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In the companion piece to this article, The
Swedish Call Center Outlook, you read about the
opportunities Sweden offers companies wishing to set up
call centers. As well as presentations by the Invest in
Sweden Agency, the group of journalists assembled in
Stockholm was treated to briefings by companies
operating in Sweden and escorted on tours of call
centers in the area.
Philip Cohen,
an international call center consultant based in Sweden,
gave an overview of dynamics of change that are
affecting the operation of call centers. With the advent
of new media, such as e-mail, Web chat and
collaboration, more calls are being generated based on
the new media, but better call-handling technologies,
skills-based routing, speech-recognition technologies
and easier database access by agents are making it
possible to handle more calls with fewer agents.
Although agents are answering fewer routine questions,
they must be better educated and master more skills. Job
variations and multitasking add to the challenge of
finding agents and also add training costs for the
agents to master new skills. While the number of e-mail
contacts is increasing, Mr. Cohen noted that e-mail is
still a series of monologs and on average it takes four
times as long to resolve a problem by e-mail as opposed
to doing it by phone, highlighting the fact that the
strength of the phone is that it is a medium for dialog.
Mr. Cohen believes that generally, people look to the
Internet to try to find cheaper prices, but companies
need to find a way to upsell and cross-sell these
customers and so are looking to push customers to the
phone. The habits of Internet users also change with
familiarity with it. The more you use the Internet, you
tend to use it less often as you do less surfing and
become more systematic and purposeful. In other words,
you transform it from a curiosity or a toy into a tool.
And using it as a tool, you tend to find out the simple
things for yourself, which leaves the difficult
questions for sending queries to experts. But as people
are asking more complex problems for expensive products,
they expect an educated agent, again reinforcing the
need for better-educated agents.
As other media are added into the mix, they make
their own contributions and pose their own problems, but
the telephone is still the consumer-preferred medium,
with about 80 to 90 percent of all contacts still being
by telephone; it is still the place where selling takes
place. Mr. Cohen stressed that to help companies provide
a differentiator between themselves and their
competition, they need to develop the perception that
their call centers are providing a better grade of
service. Call center managers need to convince
management that service is a competitive factor, a
survival factor, not a cheap, quick fix.
Telia
Magnus Sjlund, president, Telia
Promotor AB, a subsidiary of Telia AB (Sweden's
largest telecommunications company), spoke about the
services provided by Telia Promotor and also about
problems facing call centers in general. Telia Promotor
provides consultant services and solutions for customer
management. Telia Promotor's specialists focus on the
contact center, CRM and Internet services and have
delivered services for more than 13,000 agents.
According to Mr. Sjlund, as more media are added to
contact center channels, universal queues will be needed
to give agents access to all activities and contacts and
automatically follow-up when needed. Mr. Sjlund also
cited an estimate that by 2003, 25 percent of all
contacts will be by e-mail, so closer attention will
have to be paid to e-mail service levels as businesses
begin to analyze how they are servicing their customers.
Additional pressures are being put on contact centers as
Web sites evolve from brochure sites to interactive
sites to relation sites that use personal info. Other
contact center trends cited by Mr. Sjlund include
voice authentication, mobile agents and the creation of
the virtual company contact center, where all personnel
can act as agents to reach higher service levels and the
customer can be treated with a personal touch regardless
of method of entry to the company. Contact centers with
new Internet technology allow companies to take care of
their customers despite channel, time and location.
Telia Promotor's contact center product portfolio
consists of a range of products covering solutions for
different branches of business. Most of Promotor's
delivered systems are based upon three platforms:
Virtual Call Center (VCC), a network-based contact
center solution developed by Telia and sold as a network
service; the Genesys platform developed and marketed by
Genesys, which is a link-based solution targeted to
mid-size and large companies and sold as a
customer-based solution; and Telia CallGuide, which was
developed by Telia and is independent of type of
exchange. The Telia CallGuide is a solution for contact
centers ranging from 10 to 2,000 agents that provides an
IP-PBX, IVR, fax, phone, chat, e-mail, Web and WAP
capabilities, as well as universal queuing, skills-based
routing, screen pops, screen transfer, soft phone,
statistics and callback and call me services, campaign
capabilities, speech recognition and text-to-speech.
SITEL Nordic
Tomas Olsson, business director, SITEL
Nordic, provided background about SITEL and SITEL
Nordic, which is located in rebro, Sweden. With more
than 22,000 employees, SITEL is one of the largest
outsourcing companies in the world. Focusing on large
organizations, SITEL uses its 72 contact centers in 19
countries to help clients with not only teleservices,
but also on developing relationships through e-media
contacts.
The company that was to become SITEL Nordic was
founded in 1989 when Hkan Svanberg founded Svanberg
& Co. SITEL acquired Svanberg & Co. in the fall
of 1997 and retained Mr. Svanberg as its managing
director. SITEL Nordic now has 313 workstations and 330
employees who handle contacts to and from all Nordic
countries. Mr. Olsson reported that the management of
SITEL Nordic is driven by the philosophy that every
employee is important. To foster a culture of respect,
all new employees are taught a greeting from the Nataal
region of South Africa: "Sawu bono," which
means "I see you," and the response,
"Sikona," which means "I am here."
The phrases are used to illustrate the fact that I am
aware of you and you have my complete attention and
empathy. At SITEL Nordic, this translates to being there
for customers and fellow employees alike. And it must be
working, as Olsson reported that SITEL Nordic has a 95
percent retention rate.
Nordea
Martin Karlsson, vice president, channel integration at Nordea,
enlightened the group about Nordea and its Internet and
telephone banking program, Solo. Nordea has the largest
customer base of any financial services group in the
region, including 9 million personal customers, more
than 600,000 corporate customers and 500 large corporate
customers. Nordea has 1,260 bank branch offices, 125
insurance service centers and is a leading asset manager
in the Nordic financial market with 97 billion Euros
under management. As part of the Solo program, Nordea
supports 2.4 million Internet customers.
Mr. Karlsson explained that Nordea provides a
consistent logic through all customer interaction
channels so there will be a uniform customer experience
no matter which channel a customer may choose. The
group's electronic banking services are used more than
6.4 million times a month. The services may be used for
a range of banking services including account management
and invoice payments, buying and selling of shares,
mutual funds and bonds, as well as for electronically
signed credit facilities and foreign payments,
e-commerce payments and electronic invoicing,
identification, signature and salary. Nordea still
handles more than 7 million manual interactions per year
(60 million including IVR interactions), and has 1,000
CSRs in 12 contact centers. Providing integrated service
is part of Nordea's CRM program. As Mr. Karlsson said,
"It's not the technology, but what it can do for
the customers. For our customers, it allows us to
provide simplicity and convenience while building
trust."
Ericsson ASQ
At the Ericsson Radio Systems call center in the
Stockholm suburb of Kista, Ericsson vice president
Katarina Mellstrm detailed how the ASQ (answering
sales-related questions; pronounced "ask")
group operates. Run by a core executive team and divided
into three groups, ASQ operates 24/7/365 and handles
more than 3,000 cases per month.
ASQ's Intranet Support group answers questions from
Ericsson market units from around the world. The
Internet Support group answers questions from the
general public that come in through a question template
at www.ericsson.com.
The e-Business Support group handles questions from
Ericsson's extranet portals that are set up for
Ericsson's key customers. According to Ms. Mellstrm,
agents are thoroughly trained and have deep knowledge of
Ericsson's products and services. As part of the
Ericsson plan to keep agents' skills sharp, one-third of
their working time is dedicated to training courses,
practical training and job rotation to different product
units, thus developing front- and back-office skills
while developing their competence.
Ericsson has employed a Remedy help desk application,
and e-mail questions that come in to the units receive
an auto-response saying they received the inquiry and
provide an estimated response time. Looking over the
shoulder of one agent in the ASQ Intranet group, I was
impressed at how skillfully he was handling diverse
inquiries. Besides using permanent employees, Ericsson
uses students from the Swedish Royal Institute of
Technology to fill in on nights and weekends. Ericsson
sees this as a chance to find and develop highly skilled
workers for the future.
SAS
The next stop on our call center tour took us one of the
four call centers in Sweden of SAS
(Scandinavian Airlines System). Over the past three
years, SAS has been working on a comprehensive program
designed to strengthen its competitiveness and
profitability. As part of this plan, internal work is
focused on developing customer relationships. At the
heart of this are, of course, SAS's call centers, which
are open for customer inquiries from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.
When calls come in, they are routed to the first
available agent. Agents are given 10 weeks of training
before answering calls, so they are well equipped to
handle any inquiries that come their way. And come they
do, as SAS gets around 4 million calls per year and
5,000 e-mail messages a month.
SAS's 300 agents are comfortably seated at
ultra-modern, ergonomic workstations that were designed
by one of Europe's leading ergonomists. The agents can
also relax in a sunny kitchen and lounge with a nice
view of suburban Stockholm when not manning the phones.
Highlighting that SAS is a good company to work for,
many agents go on to other jobs within SAS
Convergys
In the town of Linkping two hours south of Stockholm
are the offices of Convergys Sweden. (For those of you
who missed our annual Top
50 Teleservices Agencies rankings Convergys
ranked number one worldwide in inbound transactions.)
Worldwide, Convergys has 50 integrated contact centers
and more than 40,000 agents. Jonas Berggren, general
manager, Convergys Linkping, gave us a tour of a
couple of Convergys Sweden's call centers and a brief
background on Convergys Sweden.
The organization that is now Convergys Sweden started
out as Exit Marketing, which was founded in 1984 by
local university graduates. Convergys acquired Exit
Marketing in 1998, and it has grown to 300 employees and
houses 210 workstations in three separate buildings in
Linkping (a new facility that will have the capacity
for 400 agent workstations is currently under
construction). Convergys concentrates on financial
services, telcos and technology. Convergys' agents
receive 2 1/2 to 3 weeks of training on campaigns, and
average 2 to 3 years of experience with Convergys. Mr.
Berggren said that Convergys looks for agents with
excellent communications skills and their pay is based
on achieving constant results.
One client campaign we saw was a B-to-B and CRM for
Compaq, where Convergys helps Compaq dealers with
outbound acquisitions and lead generation. On another
campaign, Convergys agents are using Kana PowerClient
for e-mail handling for their client Utfors, a broadband
provider selling T1s and fiber for building wiring.
Aiming for a two-hour turnaround for all e-mail, six
agents handle 2,000 e-mail contacts a month for Utfors.
A third campaign we looked in on was for Europe Loan
Bank, where bilingual native speakers in Swedish and
Finnish handle consumer questions about mortgages and
loans. The client's Web page has a call-back function,
and the agents receive prompts to notify them which
country is calling. During peak hours, all six agents on
the campaign handle incoming phone calls, and during
down time, agents answer e-mail inquiries. As part of
the program, the Convergys agents are notified when the
bank's customers receive an error message on the bank's
Web page. In such instances, the Convergys agents
proactively contact the customers, without waiting for
their client to contact them. This group of six agents
answers questions from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through
Friday, and answers 80 percent of all calls within 20
seconds, and all e-mail within a day.
Transcom AB
In Linkping's sister city of Norrkping, we visited
one of five sites in Norrkping of multinational
teleservices agency Transcom.
We met with Richard Krull, telemarketing project
director, and Eva Melin, site manager, who provided us
with information about Trascom and Transcom's Swedish
operations. Transcom was founded in 1995 and has grown
very rapidly, with centers in Denmark, Norway, Estonia,
Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Luxemburg, France,
Austria and Sweden in Europe, Casablanca in Africa, as
well as several sites in Indiana in the U.S. Transcom
has 2,000 employees in Sweden, with 230 agents and 193
agent workstations at the site we visited. At this
particular site, 70 percent of the calling is outbound,
with around 90 percent of that being b-to-c calling. Mr.
Krull and Ms. Melin explained that another center in
Sweden handles e-mail, online chat and inbound calls.
Outbound agents at this center make calls on behalf of
Tele2 as well as other clients in the banking and
gasoline station industry, but a large percentage of
Transcom Sweden's clients are telecom companies, for
which they handle 1,000,000 inbound calls a month and
place 300,000 outbound calls a month. Indeed, the agents
were busy as beavers as we toured the facility.
Mr. Krull and Ms. Melin stated that clients have
access to remote monitoring, to help ensure calls are
handled to their liking, as well as to Transcom's own
high standards for quality (Transcom was a 2000 Gold
Award winner of our annual MVP
Quality Award). A turnover rate of 20 percent at
this particular center is higher than the rest of
Transcom because it is primarily an outbound center and,
as for the industry in general, turnover is almost
always higher for outbound agents. New employees receive
a week of introductory training and then training that
can range up to three weeks on the individual campaigns.
Although the agents seemed young to a middle-aged man
like myself, Transcom agents in Sweden average 1 1/2 to
two years on the job and have an average age of 27, so
the enthusiasm they show for their work is more than
just youthful exuberance.
DBW
Also in Norrkping we visited the office of the young
company DBW (Doing
Business With Us), where the management staff of Robert
Johanson, platschef Norrkping, Joakim Svejd, VD, and
Henrik Gorgensson, vice VD, gave us a quick tour of
their facility and background on DBW. Former Convergys
employees, the three founded DBW in 1999 as they were
eager to start their own company, and also wanted work
in an atmosphere more relaxed than that of a larger
agency (indeed, a large portrait of Kramer stares down
from one wall).
DBW has 60 employees and specializes in outbound
b-to-b sales and lead generation for telecom companies.
Working in groups of five with one person as a team
leader, agents at DBW are calling for their clients from
8 a.m. until 9 p.m. Only full-time employees call during
the day, but DBW employs college students for calling at
nights and on weekends. The directors told us that some
of the advantages of being a smaller agency is that they
can be more flexible and charge lower prices, and yet
still afford to pay their young workforce (whose average
age is 23) more than other service agencies in the
region. The agents at DBW must be successful in their
work, as the company has plans for expanding from 40
workstations to 60 in October.
Throughout my tour of Sweden, I was impressed with
the quality and knowledge of Swedish workers and the
efficiency of the communications infrastructure and so
have no qualms about recommending Sweden as worth a very
close look if you are looking to expanding your
offerings into the Baltic region.
[ Return
To September 2001 Table Of Contents ]
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