Contact Centres Made Simple - or do you know the difference?

What is a Call Centre?

A call centre is a centralised office used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone. A call centre is operated by a company to administer incoming sales, service, product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outgoing calls for telemarketing, clientele, product services, and debt collection are also made. A call centre is often operated through an extensive open workspace for call centre agents, with work stations that include a computer for each agent, a telephone set/headset connected to a telecom switch, and one or more supervisor stations. It can be independently operated or networked with additional centres, often linked to a corporate computer network, including mainframes, microcomputers and LANs. Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the centre are linked through a set of technologies called computer telephony integration (CTI).

What is a Contact Centre?

This is where most people get it wrong! They think that, in addition to a having a call centre, collective handling of letters, faxes, live chat, and e-mails at one location means that they have a contact centre. WRONG! It only becomes a contact centre when ALL Channels can be delivered seamlessly to appropriately skilled agents. Also known as a customer interaction centre, it is the central point of any organisation from which all customer contacts are managed. Through contact centers, valuable information about the company and customers are routed to appropriate people, contacts to be tracked and data to be gathered. It is generally a part of company’s customer relationship management (CRM) environment. Today, customers contact companies by calling, emailing, chatting online, visiting websites, faxing, instant messaging, Facebook and Twitter.

Technology

This is the big divide where operational teams and IT split. Technology is only an enabler and the definitions for what systems your company needs should only ever be driven by comprehensive business requirements. This approach ensures that there is the correct balance between people, processes and technology. This is particularly necessary as call and contact centre technology is subject to continual change, improvements and innovations. Some of these technologies include speech recognition software to allow computers to handle first level of customer support, text mining and natural language processing to allow better customer handling, agent training by automatic mining of best practices from past interactions, support automation and many other technologies to improve agent productivity and customer satisfaction.

Automatic lead selection or lead steering is also intended to improve efficiencies, both for inbound and outbound campaigns, whereby inbound calls are intended to quickly land with the appropriate agent to handle the task, whilst minimising wait times and long lists of irrelevant options for people calling in, as well as for outbound calls, where lead selection allows management to designate what type of leads go to which agent based on factors including skill, socioeconomic factors and past performance and percentage likelihood of closing a sale per lead.

The concept of the Universal Queue standardizes the processing of communications across multiple technologies such as fax, phone, and email whilst the concept of a Virtual queue provides callers with an alternative to waiting on hold when no agents are available to handle inbound call demand.

Premise-based Call Centre Technology

Historically, call centres have been built on PBX equipment that is owned and hosted by the company’s IT department. The PBX might also have attached software which will provide functions such as Automatic Call Distribution, Interactive Voice Response, and skills-based routing. The IT department and vendor would be responsible for the maintenance of the equipment and necessary software upgrades as released by the vendor. In many cases, there has been significant capital investment in such systems, and considerable ongoing maintenance and support costs. In many instances this very fact is a barrier to exploring the most suitable solutions to meet the business and its customer’s needs.

Where organisations have other channel responses, these tend to be set up as silos which do not allow transparency of customer interactions to relevant staff when needed.

Virtual Call Centre Technology

With the advent of the Software as a Service technology delivery model, the virtual call centre has emerged. In a virtual call centre model, the company’s IT department does not own, operate or host the equipment that the call centre runs on. Instead, they subscribe to a service for a monthly or annual fee with a service provider that hosts the call centre telephony equipment in their own data centre. Such a vendor may host many call centres on their equipment. Agents connect to the vendor's equipment through traditional PSTN telephone lines, through web portals or over Voice over IP.

Virtual Call Centre Technology allows people to work from home, instead of in a traditional, centralised, call centre location, which increasingly allows people with physical or other disabilities that prevent them from leaving the house, to work. In addition, it negates the need for some staff to travel to work, thus supporting better economic and flexible use of resource.

Cloud Based Computing and Multi-channel Platforms for Contact Centres

Cloud based integrated computing and multi-channel platforms for contact centres extends cloud solutions beyond just Software as a Service, or hosted, on-demand call/contact centres by providing application programming interfaces (APIs) on the call centre cloud computing platform that allow call centre functionality such as provided by NewVoiceMedia to be integrated with cloud-based Customer Relationship Management, such as Salesforce.com or Oracle CRM and leads management and other applications.

The APIs typically provide programmatic access to two key groups of features in the call centre platform:

• Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) APIs provide developers with access to basic telephony controls and sophisticated call handling on the call centre platform from a separate application.
• Configuration APIs provide programmatic control of administrative functions of the call centre platform which are typically accessed by a human administrator through a Graphical User Interface (GUI).

So how do we visualise all of those words?

Let’s start with a “traditional” call centre plus normal “back office” looks like and functions. It normally looks something like this:

As can be seen, there is an immediate problem caused by multiple teams of agents doing single tasks. As there is no workflow between agent groups (bar perhaps in the call centre), there will be significant variances in how the tasks required are completed, monitored or their impact on the customer experience.

On the other hand what does the same model look like in function when a Multi-channel Interactive Customer Management or Contact Centre:

There is a big difference, not only to how it looks and functions, but its impact on resource requirements and costs. If you want to see how it all works together, please go to the demonstration part of the web site.

Traditionally, and still evident in over 90% of organisations transacting with their customers by telephone, the focus has been solely on providing environments, technology and trained resource that have the capacity and capability to handle ever increasing numbers of telephone calls. Indeed, many new call centres are still being set up as stand alone units to handle voice traffic only and this is the standard definition of a call centre.

Whilst many of these newer call centres benefit from advanced telephony technology, they do not have the capability to integrate with other communications channels, or give such choice to their customers. They also tend to be predominantly cost centres, handling inbound service and enquiry calls. Where some re-active selling is present, it usually is in the form of order taking.

Traditional call centres have up to 80% of operating cost attributable to human resource and are usually seen as a necessary evil to meet the requirements of customers. On average they suffer from high levels of attrition (up to 70% in some instances), high levels of absenteeism, reducing levels of quality and customer service and poor image. In our experience, most call centres are on average 30% over resourced due to poor management, structure and lack of operational knowledge. This has a massive impact on ongoing operating costs.

Many of these environments are not set up and managed effectively, with little or no performance tracking or quality monitoring. They quickly become high priority targets for cost reduction in ever demanding and increasingly competitive sectors, although most lack the knowledge and experience of how to get the correct balance between people, processes and technology. This normally means that most environments consider tactical technology deployments, with the customer usually suffering the consequences of such moves. The sectors particularly influenced in this way are Financial Services, Utilities, IT, Telecomms, Retail, Tourism and Outsourcers.

Few understand how to improve service whilst reducing ongoing operating costs, so it becomes an issue of minimizing cost at the expense of service quality, leading to increased levels of customer churn, which impacts on loyalty, decreasing revenues and therefore profits. Inevitably, the business, staff and customers all loose, although this effect is masked in many organizations whose overall size, revenues and profits (actual or expected) are significantly large. This is more apparent in Financial Services and Telecomms than in any other sector.

It is currently estimated that nearly 2% of the total UK workforce (source Datamonitor) is employed in call centres. This is more than the combined workforce of coal mining, steel and vehicle production and continued expansion is forecast up to 3% by 2005. Whilst there is no universally agreed definition of a call centre in terms of size, it is estimated that there are up to 3,300 call centres in the UK. (Source ContactBabel 2002)

Call centres are not distributed evenly throughout the UK and there are many “new” locations being established that compete effectively with the traditional locations in such a rapidly expanding industry. Many of those traditional locations have been established in areas of high unemployment and include such places as Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Newcastle, Sunderland, Doncaster, Birmingham, Cardiff, Newport, Belfast and London.

European growth has been slower than the UK, predominantly influenced by the US and its traditional ties, together with much of the technology having US origins. This trend is not applicable to Eire, that has seen massive US and European investment in call centres, so much so that it is at virtual saturation point. Whilst many Central and Southern European countries are seeing and will continue to see growth, some of which will be faster than the UK (source Datamonitor), it is Eastern Europe, the Indian sub-continent, the Middle East and Far East/Asia that will see rapid expansion, due to lower labour and set up costs.

However, traditional and new call centres have a problem, which is directly influenced by more competition and more demanding customers. Customers demand choice and flexibility and businesses want increased customer loyalty and value from those customers. Businesses also want to have a more flexible and cost effective, motivated work force, which is multi-skilled. Staff want more flexible and happy work environments, with the opportunity for work variety and recognition and reward for contribution and performance. None of these factors sit nicely in a voice only traditional call centre and dramatic change is usually required.

The Call Centre Industry also suffers from a lack of good quality managers, largely due to the exponential growth within the last 10 years. Poor or ineffective management has the biggest impact on the way centres are run, none more so in sectors where internal managers have moved sideways to take over running call centres. This lack of management skill and capability is more prevalent in Financial Services overall, than in any other sector.

Most companies are beginning to understand and come to terms with the fact that improving customer service is the most critical issue to be faced by call centres. These companies begin to question the traditional role of the call centre and begin to redefine it as a vehicle for managing customer relationships. Rather than just processing calls, call centres are now being asked to deepen customer relationships and foster good perceptions of the company.

With this transformation to a customer focused management centre comes a number of new requirements. Notably, the need to handle multiple functions across a variety of disciplines. This includes having access to relevant customer historical data, as well as being able to handle multiple communications channels including voice, fax, e-mail, land mail, web, text, SMS etc. In addition, tasks not normally associated with traditional call centres will have to be performed, such as providing technical support, post-sale customer satisfaction and service, sales, telemarketing, order processing, customer retention, customer growth, servicing and tracking.

These new requirements are totally compatible with having a highly flexible and blended environment, where the traditional boundaries between inbound and outbound, sales, service and support, front office and back office tasks are removed. With the right skilled and trained staff, fully developed and documented processes, together with appropriate enabling technology, this becomes a pro-active contact centre, totally different to a traditional call centre.

As would be expected, such environments have significantly increased responsibility for satisfactory customer management, which means additional management and operational issues. In fact, running a contact centre today is more difficult than ever with the growing pressure to increase customer satisfaction and delight, while reducing operating and maintenance costs. Equally importantly, the contact centre is now being asked to generate and measure revenues by closing sales and increasing customer value through superior service and additional sales of products and services.

By deploying a contact centre, a company wins by being able to increase revenues in line with its strategy, whilst deploying human and technical resource that minimize ongoing operating costs and maximize individual and team contribution. It also enjoys the benefits of higher customer retention and value and higher staff retention.

The customer wins through enhanced customer experience through choice of channel appropriate to their needs at any given time and enhanced service, whilst enjoying the benefits of their needs being identified and effectively managed. This increases loyalty, retention and value.

The staff win through working in a changing and multi-skilled environment, given the right training, skills and tools to deal with multiple tasks, with increased motivation, morale, recognition and reward

In overall terms the contact centre can be described as: - “a number of technical and human elements that work together intelligently, under the control of business rules, to personalise and optimize the management of each interaction (irrespective of channel) between a company and its customers, based on the context of the interaction. Additionally, it provides an integrated resource management solution designed to optimally manage the most expensive call centre resource in the evolving multi-skilled and multi-site environments, improving operational control through having the right resources with the right skills, available at the right times to service customers at a given service level, minimizing understaffing and overstaffing, maximizing productivity”.

The overall growth in the industry, linked to the number of existing call centres, 90% of which need changing to a contact centre, give tremendous opportunity for the right people with the right skills, together with the right information, knowledge, experience and access to appropriate products, to really make a difference and capitalize on those opportunities.

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