VPs, engineers, sales execs…everyone’s on call in the extended contact centre

Call centre? Who needs a call centre? It's a paradigm-shifting notion, but the technology is now available, with SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and presence management, to extend the call centre out of the realm of the headset-equipped dedicated agent to include anybody in the enterprise qualified to handle customer enquiries.Some organizations are already implementing systems to do this, but the notion of the enterprise as call centre is also fraught with potential problems and pitfalls.In initial implementations, companies will try to make it easier for dedicated call centre agents to transfer customer calls to, or conference in, subject-matter experts. Agents will use the presence management engine to see who is available. In some cases, they may act as "concierge," handling simple calls but routing more difficult ones to appropriate experts. Or subject-matter experts could coach agents through customer interactions in side conversations conducted using instant messaging (IM)."If you think about the typical bank, it has 50,000 or 60,000 employees and 4,000 or 5,000 of those are dedicated call centre agents," notes Tracy Fleming, IP telephony practice leader for Avaya Canada. "It really doesn't make a lot of sense that the only people in the organization who ever do customer service are in the call centre."Analysts say that in the second phase companies will use skills-based routing engines and presence management to distribute calls directly to the most appropriate expert, wherever they are, including outside the office. "I think in time, maybe 10 or 15 years, we'll see small and medium-size companies with no call centre at all," says Ken Landoline, program manager for enterprise research at Yankee Group. "If you're a 300-person company, you probably don't need a call centre with four or five dedicated agents."Vendors and analysts say the main reason for extending the call centre is improved customer satisfaction. Out of that, in theory, flows increased customer loyalty, and possibly reduced costs - all of which can provide a significant competitive advantage. Routing calls to the appropriate expert in the first place or allowing agents to conference in or consult a subject-matter expert improves the chances of resolving a customer query on the first call. This will naturally please the customer because it means he doesn't have to call in again or wait for someone to call him back.Betsy Wood, an "evangelist" in Nortel Networks' call centre marketing team, says studies show that if a customer query can't be resolved on the first call, it very often takes five to seven more interactions to resolve it. "The time delay and cost of that can be considerable," Wood says. "Plus customers are not going to be happy.""Nothing," Landoline says, "is more expensive in the call centre than repeat calls to do the same thing."Wood adds that call centre employees will be happier if they're more often dealing with happy, satisfied customers. And Martin van Niekerk, business development manager for contact centres at Cisco Canada, notes that "it's not only first call resolution. , you're also empowering and educating him."A secondary reason is that extending call centre functionality lets you cover peak periods without adding expensive dedicated call centre staff - or cover temporary call centre outages using non-call centre employees. Temporarily deputize qualified employees as call centre agents and route calls to them, even if they're on cellphones or working at home.A bank, Landoline suggests, could route overflow calls on a Monday morning to branch personnel. "Those employees are certainly well trained enough to do it. But they would never want to consider themselves as call centre agents. So it's a win-win situation."There may well be benefits, but Drew Kraus, VP of research for enterprise communications applications at Gartner Inc., points out that vendors have their own reasons for pushing the notion. "It means they can greatly expand the number of agent seat licences they sell," Kraus says.Certainly one way to implement such a system is to extend all the functionality that call centre agents now have to others in the organization - so that they see screen pops from the CRM or ERP system, for example, and see ACD queues. But it isn't the only way to do it. If all you want to do is make subject-matter experts more accessible to call centre agents, you typically don't have to pay for additional agent seat licences, vendors insist.So is anybody actually doing this? Yes, mostly the first type of implementation with call centre agents getting easier access to subject-matter experts, although there are some implementations, as we'll see, where companies are distributing calls directly to employees outside the call centre. But even the vendors agree it's early days yet."It's definitely more of an emerging trend than a mature market and there's definitely more hype than adoption," Kraus says. "Where we have seen the adoption, it's typically among companies that are already adept at altering business processes to take advantage of new technology capabilities."Vendors claim that customers trying one of these approaches believe it will deliver an important competitive advantage, which makes them reluctant to talk about their initiatives. But we did hear about some interesting projects.Insurance companies, for example, have been using such systems to radically alter business processes so that call centre agents can find available insurance adjusters and conference them into a customer call to deliver decisions on claim requests on the spot. "This has dramatically shortened the approval process," Kraus says. "And that goes right to customer loyalty."Landlord and Tenant BoardThe Landlord and Tenant Board, an Ontario government agency that resolves disputes between landlords and tenants, has a call centre in Toronto, but also branch offices in several major cities across the province. It implemented an Avaya IP telephony system a few years ago that allows employees in the branches to log on as temporary call centre agents from any phone, including soft phones, and handle calls during peak periods such as first thing in the morning."It was difficult for them to have enough agents in Toronto to handle all the calls ," Fleming says. "This way they also have one or two people in each of the local offices who can take calls too."AAA Mid-Atlantic, the American Automobile Association affiliate in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and parts of Virginia, has a similarly distributed call centre model. There are four regional centres staffed by dedicated agents, plus 54 branch offices each of which also functions as a call centre. The Avaya ACDs are networked together using Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), a data-carrying mechanism that emulates a circuit-switched network over a packet-switched network.Member calls that come into the club's toll-free numbers hit a regional call centre first. If the system determines, based on IVR selections, that the caller could best be helped by branch personnel, and there is a suitably skilled branch employee available, the call goes to that person. If no branch expert is available, it goes to the call centre agent. Branch employees, who also handle walk-in traffic, are shown as unavailable to take calls if they're helping a customer in the store. It can also work the other way, with calls to local offices being routed to a call centre if no branch employee is available to take them.Vicki Kenney, AAA Mid-Atlantic's director of communications technology, says the new system, which the club started implementing four years ago, had two objectives: to ensure members receive the best service available when they call in, and to drive traffic to the semi-autonomous branches as much as possible to ensure they don't miss sales to members who are in the vicinity. By extending the call centre to include branch employees, the club reduced its call-abandon rate from 10% to less than 3%. It's also now consistently hitting targets of answering 80% of calls within 20 seconds.In one interesting variation, a large Canadian telecommunications company implemented a system, again using Avaya technology, that allows technicians on the road, when they're not busy at customer sites, to enter the call centre queue using their cellphones and pull out calls to answer. "The customers don't realize they've been transferred to a guy in a truck," Fleming says. "It works well because the person in the call centre probably doesn't have the same level of expertise as that guy in the truck anyway. This is a pilot for this company, but so far they seem pretty pleased with it."A food and beverage retailer went the other way. Regional managers who travel from store to store no longer field calls from branch employees and suppliers directly on their cellphones. Instead all calls go into a call centre, which handles some enquiries, but also functions as a kind of answering service, routing the call to the appropriate person if the presence engine shows him as available. Call centre agents can even send whisper pages that can be inserted into an ongoing conversation to tell a manager that an important call is waiting. (The other party on the call doesn't hear the whisper page.)Vantis Credit UnionVantis Credit Union, now part of Assiniboine Credit Union in Winnipeg, last year implemented Nortel's SIP Contact Center solution with Expert Anywhere functionality. It allows the credit union to route calls from the call centre to any employee. "They said, ‘We think every employee is prime for keeping our members loyal,'" Nortel's Wood recounts. "So they're doing what they need to do to make that happen."The technology needed to implement an extended call centre depends on the approach you're taking and the call centre infrastructure already in place. Analysts and vendors agree that the key is presence management, ideally delivered by SIP. It's also important for the system to be able to tie into networked calendars to help determine who outside the call centre is available to take calls.Avaya, for example, uses the SIP-based presence management functionality of its Communications Manager software coupled with the networked calendaring of its back-end Microsoft Live Communications Server to help agents in its business partner call centre see which subject-matter experts are available to help on calls.In some environments, it may be necessary to add part-time call centre agents and on-call subject-matter experts as full-fledged agents, which means paying for additional seat licences. This typically provides additional functionality, though, such as screen pops that show information about the customer on the line.How much does it all cost? Kraus says vendors realize customers won't be willing to pay the full freight for software licences so they're offering reduced rates, typically half what customers pay for licensing dedicated, full-time agents. Implementation costs in mid-size and large companies involving hundreds of employees can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, he says.But Avaya and Nortel, which both provide solutions for either type of implementation - conferencing in subject-matter experts or directly routing calls to employees outside the call centre - say they don't charge customers additional licence fees for temporary agents and on-call experts. Whatever the implementation, however, it does require an enterprise-wide IP-based phone system with SIP using a product such as Nortel's Multimedia Communication Server 5100."In larger call centre corporations such as a bank with 50,000 employees, the last thing they want to do is go out and buy 50,000 concurrent licences," Fleming notes.Implementation is mostly a question of system configuration, Wood says - setting up expert profiles for employees, and establishing policies and procedures for how calls will be handled.But even if incremental costs are relatively low - after you've implemented a corporate-wide IP-based telephony system with presence management - and even if the benefits are enticing, extending the call centre into the wider enterprise presents some challenges.Are you ready?"It changes business processes," Kraus points out. "The biggest hurdles will face are not what technology to use or how to implement it, but are they ready to change the way they do business to leverage the advantages."You're now asking employees previously buffered from customer contact and aloof from the call centre to get involved. Some will not welcome the change. Call centres are often critical to an organization, but workers in them may be considered low status. Wood knows one company that realized it needed experts available to handle customers' calls and told some employees they would henceforth be call centre agents. "That doesn't work at all," she says, "because no way do they want to become call centre agents."Non-call centre employees must be able to opt in or out, Landoline says. That of course is the beauty of presence management - if an employee is busy writing a report, for example, he can change his presence status to unavailable. "It's up to the management of the company to say who can turn off and when," Landoline says. "Some companies are requiring that employees be available one or two hours a day or week, for example."But be very careful about setting such policies, Kraus warns. Escalating calls from a tech support call centre to an engineer on the development team may help ensure first-call resolution and drive customer satisfaction. "But those engineers may find this level of interruption so disconcerting that they end up leaving the company," he says. "There are substantial risks that companies have to be very aware of as they try to implement this. You need to ask yourself, who are the right people to involve and who are those that never should be involved?"At Vantis, employees did not object to answering customer calls, Wood says. "They were thrilled to have new tools. There are some kinds of companies that are going to have an environment where employees see the value." That may even be true of most companies that are early adopters, Kraus says. But mainstream companies may have more difficulty selling the concept.Quite aside from how employees feel about being pulled into customer calls, some may simply not have the interpersonal skills required to deal with customers. "He could be the best engineer in the company," Kraus says, "but he's just lousy at dealing with customers." And then you have to think about the impact on productivity of employees pulled into customer calls. In some companies, it almost certainly means they won't be able to get as much done.Landoline insists that it's possible to develop a "compelling" business case for the extended call centre based on delivering improved customer satisfaction and being able to cover peak loads without adding dedicated call centre agents. Kraus adds that getting the right expert involved on the first call can reduce total time spent resolving a customer query, which in turn can reduce labour requirements and even telecommunications costs. But ultimately it may be difficult to quantify the benefits and show a clear return on investment.Does that mean you should dismiss the whole idea? Not at all. Especially in organizations that view customer satisfaction levels as a key business success metric, extending the call centre to the rest of the enterprise could provide a significant competitive advantage. You just need to be aware of the risks and understand that it may, like many other technology-based innovations, involve changing business processes - and a major change management effort.

VPs, engineers, sales execs…everyone’s on call in the extended contact centre

News | 05/22/2007 1:25 pm EDT

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