Customer Service at Kaston Pyral

‘One of the trends in our business has been the increasing internationalisation of call centres.
Companies have realised that they do not necessarily have to be physically represented in the
country whose market they are serving. Decreasing telecommunications costs have made us all
aware that we can get unheard of economies of scale by focusing on large and sophisticated
call centres which can serve a whole continent, or even the whole world’ (Lisa Jackson,
Customer Service VP, Kaston Pyral, U.S.).

Kaston Pyral Group (KPG) is an international manufacturer and installer of heating, air
conditioning, environmental control and condition monitoring systems. While the company’s
products still included electro-mechanical devices and (mainly) gas burning heating devices,
heat exchangers, etc., increasingly they provided the sophisticated software which controlled
and monitored both their own, and competitors, systems. These control systems could be
updated independently of the hardware. They could also be integrated with other building and
environmental management systems to provide ‘total monitoring and maintenance’ control. This
could include remote diagnostics capabilities which allowed KPG’s engineers to spot potential
problems even before the customer had noticed. The customer service division of KPG provided
customers with a range of services including spare parts supply, maintenance and technical
support. Technical support was becoming particularly important because the integration of new
KPG systems with ‘legacy’ control systems could cause unforeseen problems. In most markets
around the world the division had their own service centres but also used contract service
engineers. Until recently the division also operated call centres in each country in which it
operated. The call centres would take orders for spare parts and arrange delivery, investigate
billing queries, arrange for regular or emergency repair and maintenance visits and provide
technical support for installed hardware and control software.

Merging the call centres

The customer service division had recently decided to merge its individual country-based call
centres into three regional call centres which would cover its three regional markets worldwide.
Last year the call centre in Antwerp, Belgium, had expanded its capacity by five times and had
taken over responsibility for all European customer service. A single centre in Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia, was planned to serve the Asian market. Lisa Jackson’s responsibility was to oversee
the merger of the North American call centres (previously in New Jersey, Montreal and Mexico
City) into a new centre located in Atlanta, Georgia. The changeover to the new centre was
planned to be phased over twenty weeks. Lisa was ten weeks into the changeover. Things were
going well, as Lisa explained.

‘Our current concerns are centred around managing the changeover smoothly. Atlanta is a
greenfield site and most of our staff are relatively inexperienced, but we have put a lot of effort
into training and we have managed so far without any real disaster, although it’s been a steep
learning curve for all of us. We have been working totally in the dark. None of us had any
experience of what it means to bring together the responsibilities of three different centres with
different traditions, cultures and, to some extent, systems. I am just happy that we have managed
well so far. We are currently operating at 75 per cent of our planned final volume and can
already see how concentrating all activities on one site will allow us to achieve economies of
scale compared to having separate country-based centres. We have invested in the latest

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telecommunications technology and call handling systems which allow us to route calls to
associates (call centres operators) with the appropriate technical and language skills. The larger
scale also allows us to cope with the ‘natural’ uncertainty in the volume and type of calls which
come in. Around 40 per cent of our staff are bilingual and 5 per cent trilingual which gives us
the flexibility to cope with fluctuating demand between English-, Spanish- and French-speaking
customers. In fact, because all our customers are businesses, most of them can speak English;
however, we always try to use the appropriate language. It is a matter of courtesy and it also
helps to build relationships with our customers’.

The customer survey

Prior to the changeover period the New Jersey centre had carried out an extensive survey of its
US customers. The summary results are shown in Figure 1. Lisa was pleased to have this data.

‘The New Jersey centre’s survey provides us with a good benchmark. In the short term we have
to make sure that we at least match this level of performance and in the long term we must
improve on it. Certainly the overall level of satisfaction score is not good enough. Our challenge
is to achieve excellence in all aspects of service. But customer service is not the only thing we
have to monitor. It is vital that we get some financial payback for the investment in the new
centre. I have been tasked with making this centre the ultimate in leading edge process
management to ensure ‘world class’ levels of efficiency. That is why we also intend to monitor
productivity-based measures closely. In fact, since the new centre started we have been
recording our progress closely on four key measures (Table 1 shows these measures for the first
ten weeks of the centre’s operation). These are the measures that we have decided will be the
key performance indicators for the centre. ‘Calls per associate hour’ is the best measure we have
of our associates’ productivity and the ‘average call time’ is a related measure which indicates
how efficient the associates are at dealing with customer queries. As we get better at routing
calls to the right associate quickly and efficiently and as our associates get to know the business
better, the average call time should shrink to below eight minutes. ‘Average wait time’ and the
‘percentage of abandoned calls’ gives us an indication of how well we are matching our
capacity to demand throughout the day. We have already started to experiment with using
control charting procedures to monitor some of these performance measures, specifically,
average call time, average wait time and the percentage of abandoned calls. It is by using this
type of technique that we aim to develop one of the most efficient call centres of its type’.

The future

The progress of the call centre reorganisation in the customer service division was being
watched closely by Kaston Pyral’s group management. The European reorganisation had gone
reasonably well and the US centre seemed to be on track. Eddie Karowski, KPG’s CEO, was
keeping a close watch on the new call centre strategy because he believed that customer service
would become the way the company could differentiate itself.

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Do this part of the Do this part of the questionnaire

questionnaire FIRST SECOND

How important are these aspects of How good are we at these aspects
our performance? of performance?

Not at all Exceptionally Exceptionally Exceptionally

important important good poor

- 2 2 10 16 9 28 22 11 Knowledge of staff 4 15 21 20 20 12 4 2 2

2 3 13 22 21 23 11 4 1 Friendliness and attitude of staff 4 25 24 19 21 4 2 - 1

- - - 6 10 16 14 29 25 Staff understanding of your needs - 2 18 22 23 20 11 2 2

- - 4 - 9 18 22 19 28 Completeness of final solution to 7 5 7 14 20 18 19 7 3

your request

Keeping you informed of progress 4 6 5 10 19 21 14 14 7

2 2 - 4 6 19 15 27 25
on your request

2 4 12 20 20 18 18 3 3 Ease of getting through to the 4 19 20 20 18 15 3 - 1

right person

- - 2 2 - - 26 33 37 Time taken to finally resolve your 4 3 12 38 21 20 1 1 0

request

Very Very
satisfied dissatisfied
What is your overall level of satisfaction
with our service?
3 10 25 27 25 6 2 1 1

Figure 1 Results of the customer survey carried out by the US call centre prior to
the merger of the North American centres

‘Our business is getting more competitive every year. We already have a range of products
which is (we believe) the best in the world. Surveys show that the functionality and reliability of
our equipment is outstanding compared to our competitors. But they are catching up fast. To
stay ahead we need to do three things really well. First, we must be more innovative in the new
products and services we introduce, especially now that new technology such as the control and
diagnostics power of new software can be integrated into our systems. In effect we could offer
‘remote management’ of customers’ systems, monitoring their equipment, automatically
dispatching our engineers, providing customers with management reports, advising on their
energy strategy and so on. The potential for exciting new offerings is vast. However, as yet, no
one really knows what customers want in this area, I suspect they all want slightly different
things from the hardware, control software and the services we offer, but whatever emerges we
must be in a position to supply it. This will mean that we really need to understand customers’
actual requirements at a deep level. Then we must act fast to get those services to them. Second,

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whatever we finish up doing, we have to give impeccable service. Excellent customer service
builds relationships and is the best way of establishing customer loyalty. Again this means
really understanding their needs. Third, we have to make sure that we are always in a position to
keep the customers updated with the new product and service offerings which could benefit
them in order to make the best of sales opportunities. This is an ongoing education process. The
better customers know what we can do, the more useful they will be in articulating their own
needs and so stimulating our service development processes. Our call centre operations have the
potential to help us in all of these areas. The question which we have to answer is how best to
make sure that the three new consolidated call centres become the power house for keeping us
ahead of the competition’.

Week of Volume Number of Calls per Average Average Abandoned

changeover of calls associates associate call time wait time calls (%)
taken (full-time hour (min) (min)
equivalents)
1 2,650 104 0.64 28.6 5.3 0.08
2 7,800 185 1.06 25.4 8.9 0.06
3 10,600 260 1.04 19.8 8.8 0.04
4 19,900 280 1.75 14.2 5.5 0.05
5 42,200 285 3.70 11.6 5.4 0.03
6 56,000 311 4.61 11.4 3.9 0.03
7 60,000 312 5.01 8.8 4.4 0.03
8 59,400 325 4.98 8.6 2.1 0.03
9 64,800 325 5.30 9.0 4.7 0.02
10 64,400 325 5.29 8.2 4.9 0.03

Table 1 Atlanta call centre performance measures during the first ten weeks of
changeover period

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