Twenty-five years after their inception, call centres are finally getting a makeover, with awards ceremonies, consumer feedback and, above all, an emphasis on the human touch. Tom Lamont goes behind the scenes to meet the real people to whom your call is important
His exact words, reading like sweary Enigma code, were "cock up brain dead in call centre clueless", but we all understood what Alan Sugar meant.
Earlier this month the business tycoon had taken to Twitter to vent a fury, some problem with his BT internet connection, a faulty router, the details didn't matter ? it was the call centre that did it, and Sugar expressed a universal frustration. After speaking too long to a leaden operator, being passed about departments like an insensate parcel, hearing several loops of "Greensleeves" and "Mambo No 5", who hasn't thought of smashing down the phone and screaming "cock up brain dead in call centre clueless" at the ceiling?
Uniquely irritating, call centres are unavoidable in modern life: the gateway to household-bill or working-boiler or hard-shoulder rescue, even (from this month) an appointment with the local doctor ? at least in places like Manchester and Milton Keynes where bookings at 50 general practices are to be grouped under a remote call-centre booking system.
How much do we really know about them? "More people have worked in call centres than ever worked in the mining industry," says the writer Matt Thorne, a former operator who wrote a novel, Eight Minutes Idle, about his experiences, "yet it's an occupation that has a relatively low public profile."
Keen to find out more about this industry that employs more than a million Britons, so often a source of anguish for the remainder, I am at the Call Centre Expo in Birmingham's NEC Arena. Thousands of insiders gather here every year to tour the hangar-like space, sharing advice and innovations, selling each other products and worrying about an industry that has gone through some juddering changes in its short lifespan.
It is a frenetic event. Men on podiums have imaginary conversations into futuristic headsets. A consultancy firm has erected a "wall of honesty", asking visitors to confess to past sins like hazy option menus, or neglect. Later in the evening, I have seen advertised, the European Call Centre of the Year awards will be staged in a neighbouring hotel. For now, guests are invited to sit in on talks in the hall's various lecture spaces: "My Call Centre Doesn't Understand Me", "Press One To Get Lost", "Hello Mr Bond We've Been Expecting You (The True Value of Voice)", "Tenacity! Selecting The Right People To Work In A Call Centre".
I stop in at "Press One To Get Lost", a 45-minute oration by a consultant called Don Peppers who rails at the culture of pass-the-potato phonecalls and the fact that two-thirds of UK customers think service levels have plummeted in the past three years. Peppers bemoans rudeness, inattention, ending with a stark warning to his audience of call-centre bods: "Remember that customers have memories. They have brains."
It is a rousing address, and seems to sum up a prevailing theme at the Expo, with its wall of honesty, its self-flagellating seminars: that it's time for the industry to rediscover its humanity. Lord Sugar, after his Twitter rant, got an apology call from BT chairman Ian Livingston. Unusual circumstances, but the personal touch did the trick and Sugar's tropical fury was assuaged. Customers have brains, said Don Peppers. When did the idea ever get lost?
Call centres as we know them ? banks of agents, "press 21 if your surname contains a double consonant" ? first appeared in Britain in 1985, when the businessman Peter Wood founded the telephone-based insurance company Direct Line. His 63-man centre in Croydon was followed, in 1988, by a First Direct centre in Leeds, a location chosen because of the pleasant lilt of the local workforce. By the mid-1990s this cost-reducing method of managing inbound and outbound calls was a business standard, the industry, by the mid-2000s, one of the fastest-growing in the UK.
Somewhere in its 25-year lifespan, admits Peter Wood, now the head of esure insurance, "the phrase 'call centre' came to have all sorts of associations for people, often bad". A survey by the Citizens Advice Bureau in 2004 revealed that 97% of call-centre customers had had cause to complain. "Lack of human contact" was a major woe ? actually a calculated move by industry innovators looking to slim call times (and staff costs) through automation. At the Birmingham Expo I'd listened to Nicola Millard, a call-centre wiz from BT, speak about the era of self service that everybody expected would be in place around 2008. "We were all supposed to be redundant!" Millard reminded her audience: robots were meant to be answering the phones, customers plinking in their complaints and queries via a telephone keypad.
Number pressing, of course, came to be seen as special torture. "Like everyone, I hate push-button options," says Wood. "You don't know you've taken the wrong path until it's too late." Customers rebelled, hammering zero to speak to a real person. An entrepreneur even set up a website, gethuman.com, revealing which keys to press to bypass option menus. Self service was scaled back.
Another cost-cutting measure, the export of call-centre jobs from the UK to Asia from 2001, further damaged the industry's image. Migration peaked around 2005, institutions like the AA and National Rail Enquiries shifting tens of millions of calls east. But callers hated it; something felt wrong about an agent in Bangalore reading out the trans-Pennine train timetable, and the whiff of bad PR grew so that companies began hauling call-centre work back to the UK. BT, said Millard, has reduced its offshore centres to three. Yorkshire-based internet company Plusnet, meanwhile, is one of many to boast in adverts of its UK-based centres ? "Just down t'road", as a chummy voice puts it.
All this flip-flopping has left the reputation of call centres in limbo, everyone with a favourite complaint. Peter Wood hates button bashing. Thorne, being on hold with terrible music playing. Peppers expresses contempt for centres that try to flog things even when being called with a complaint (it is not uncommon, apparently, for incoming calls to be routed through a sales team). For me, it's the dead voice of the operators I always seem to get ? the ones that sound, at best, like they're playing Minesweeper at the other end of the line; at worst, waving two fingers at the receiver while I speak.
Is this what it's really like? Wanting to know, I visit a call centre run by Britvic soft drinks, just down t'road from the Birmingham NEC in an industrial park off the A34. It is a small outfit, about 100 employees spread over four rooms painted a company-correct racing green. The manager, Michelle Smith, shows me around, past a wall-sized Pepsi fridge and a screen showing old Tango adverts. A storeroom has been made up to look like the counter in a pub, complete with a mural of grinning customers, so that agents can know what it's like to stare down the barrel of a faulty R Whites dispenser, and be sympathetic.
She guides me to a desk that takes incoming customer calls. "We get all kinds," says Krista, an agent in her 20s. "People suggesting flavours. Asking, can vegetarians drink Juicy Drench? We're not medically trained ? we tell them to speak to their GPs." What's the most common complaint, I ask. Money lost in vending machines, says Krista, or flat Pepsi. "Though yesterday we had a gentleman who was upset that his Pepsi had too many bubbles. We had a chat and I explained it was the nature of the product. He calmed down."
A call comes through: a man in Eastbourne troubled by ring pulls. "I've thrown away two cans from the multipack already. When I couldn't open a third?" Krista tells him he was right to call. A bad batch, she thinks, letting him vent for 10 minutes before sending out vouchers. No script reading, no holding music ? just Krista doing a good impression of somebody interested in ring pulls.
I ask the team about the popular call centre grumbles: the number pressing, the zombie voices. There are just a lot of bad centres out there, they agree. "I hate having to ring Carphone Warehouse," says one. "Personally I'd rather throw my phone in the bin than call Vodafone," chips in a colleague. "And I'd rather slit my throat," concludes another, "than speak to BT."
Smith leads me to the office's award shelf. There, on proud display, is a European Call Centre of the Year award, won by Britvic in 2009 for being the year's best small centre. They were chosen, thinks Smith, because of the little things: tone of voice; a deep love for Britvic products ("I like a gin and tonic, but if it isn't Britvic tonic ? mine's a wine"); because they never play "Greensleeves"; because the people who answer her phones do a good job of caring, or seeming to care, about the calls they receive, however silly.
"We were put on this earth to make relationships," says Smith. "Why should call centres be any different?"
Having the reputation they do, the notion of a black-tie bash honouring call centres sits a little strangely. In which hotel ballroom, you want to ask, is the ceremony for 2010's loudest car alarm? But the European Call Centre Awards exist, are 15 years established, and are taken very seriously by people in the industry. This I discover while sitting among 500 of them in formal dress in the ballroom of a Midlands Hilton. Loosened by free fizz, the assembled blare like a sports crowd whenever a champion is called to the stage: a woman from Orange winning manager of the year, LV insurance victorious in the "most improved" bracket and earning a brief football chant in recognition.
Next to me on my table are members of the Britvic team. This year they are just interested spectators, but they know what it is to climb that podium, and they whoop with particular gusto whenever a winner is announced. British Gas gets an award for large call centre of the year, and then another for best centre to work for. "So constant," says Smith, shaking her head appreciatively. "British Gas are one of the best."
There's a strange moment when the NHS are booed, around the hall, for reasons unclear. "They help people with cancer, you dicks!" says comedian-for-hire Rufus Hound, uneasily hosting the ceremony. Hound is on a tight leash: beyond an opening tease about being unavailable to take the stage due to high demand ("but please be assured your awards are very important to me") he's kept the call-centre gags to a minimum. But as the ceremony wears on, the strain shows and Hound gives a pantomime yawn while presenting a Lifetime Achievement award. "Let's put these motherf***ers out of their misery," he says before the final winner is announced ? the big one, the European call centre of the year. It is British Gas, the team climbing to the stage to collect a third trophy of the night. Smith nods her approval.
"If you're already looking forward to the 2011 Awards," says Hound, closing proceedings, "they'll be in Mumbai." There's some uneasy laughter; most of the crowd have already started to drift away to an adjoining disco room. On the British Gas table, celebrations are under way.
Three years ago a failing call centre, routinely listed among the worst in the country, British Gas has somehow transformed itself into the best in the game. Intrigued to know how, I arrange a visit, touring the prizewinning centre in Cardiff a week after the awards night. "Customers used to go through three minutes of recorded voice before they spoke to anybody," says John Connolly, the company's head of innovation. No longer: they now get 12 seconds before hitting an agent who's been schooled in psychometrics ? taught to make judgments based on the decades old Myers-Briggs system and adapt their manner accordingly.
Myers-Briggs dictates there are four personality types: the brisk "controller", the sensitive "feeler", the intelligent "thinker", and the joke-telling "entertainer". Customers reveal these traits, says Connolly, through their tone or their choice of words, and agents modify their conversation to fit. "If a thinker wants to chat about taking a trip to Legoland you chat about Legoland. You wouldn't ask a controller what they're doing at the weekend."
As we move on, past a beanbag-filled space where agents are being taught to replace phrases like "no problem" with "my pleasure", Connolly tells me there used to be a room made up to look a lounge. Staff would take scripted calls, read in person by costumed actors, so they could see what it might look at the other end of the line as a customer complained about a dodgy boiler. "Callers weren't just a voice any more."
To see how it works in practice I sit down next to an agent called Rebecca, a cheery 30-year-old. We're assaulted by calls from the moment I pull on a headset, Rebecca talking and clicking and typing without pause, multitasking like a submarine commander. In a matter of minutes she has seen through three calls: a Sutton-based "controller", ringing off happy with a debt enquiry answered; a Coventry "feeler", promised to be called back when she's had a chance to "have a nice cup of tea"; and a Cheshire "thinker-stroke-feeler", looking to take his wife's name off the bill and, after a chat about life and love, getting his wish. Over the three calls, Rebecca had been a firm-but-fair policewoman, a mate, and a marriage counsellor. I'm impressed.
She attributes her sensitivity to an unfortunate incident, a year ago, when her own house was struck by lightning. "I had to phone everybody ? repairs, insurance ? and some of the call centres couldn't care less. No personal touch." British Gas sees this as key to its reinvigoration: a return to empathy. Strange to think something so essential was ever mislaid.
I tell Rebecca I'm particularly impressed with the man who called up angry and rang off happy. "Fingers crossed he rated me well," she says, and we watch a little box on her screen that will reveal, through a post-conversation survey he's agreed to conduct, what he thought of his call to Rebecca. We stare for a while. "He might not have completed it," she says, a little despondent.
Back in Connolly's office, I learn of some innovations the company plans to roll out: software that will recognise and bar-chart "customer agitation levels"; a bid to remove the last 12 seconds of recorded voice, wiping out any trace of self service. They've also got their eye on the World Call Centre of the Year awards, staged in Las Vegas next year. Even I shiver a little at the thought.
"Back in 1985, we simply decided to use the phone instead of people behind counters," says the grandfather of call centres, Peter Wood. "It was pretty revolutionary, and it cut so much time and money, that's why it took off." It just went too far, thinks Matt Thorne, "the desire to maximise profit continually pushing towards a poorer service."
Restoring the reputation of call centres, Thorne thinks ? reversing Alan Sugar's "brain dead" characterisation ? is up to the individuals answering the phones, British Gas's Rebecca and Britvic's Krista. "Dedicated, knowledgable employees are the only way to go. That ? and maybe letting you choose your own music. Press one for dubstep, two for witch house, etc?"
I am about to leave British Gas when somebody screams my name across the office. It is Rebecca, running over. "He filled in the survey after all," she says, breathless. Who? "The customer. The thinker-feeler from Cheshire. He liked me. Nine out of ten!"
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