become more reliable and will remain a part of the call centre arsenal.
Like touch-tone phone menu systems, he sees speech recognition as a useful way to bypass the call centre queues that develop when there is a shortage of humans available to answer queries.
"As a technology company we'll argue that speech [recognition technology within call centres] is now in its maturing form," he says.
"We think we need to do more education convincing customers that it's right."
* simon@businesswriter.co.nz
