Continuing our conversation with Fábio Santana, IT Superintendent at Grupo Connvert, this is the second and final part of our interview discussing the challenges, limits, and opportunities regarding the latest ANATEL regulations for Contact Centers.
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Ygor: The new changes required almost a war-like planning, didn’t they? What do I do overnight to improve contactability… and there’s another point: knowing how many times you call the same customer, how to centralize this data (multiple rules, multiple contractors, multiple dynamics, platforms…) to set a rule that I should call x times a day for a particular customer, avoiding bothering the citizen?
Fábio: That’s an important point because if you look at PROBARE (Brazilian Program for Self-Regulation of the Relationship Sector), there’s already a point about this, and those in the field know this. In debt collection, this kind of situation is becoming increasingly prevalent. We already had this control because we can’t call the same customer 50 times; it’s also a cost for us. So, we were already working with some indicators. It reached a point where some clients said: I want you to limit it, and if there’s no limitation, there will be a fine. So we used Khomp’s entire infrastructure to make this call limitation.
In this case, I’m implementing a type of control that is much more advanced than the platforms. If I have a client X operation with platform A and platform B, and both are connected, we block it at the Flow, which allows us to meet both the client’s needs and the regulation, ensuring that these needs are met. These types of technologies are becoming increasingly important because the trend is that these rules will continue to be adapted. We will need to be more precise, be able to call the client in a more coherent way, with fewer calls, at the ideal time, and that’s why we’re working with Analytics to determine the best time for that person.
In this vision of improving connectivity quality and our telephony, which has changed a lot, today you can go to a store and buy a cell number. We know that a number in the sales area is difficult to manage, but in the debt collection area, a person might change their phone several times. So, I can no longer trust that the phone I had in the database is still valid; the person who owes might have changed their number two times. You need to be more precise and not keep dialing old numbers.
We are working a lot with Analytics, analyzing within our databases to determine if the person is still using this phone number. So we start doing a score analysis containing much of this information to be more precise, and these are actions we’re already taking so that we don’t disturb customers so much and can be much more accurate.
Ygor: In other words, is that database actually up-to-date? Is the number I’m trying to reach still associated with that customer? I think more than ever, it’s: once I make contact with the customer, I need to provide a good experience, good voice quality, be objective, and have mechanisms so that when I reach this customer, I can have an extremely productive call…
Fábio: And you touched on a very important point; in sales, we have agents who are good, average, and not-so-good, and this impact has affected the market. The entire call center market is experiencing a very high number of layoffs because now, if I have a call in hand, I can’t take risks; I need to deliver it to a very skilled agent, someone who performs well, understands what they’re doing, and follows the rules.
What happened to all the companies in Brazil? They had to reduce their workforce because now I can no longer dial so much. I have a 0303 number that limits me, and consequently, a smaller mailing list for a specific number of people, so I can’t afford to call someone and fail to make a sale. This is also a significant change in our market, but it has had a big impact; there have already been many layoffs in the last two months in various companies, and by the end of the year, there might be even more developments regarding this. Associations have already reported this to ANATEL as it is creating a significant problem in the market overall, and we are among the largest employers, right? It’s a social problem; in the telemarketing sector alone, there are almost 450,000 unemployed people in Brazil.
Ygor: And thinking a bit about the importance of productive contact, talking to the right person, there’s also the aspect of infrastructure: having an infrastructure where the carrier delivers the call to you, where it has a probability of being delivered, and ensuring that your contact center platform also has all the network prerequisites to ensure good call quality. That’s also a point, right?
Fábio: I agree; if I can’t afford to lose my call, I can’t have a technical issue in the middle. I need to have technical solutions, carriers, and platforms that deliver quality, and that’s something we monitor very closely.
I can’t just think about volume. I need to think about quality because the call went through, and I need to answer and deliver. I know that some carriers generate congestion because they don’t have enough capacity, but this is internalizing because if this happens? It goes into the precautionary measure of 100,000 calls. So, I need to choose carriers with less congestion because if not, it will reduce the chance as these calls are also being accounted for. It’s necessary to balance all this: congestion, non-existent numbers, all this needs to be monitored because it affects the quality of the entire infrastructure.
I need to have high-quality equipment, carriers with quality, and then with our new network infrastructure, we can measure and identify at that moment which side is better for dialing. So this helps us manage this quality aspect within our internal infrastructure to achieve the best call, with the best quality, available at that moment for the best agent. That’s the path we’re seeing in this area.
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