The Real-Time Contact Center

Donna FLUSS

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780814429082
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Companies looking for a competitive edge must convert their reactive, cost-laden contact programs into proactive, revenue-generating, "real-time" contact centres. Real-time is a big "buzzword" in the customer service field right now, and this book offers real, practical strategies for turning the call centre into a real-time operation that generates profits. These centres provide an outstanding customer experience, enhance loyalty, create new revenue, reduce expenses, and streamline the flow of information between the center and the rest of the company. "The Real-Time Contact Center" shows how to implement one.

1
Transforming Contact Centers into Real-Time Enterprises

Contact centers are real-time organizations. They interact with customers in real time, sell in real time, resolve customer problems in real time, listen to customer needs and wants in real time, identify new sales opportunities in real time, enhance the brand and build customer loyalty in real time, and sometimes, unfortunately, they frustrate and disappoint customers in real time.

Redefining the Contact Center’s Mission

Contact centers are generally very good at fulfilling their classical mission: service, sales, or a combination of the two, at the lowest possible cost. For most of the past 30 years, doing a good job at service and sales was enough. But good service alone isn’t sufficient anymore; today, enterprises can’t afford to ignore the millions of dollars in untapped revenue opportunities that flow through their contact centers in unstructured customer discussions and e-mails. Companies need tools to identify and mine the information hidden in customer communications. The challenge is to capture and analyze the data in these transactions and take appropriate action quickly and effectively so that customers will have a wonderful experience, be completely satisfied, and want to spend more money with your company.

The cost of lost revenue, branding and operational opportunities due to wasted customer information is very high for most companies, but these factors are difficult to measure and organizations often do not make it an organizational priority. Cost containment remains and will continue to be the overriding concern in the majority of contact centers, as 70 to 80 percent of most contact centers’ expenses are people related. Focusing on cost containment made sense in the past, when there were few tools for leveraging customer insights at the point of contact and using this information to yield revenue, but innovative and differentiated contact centers are now generating incremental revenue with real-time decision-making tools and best practices.

Contact centers are the focal point of customer interactions with an enterprise. They are practically and strategically positioned to leverage realtime interactions. Customers tell contact center agents when competitors are making better offers and when they are unhappy with corporate policies. Contact center agents know when marketing programs succeed and fail, and they are often the first to know when there is an internal system problem, such as a glitch in billing. This goes far beyond the basics of sales and service—but taking steps to capitalize on this information requires major shifts in organizational mind-set, management, operations, process, and technology. Contact centers that make these changes will accomplish everything they did in the past (including cost containment) and will also give their company a strategic advantage by enhancing each customer’s experience and satisfaction and improving the corporate bottom line.

Reactive to Proactive: The Challenge of Transition

For many years, managers have been well aware of missed revenue opportunities in their contact centers, but they were physically separated from senior decision makers, who told them to “just handle customers” and keep their costs down, making it very hard for them to have an impact on the greater corporation. Corporations have often locked contact centers out of the decision-making process and relegated them to second-class status, as compared to sales and marketing functions. Finally, however, contact centers are beginning to participate at the executive level, but having to meet both corporate and departmental objectives poses a variety of challenges.

Contact centers have to transition from being internally focused, reactive departments, concerned mostly with managing costs, to proactive organizations that help to set and influence corporate decisions and goals. It’s a difficult challenge, but new contact center performance management applications are helping contact centers find this balance by looking at all aspects of agent and departmental behavior—including productivity, quality, customer satisfaction survey results, sales, and marketing effectiveness—and then tying these measures into enterprise goals. This is a major step in the right direction, albeit one that requires significant changes in procedures, practices, and politics, as well as senior executive support and a great deal of system integration. Finding and implementing effective systems and best practices that help companies increase revenue and decrease costs will drive contact center investment decisions during the next 5 years.

Twelve Top Trends in Contact Centers

If the economy continues to grow, the next 5 years are going to be very exciting for contact centers. While slow to change, the contact center market now offers a great deal of innovation and many new opportunities for end-user companies. As enterprise customers start to buy new and open solutions, the pace of innovation will certainly pick up speed. The top trends in the contact center market are the following (see Figure 1.1):

1. Internet Protocol (IP). Internet protocol, which deals with voice and data transactions and facilitates multisite activities, is here to stay, even though companies have not rushed out to invest in new IP contact centers. Enterprises interested in replacing their contact center solutions should seriously consider an IP contact center if they are “greenfield” (without an existing contact center), relatively small in size, and this investment doesn’t require a wholesale replacement of their existing voice and data infrastructure. Larger organizations looking to invest should not wait. Instead, they should buy open, hybrid platforms that include both time division multiplexing (TDM) and IP capabilities that they can fully convert to an IP contact center in the future without a total system replacement.

2. Voice and Data Convergence. Most companies are converging their voice and data networks. However, this often results in turf battles over who owns the transactions, with the data side usually winning. It’s time to put internal political battles aside and move forward to realize the technical and organizational benefits.

3. Hardware-Independent Systems. Customers want the flexibility to make software decisions that are not tied to specific hardware platforms and are increasingly demanding hardware-independent solutions. Instituting flexible systems is an important step on the critical path to opening enterprise systems and sharing contact center data on a timely basis.

Figure 1.1: Contact Center Trends

4. Integrated Multivendor Solutions. End users want to have free choice in selecting systems and applications without being hampered by the technical limitations of their contact center infrastructure providers. They want systems and applications that are open, flexible, and easy to integrate. The good news is that many of the contact center infrastructure and platform providers are now delivering systems that can integrate with multivendor solutions.

5. Simplified Operating Environments. End users are demanding openness and flexibility, but they are also striving to simplify their operating environment and make it easier to manage.

6. Platform Extension. Contact center vendors are expanding their footprint to include systems and applications—such as interactive voice response (IVR), outbound, and logging—that were previously purchased separately and then integrated.

7. Organizational Access to Contact Center Transactions and Data. Sales, marketing, operations, finance, and the executive suite are increasingly interested in understanding customer behavior, needs, wants, insights, and concerns. There is a great demand for solutions that structure the content of customer conversations and make this information available to other parts of the organization for analysis and action.

8. Return on Investment (ROI) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculations. Organizations use ROI to help decide between two or more technology options, while TCO is a measure that facilitates management of assets on an ongoing basis. These are complementary financial measures intended to help organizations realize the greatest benefit at the lowest cost. It’s no longer sufficient to have the lowest acquisition cost. End users are now appropriately looking at the ongoing operational and support costs of investments. Companies must seriously address concerns such as initial purchase price, ongoing costs, ease of use and integration, and scalability.

9. Hosting/On-Demand Services. The hosting offerings available today are very strong functionally and are viable alternatives to a long-term investment. Hosting, also known as on demand, is attracting the attention of contact center management. It’s an effective way of acquiring new platforms, solutions, or applications without a large commitment of time or resources.

10. Offshore Outsourcing. As cost control remains the top issue in most contact centers, offshore outsourcing, which can reduce people-related expenses by 50 to 60 percent, is an option that demands serious consideration. However, the savings are decreasing, and offshore sites, particularly in India, are now confronting some of the same challenges as United States–based sites: high agent turnover, ongoing training, and quality concerns.

11. Targeting Small and Mid-Size Businesses (SMBs). There are more SMBs around the world than large enterprises. Small and mid-size businesses are hungry for effective and feature-rich applications that are priced appropriately for them. Vendors are realizing the potential of SMBs and have started to deliver solutions for this market. Much work remains to be done to satisfy SMBs, but the market potential is huge both in the United States and abroad.

12. Migration from Cost Centers to Profit Centers. For most of the 1990s, the industry talked about transitioning contact centers from service departments (cost centers) to organizations that also sell and generate profits. It has taken a long while, but an increasing percentage of contact centers now service and sell.

Each of these trends represents opportunity and innovation f...