When you call any customer service line, you are most likely to be put in a wait queue, with the commonplace litany: "Your call is important to us; please wait while we transfer your call to one of our executives." The basic comfort people derive from verbally discussing their concerns has resulted in 280 billion dollars being spent on outsourced call centres alone! Though Internet services have helped cut down call centre costs, India alone has seen an increase of 30 per cent in call volumes, compared to last year. An olive saved... The main reasons for the increased volumes are an increased customer base, more demanding customers, and increased competition. To handle the gargantuan increase in load, call centres are becoming more innovative. They are learning from the tactic American Airlines took in 1987, when it decided to eliminate one olive from each salad served to its passengers - resulting in a saving of $2 million a year from, over 40 million passengers. Call centres' parallel cost-cutting idea is to shave off five seconds from each call. They have learned that executives waste quite a few seconds in forwarding the call to the right executive, even when they have provided options to customers to choose the correct representative via the interactive menu system. This is mainly because some options are somewhat obscure to specific customers, as they are planned for a wider audience. Other wastages occur because some customers are just too lazy to work their way through the menus. Finding the right fit Call centres will now take into account contextual data, such as the caller's location, the local weather, the time of day, and records of their recent transactions, before routing a call to an executive. Cisco, the networking and communications giant, recently upgraded its call centre software to provide just this feature. The contextual data enables routing of a call to an agent who is experienced at handling that particular sort of transaction. Gathered contextual data may also include information gleaned from news reports: storms, sporting events, and transport strikes, for example, can affect callers' moods and purchasing dispositions, which is very often useful knowledge for agents. The 'demographic mapping' features in call-centre software can also provide additional indicators of what products callers are likely to buy, depending on their location and the time of the call. Saying it correctlyAnother 'saving of seconds' is achieved through accent training. Depending on the location of the user, the call is forwarded to an agent who has been trained to understand and reply in the caller's dialect and accent. This usually eliminates much of the “Pardon me?â€� repetition of information, since both customer and executive understand each other's communication better. What's in a word? Modern call centre software is also equipped with 'word-spotting features to provide valuable insights about what callers think about a particular product, and how their vocabulary changes in response to advertising campaigns, recalls and publicity stunts. In one case, word-spotting technology quickly alerted a refrigerator-maker to a design flaw after the words 'tipped', 'top-heavy, and 'fell were uttered to call centre agents, in different countries, just half a dozen times. Such proactive measures help facilitate improvements in service or product quality, even before executives make a report regarding a perceived problem. Future improvements More innovation is on the horizon: learning through 'neuro-linguistic' methods, where the software "understands" the mood of the customer, and makes suggestions to call centre executives regarding the suitable words and information to use in the situation. Executives can ask the caller to hold while they 'retrieve information', and use the short interval to understand what the software advises them to say or do. These modern methods help increase sales and reduce the reaction time for executives, which, in turn, improves the customer experience. India's call centres employ roughly 3,00,000 agents - and five seconds saved from each can beat the savings of American Airlines, besides resulting in more sales. Sumesh K.P.