The Intelligent Approach to Customer Service - A Guide to a More Customer-centric Call Centre

By: Patsy Bertoia, Managing Director, Customer Service Canada.

FedEx has become a household name thanks in large part to our dedication to customer service. Frederick W. Smith founded Federal Express in 1971 for the sole purpose of finding a faster, more efficient method of delivering packages and airfreight for customers. Now known as FedEx, that same customer-centric focus prevails in the company today.

One area of the company where the focus on customer service is especially pronounced is in our call centres. In Canada, FedEx has call centres in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver that handle more than 20,000 customer calls daily. Ensuring that we help resolve each and every one of those customer issues in a fast, efficient manner is paramount to maintaining our positive brand image.

Thankfully, our call centres have a great customer resolution track-record which is a direct result of our realization that a "one size fits all" approach does not work. A customer whose cat has slipped into a box just before she sent it off for shipping has a very different set of needs from a customer who is curious about whether his package will arrive at its destination before Valentines Day - and we need ways to properly address both.

However, finding ways to connect customers with the right resources is not a simple or easy process. Just as Frederick W. Smith spent considerable time analyzing shipping routes to determine the best way to design a shipping system for faster delivery of airfreight, we take the same careful, analytical approach to designing customer-centric call centres.

Inbound call routing
Like many call centres, we employ an automated information menu that a large portion of our customers use to find basic information from billing to package location. To service customers with more complex needs, we designed an infrastructure that carefully matches callers with service agents based on availability, level of knowledge, language capabilities and other characteristics.

This approach helps us efficiently provide the majority of our customers with "one-call" resolution, which means that the first agent customers speak to can generally provide them with all the information they need.

We relied heavily on partnerships with technology and telecommunications providers to help us develop this system, since the deployment and management of highly specialized technology falls outside of our core expertise.

Our famous 1-800-GoFedEx toll free service in Canada and North America is supported by AT&T and includes a number of important network-based features that we have leveraged to streamline our call centres. This includes an Intelligent Call Management (ICM) feature offered by AT&T which helps us determine where to best route customers, based on an algorithm FedEx created.

With this intelligence, we can connect a French-speaking customer concerned about whether the contents of her package will pass safely over international borders to the first French or bi-lingual agent with experience in cross-border shipping issues. This saves customers from the frustrating and time consuming experience of being transferred between agents or being forced to call back.

The AT&T Contact Center service also provides us with routing capabilities that help distinguish our call centres systems from many others in the industry. Instead of routing callers into a single call centre to wait for the next available agent or transferring callers to a queue at another call centre, our system puts all customers in the same queue and matches them to agents regardless of the agent's location.

Using the example above, that same French-speaking customer would be routed to the first French-speaking agent with international shipping experience, regardless of whether they are based in Montreal, Toronto or Vancouver. This helps us significantly shorten wait times for customers and make more efficient use of our call centre resources.

This same routing capability also helps us continue to service customers should a switch at one of our call centres fail. For instance, if our call centre in Toronto experiences technical problems, our customers are automatically routed to agents at either the Vancouver or Montreal centres, minimizing the impact on customers.

This level type of "always-on" availability is essential to delivering the best customer service possible, which helps us maintain high customer satisfaction levels.

Satellite agents
Although technology is a major factor in the design of our intelligent, customer-centric call centres, we also take great measures to consider intangible factors that may affect service levels, such as agent job satisfaction. To improve the quality of life for some of our senior and more experienced call agents, we recently implemented a new program that allows these agents to work from home.

Called satellite agents, these employees connect to our call centre systems via residential data and voice networks. The program has had a surprisingly positive impact on our overall service levels and resulted in more satisfied agents. This program also allows FedEx to re-route calls off-site, should unforeseen circumstances impact operations at our main call centres.

For many organizations, call centres are seen as a necessary evil that drains a certain portion of the operating budget from the company each year. At FedEx, we believe that investing time and money into strategies and technologies that help us more efficiently respond to customer inquires has a positive impact on the long-term success of the company.

We are proof that focused and strategic call centre investments can dramatically speed customer resolution and improve customer satisfaction. We encourage others in the service industry to work with their call centre teams and outside vendors to implement more intelligent, customer centric call centres.

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