IN FOCUS: What happens when you contact a bank or telco customer care centre?

While call volumes have declined over the years, most banks and telcos said they still receive high numbers of queries from customers.

DBS said its 500-strong customer service officer workforce, which is based in Singapore and comprises mostly Singaporeans, manages over 250,000 queries from customers each month. This works out to more than 3 million queries per year.

OCBC said it has received 1.4 million calls this year while Singtel, which provides various channels for customers to reach out to them including Whatsapp messaging and its customer hotline, said it handles more than three million queries from customers each year.

The number of queries may also surge during major incidents such as service disruptions, placing a greater strain on customer service resources.

“In a (mobile network) outage, you must understand that the volume and the traffic (of calls or chats) that comes to us is not five times or ten times, it’s probably 100 times more than normal,” said M1’s director of customer experience and retail Stamford Low.

“To be able to scale up, we rely heavily on our bots, so we have an ability to update the bot with the outage information. So if you were to call us, the voicebot would be able to tell you ‘if you’re calling us because you’re facing service difficulty, our engineers are aware and they are working on it,” he said.

“So we are able to do that so that the customer doesn’t have to go and wait for a long time before they speak to an agent and then hear the same thing anyway.”

DBS said it has real-time monitoring dashboards and early warning indicators to enable its teams to rapidly ramp up resourcing to manage spikes in call volumes, while OCBC said it schedules more officers to work during peak periods such as the start of the month when they typically receive a higher number of queries about bank balances and credit card statements.

With some clients complaining that they are unable to reach a customer service officer during such situations, companies CNA spoke to said they do not avoid calls.

“‘When there is a surge in calls, we try our very best to clear as many calls as possible … we may even do a slightly higher number of calls (than usual),” said OCBC’s Mr Indra, adding that staff members from other teams might also be deployed to attend to customer calls.

With some users complaining that they are unable to reach a customer service agent during major incidents, Singtel’s deputy chief executive officer Anna Yip said there could be delays due to a surge in calls.

“When incidents happen … it’s not just the (customer service) agents’ role, it’s actually a whole team that crosses many departments like networks, customer agents, marketing is also involved,” she said.

“It’s basically like a war room situation … because we don’t want to give customers wrong information. We want them to … know that they’re being taken care of, but we also need to give them correct information whenever we can, because if we really don’t know what’s going on, we can’t lie.”

“So that’s why the coordination is very, very tight, and it’s not just about the front-end messaging, but all the way to the back, those people who are fixing things and turning things around, giving us the update. We need to keep it in one team.”

“We don’t stop any calls or … say ‘we don’t take any calls because we have nothing new to tell people’.

“It could be that, in the very, very rare situation where we do have a call surge, then of course, there is a bit of delay for people to come through, but we never stop communication, and we certainly never stop people from contacting us at all.”

RISING CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS

With consumers becoming more digitally savvy, this could have also resulted in higher expectations of customer service, according to Assoc Prof Cheah.

“Just a few years back, studies showed that consumers were still alright if they had to wait a little while for their issue to be resolved,” she said.

“But today, a lot of people cannot tolerate even a refresh of the screen which takes more than one minute or a call that is not handled within ten minutes.

“It’s the digital age that we’re living in, where a lot of information is being provided very quickly, so … to a certain extent, we are being conditioned to expect a fast response.”

To keep up with rising expectations, OCBC said it has implemented several internal processes to help to shorten its customer service officers’ average handling time.

This includes allowing its customer service executives to approve loan waiver requests immediately provided certain criteria are met, as well as processing credit card transaction disputes.

Previously, they were not able to do this and had to raise such requests to another team to process.

Its efforts appear to be working with the bank now hitting its target of picking up 80 per cent of calls within 60 seconds.

In comparison, it picked up 40 to 50 per cent of calls within the target last year.

“Last year, when I took on (this new role), we obviously had quite a fair bit of catch up, but ever since we normalized the situation beginning of this year, we’ve been using data to teach ourselves how to be more proactive,” said OCBC’s head of service channels and transformation Dennis Lee.

“(We) want to be proactive, to (be able to) tell customers that the moment they face an issue, we (already) know and before they call us, we are able to educate them on how to self-help so that they can resolve an issue … without having to call us or wait on the phone.”

The bank is currently pilot testing push notifications that explain why payment has failed when a customer’s card is rejected as well as free web call service for customers who experience credit card issues while overseas.

This was a solution it came up with after noticing that enquiries about account balances as well as credit card issues accounted for the highest numbers of calls.

“What I’m trying to do is whenever they tap at a failed transaction straightaway, we will detect why their transactions were rejected … so we’re trying to proactively inform customers … and this is where they can go and self-help immediately,” said OCBC’s Mr Lee.