Survey highlights call centre failings

Major firms running call centres in the Republic are not making adequate contingency plans for their services in the event of an emergency, according to a paper by two technology services companies.

Synstar International and Sabio warn that the maturing Irish contact centre industry needs to upgrade the services they provide to deflect competition from India and east European countries, where staffing costs are lower.

"For most companies, it doesn't really matter where in the world the call centres are," says Mr Rod Coleman, director of Sabio. "Ireland has been successful in attracting multinationals to set up call centres because of tax incentives, but it has to compete on a higher-value basis now."

A survey by market analyst Datamonitor suggests that the Republic's working population has the highest proportion of call centre staff in Europe at 3.6 per cent. The three main industries establishing centres here are the technology, financial services and travel sectors.

Business continuity is one of the higher-value services that the Irish industry can offer, according to Synstar. The company has developed a contact centre facility in Swords that can act as a back-up for companies wanting to make sure customers can still access services if a natural disaster or technical hitch results in the shutdown of their main contact centre.

"Lack of continuity can have a massive impact on share prices and market confidence. If a customer can't get through to a bank, for example, they might start to worry that they've gone bust," says Mr Alan Whelan, sales manager for Synstar. Or if an airline's contact centre is unavailable to take bookings for urgent flights, customers will transfer their loyalties elsewhere.

Outsourced business continuity services have been in demand in the US since the terrorist attacks shut down New York last year.

"September 11th reinforced the belief that business continuity cannot be taken for granted," says Mr Coleman.

Two of Synstar's clients, an Irish financial institution and an international manufacturing company, are running test cases at the Swords facility. The site has capacity for 450 contact centre agents and there are plans to extend this up to 1,600.

"Companies can't have an exact mirror of their call centre waiting for something to happen, that's not practical," explains Mr Whelan. "But the idea of the Swords facility is not just to say, here's a big warehouse full of seats. It's about looking at what applications companies use and asking what are the key services the call centre provides."

Disaster recovery plans are carried out on a phased basis, he adds.

Outbound marketing campaigns - "like ringing up people and saying, 'hi, are you interested in a car loan?' " - take a back seat to facilitating financial transactions and answering critical, loyalty-enhancing calls from customers.

Contingency plans can be as simple as reverting to pen and paper or knowing where to source replacement computers, according to Mr Whelan, but most companies are taking risks by not thinking about how to relocate staff, not reviewing plans on a regular basis and not asking awkward "what if" questions.

"Companies say they can re-route calls from the centre to another call centre in Derry. They don't ask, what if the switch can't handle that volume of calls? What if the calls in Dublin were answered in French or German or Spanish, but in Derry, it's English?"

The contact centre industry is "not just standing still", but broadening the scope of the services it provides, making wider use of web-chat, outbound telemarketing and customer relationship management technology.