Contact centres embrace innovation

Modern contact centres are setting the stage for greater innovation: they have the ability to combine data with voice, easily transferring calls across networks, thus making technology more efficient and affordable. Supporting these platform changes are improved workforce optimization tools, which are continuing to generate interest. “Studies suggest that labour costs can be between 60% and 75% of the operating cost of a contact centre,” says Kevin Hegebarth, VP Marketing for enterprise workforce optimization solutions provider GMT Corporation. Effective optimization rests on pillars like analytics, particularly workflow forecasts. More advanced forecasting needs centre around what-if analysis and campaign forecasting to help managers better predict both workload and staffing needs. Certain tools enable what Hegebarth refers to as multi-variate scheduling. This way managers can schedule agents based on “virtually anything you can measure,” including proficiency, competency, skills, and customer satisfaction scores. The next evolutionary stage in analytics involves what Bill Bumbernick, chief executive officer of Philadelphia, PA-headquartered VoIP service provider Alteva LLC, calls “more intelligent metrics.” “We want metrics that not only measure how effective a call centre is,” he says, “but how effective a company’s communications with their customers, or internally, happens to be.” “First contact resolution is an important metric people are trying to manage towards,” adds Ross Daniels, Director of Unified Communications Solution Marketing for Cisco Systems, Inc. Empower the agents To lower employee churn, contact centres seek to empower agents in several ways. Take buddy scheduling as an example. Employees who carpool or otherwise need to coordinate shifts with colleagues can specify shift preferences. “More of our clients are focusing on work-life balance,” says Hegebarth. “Some of our clients want to create private groups for agents in social networking sites,” Hegebarth adds, “so they can bid for shifts, enter their schedule preferences and vacation requests, schedule updates and so forth.” Affording agents a better work-life balance can lead companies to engage telecommuting contact centre agents. “They can seem to be working on-premise even if they’re actually at home,” says Joe Heinen, vice president of corporate marketing for customer contact centre solution provider Genesys Telecommunications Labs Inc. Telecommuting offers other advantages. For instance, contact centres can perform salary arbitrage by hiring agents in rural areas. They can also cover more time zones without staffing another office. And each remote agent represents one less workstation for the contact centre to equip and maintain. However, Info-Tech Research Group analyst Jayanth Angl suggests consumer-grade residential lines could prove problematic. “Quality of service concerns arise when an agent based at home communicates over a residential-class connection,” he says. “There’s no real quality guarantee for VoIP calls from those locations.” Quality of service applies to more than just the network and the agents who staff it. Customers demand quality of service as well. As a result, contact centres offer customers more service options. Self-service applications, for instance, where customers tap into designated areas of a firm’s knowledge management infrastructure, appeal to an increasingly Web-savvy populace. Heinen sees upsides for companies that offer more self-service tools. “That transaction cost can be a tenth of the cost of an assisted call,” he says. “With the right infrastructure, an enterprise can move many transactions to low-cost self-service transactions and just the escalations to assisted service are the ones that need to be handled.” Since more complex calls reach agents in this scenario, and because CTI enables communication channels besides voice – e-mail, chat, Web, SMS – today’s agents need more skills than ever before. They can now, for instance, speak with a customer while texting an expert colleague for answers to the customer’s questions. Agents must also adapt to emerging customer preferences. “People expect answers in 100 characters or less,” Heinen asserts. “They’re not interested in long engagements – and those might be five minutes long.” Smartphones may emerge as important call centre touch points as well. Heinen predicts that SMS confirmation of transactions will be as common as today’s e-mail confirmations that follow online purchases. Add video to the mix, but not in the way you might first think. “The talking head offers limited value,” says Cisco’s Daniels, who instead envisions “video assets” sent by agents directly to a caller’s screen. Such assets may include 30-second videos that allow a caller to evaluate a hotel chain’s two separate properties in a given city, thus justifying room rate differences. Avatars at your service A form of video, however, may emerge as another contact centre touch point. The vision: assemble all customer-appropriate knowledge management resources behind an animated screen presence à la Second Life and you have avatars, digital representatives that serve as one “face” of customer service. Future generations of consumers, those familiar with multiplayer online games like World of WarCraft, should adapt easily to customer service avatars. Firms can even localize avatars to the region of a given customer. When necessary, human customer service reps can also guide avatars. Social networks may offer another potential front-end, one that customers already understand and that, like Facebook for instance, offer software development kits that third parties can use to add features. Given their suitability for one-to-many communications, they may prove ideal as support forums. “If I can have another customer handle your requests, then it costs me little,” Heinen says. But anyone who thinks contact centres might not need flesh-and-blood agents should consider banks. Online banking, phone banking and ATMs are mainstays, but branches staffed by tellers have yet to disappear. “Banks offer more touch points,” Heinen says. “The primary success criterion is convenience.” And as compelling as new contact centre technologies may be, Angl says migration to a CTI-enabled setup has been, and will continue to be, gradual. “The benefits outweigh the challenges, and organizations will continue to move in this direction,” he says. “What we’re not seeing with IP communications in general is the ‘rip and replace’ strategy.” “These types of major infrastructure changes happen when the existing infrastructure reaches end of life.” The nature of innovation itself may be changing in the industry. Past developments appealed to large numbers of customers. Future contact centre technology innovations, on the other hand, might not carry such wide appeal. “We’ve opened the floodgates to requests,” Bumbernick says. “Now that we can really integrate business applications and telephony systems, our customers are starting to imagine what they can do next.” Bumbernick illustrates with this example of a client request: “Hey, now that you have integrated SalesForce.com, can you take your call recording product and integrate it as well so that every call we get through our call centre to my customer service agents that use SalesForce.com is recorded and automatically attached to the SalesForce.com record for that customer?” Bumbernick encourages this kind of thinking. “Don’t be limited by what you believe is on the market,” he says. “Open your mind and ask the questions. Can you do this? If you can’t, will you be able to?” “Your business process and your business efficiencies will gain when you ask those questions. You will catapult your business forward using technology rather than assuming limitations that hold your business back.” SaaS for contact centres: a double-edged sword While smaller firms on tighter budgets can now afford enterprise-class contact centre tools thanks to the cloud, their business data may be less secure given that it resides outside the firewall. Hosted service providers cover most security criteria in their service level agreements (SLAs). For instance, any hosted provider worth its salt ensures that customer data are properly backed up and fully protected from intruders (electronic or physical) by well-qualified and background-checked experts. But there are things that SLAs can’t cover. For instance, the US Patriot Act entitles federal agents to access information on any computer located on US soil, then prevent the service provider from notifying the data’s owner of the breach. GMT’s Hegebarth says hosted providers can mitigate this threat. “We find that our clients are more comfortable when they know that they have local hosting arrangements. Our North American clients are hosted here in Atlanta, our UK clients are hosted in the UK and our Australian clients are hosted in Australia.”

Contact centres embrace innovation

News | 03/20/2009 1:00 am EDT

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