A
C O N C E R T O
S O F T W A R E
®
W H I T E
P A P E R
Strategies and Solutions For Medium to Large Contact Centers
Mike Sheridan, Vice President, Strategy
The Contact Center Is the Customer Experience
No one can deny the importance of the contact center. For many customers, the quality of a single phone or online interaction may determine the depth and longevity of their customer loyalty or their perception of your company’s brand. Simply put, the contact center is the customer experience. To meet the challenges of increasing call volumes, while satisfying highly sophisticated and demanding customers, enterprises are seeking ways to do more with less — to optimize their existing resources, rather than incrementally growing their contact centers. Indeed, very large, centralized contact centers — those with more than 1,000 seats — are by no means the norm. Multiple, widely dispersed centers with 250 - 1,000 seats are becoming the most common. The reasons for this trend are both economic and practical: o Proximity to customers. To deliver 24x7x365 follow-the-sun, customer service across multiple geographies and time zones, companies are distributing their contact center resources. o Lower telephony costs. In some cases, locating centers closer to customers can lower long-distance phone charges and toll-free number costs. o Disaster recovery. Distributed centers help companies minimize risk and recover more quickly from outages and natural disasters, as contacts can be re-routed from disabled centers to other locations. o Talent shortages. Local labor shortages may require companies to look beyond their home turf to tap agent talent in remote or outsourced contact centers, even home-based workers. As a result, companies are typically managing a collection of widely dispersed contact centers of varying sizes, including local and remote agents, as well as nearshore and offshore outsourcers. This distributed environment creates both business and technological challenges, as companies still require the same centralized control, monitoring and management capabilities as they would with a single contact center. 2
The Needs of Medium to Large Contact Centers o Deliver 24x7x365 follow-the-sun customer service across multiple time zones and cultures o Ensure consistency and quality of service among decentralized work force o Better manage inbound and outbound contacts across multiple channels o Generate operational reports and business intelligence across dispersed centers o Contain operational costs while providing optimal customer satisfaction o Gain advantage from economies of scale o Support the strategies of the company This paper will focus on the challenges faced by medium to large contact centers, defined here as ranging from 200 - 1,000 agents. Understanding the needs of the medium to large contact center is particularly important for two reasons: These contact centers face “big company” demands and operational issues, like meeting bottom-line business objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs). At the same time, they encounter all the challenges smaller companies face in rapidly scaling resources to manage growing business demands. Above all, the medium to large contact center needs to develop strategies and solutions based on flexible technologies to manage contact center resources wherever they are located, efficiently and productively, to ensure that every customer interaction results in customer satisfaction.
Challenges Facing Medium to Large Contact Centers
In almost every industry, companies continue to expand and consolidate through mergers and acquisitions, constantly changing the rules of the game and the cast of players, both internal and external. Managers and directors of medium to large contact centers face the daily struggle of managing the associated complexities. o Workforce management challenge. Because agents are the most costly resource, the primary challenge is managing, planning, scheduling, and forecasting staffing and resources. How does one manage a diverse workforce across multiple locations, while
guaranteeing adherence to company policies and standards, consistent reporting and monitoring, and compliance with widely varying regulatory requirements? o Technological complexity. Contact centers rarely have the luxury of a single technology solution provider. Growing centers may be working with multiple vendors and point solutions, while facing complex integration issues. The more vendors and solutions in the mix, the greater the training needs and maintenance challenges. o Managing dispersed centers. Both personnel and technological resources may need to be managed remotely. And with dispersed operations, there is an ongoing challenge to maintain connectivity with remote locations. How can one ensure the integrity of the network and the reliability of the technological infrastructure? And extending the network means extending security risks; how does one secure the network over global boundaries? None of these issues is new. What is new is the advent of flexible technologies that enable companies to treat all contact centers and agents as if they were physically in the same location. Naturally, it would be costly to duplicate IT staffing and infrastructure at every branch location. Instead, dispersed resources can be centrally managed as if they were all under one roof, optimized for efficiency and responsive service, any time, anywhere.
To support this key requirement for customer segmentation, companies require routing capabilities that go beyond traditional processes to deliver a higher level of customer service. The ability to personalize customer interactions by routing each customer according to his or her value is one of the new key drivers within the center. With these capabilities, organizations can choose to have highly valuable customers quickly routed to an agent, while lower value customers can wait longer or be routed to self-service applications. Sophisticated data-directed routing provides the ability to retrieve a customer’s data and determine their value as defined by the organization’s business rules. Skills-based routing then allows customers to be identified and routed to the best-suited agents for the highest level of customer service. Conversely, data-directed routing can also identify lower value customers and route their interactions to self-service applications such as an interactive voice response system (IVR). For example, a customer calling into an airline reservation center can be identified as a gold-level customer based on the specific toll-free number that was dialed. The automatic call distributor’s (ACD’s) core routing then requests that the router retrieve additional information about the customer from a database in order to optimize service delivery. Additional information is retrieved, a more extensive routing decision is made, and the customer, along with associated information, is delivered to the most appropriate agent or self-service resource. Skills-based routing can be combined with occupancy optimization to analyze agent skills along with occupancy levels before selecting an agent. Occupancy can be continually monitored so that contacts are routed to the agent with the required skill and appropriate occupancy level at that time. By eliminating hot seating, where the agent with the best skills often receives the majority of contacts, you can prevent agent burnout. Managing occupancy in this way, in conjunction with utilizing business logic to match bestsuited agents with customers, promotes first-time resolution of every contact and improves customer satisfaction. When segmenting customers, it is important to remember that customer relationships evolve over time, and marginally profitable customers can later emerge as highly profitable. Businesses can run the risk of offending and losing potentially high-value 3
Strategies for Optimizing Medium to Large Contact Centers
1. Build profitable relationships through customer segmentation. Economic pressures and razor-thin profit margins are forcing many companies to make tough choices – between cost reduction goals on the one hand, and delivering the best customer service on the other. What companies are looking for is a way to deliver both. Companies can build strong and profitable customer relationships while maximizing contact center resources — by strategically segmenting their customers. With every contact, centers can collect valuable information that helps identify the customer as a high-value customer, a collections candidate, a customer service call, or a sales prospect. This information can then be used to make routing decisions or for upselling and cross-selling purposes as the organization sees fit.
customers by the quality of service they deliver to perceived low-value customers. A customer’s value to the company need never be visible or obvious. Integration between customer-facing systems and back-end CRM or other information databases will ensure the right customer information reaches the right agent at the right time so the customer experience delivered is always optimal. 2. Give customers choices. Businesses are continually challenged to deliver excellent customer service. Unfortunately, there are times when customers contact a business and experience long wait times. These can be costly for the business as telephone line charges accumulate. When customers continue on hold, they also tend to get frustrated – and they may choose to hang up and take their business elsewhere. If that happens, the business loses a potential long-term customer and the revenue from that customer. This is especially true when a flurry of calls comes in during an unexpected period. When this happens, customers are placed in queue and on hold for extended periods without the knowledge of when they will be serviced. This is where the challenges — and opportunities — of managing customer queues occur. Rather than requiring the customer to stay on the line, queue optimizer tools can make wait times more palatable by delivering recorded messages that provide an opt-out to callers. Customers can choose to leave a message or hold their place in the queue but request a call back when they get to the front of the line. Providing helpful information like how long the wait will be on hold, or the availability of other options like on-line chat, enables the customer to feel empowered while optimizing available agent resources. Medium and large contact center managers are struggling with ways to deliver on customer expectations when staffing is limited and hold times are long. All too often, customers are forced to communicate via the company’s preferred low-cost interaction channels. Typically online self-service is the most economical, but companies who don’t offer higher cost alternatives can run the risk of shutting out valued customers who aren’t Web-savvy, and once unwaveringly loyal customers may defect to the competition. Customers want to be able to interact via their channels of choice, whenever they want, and those organizations that don’t offer that possibility will be disappointing their customers. 4
For outbound campaigns, customer choices and preferences can also be respected. To manage campaigns across multiple contact centers, service level goals can be managed centrally, and calls can be distributed based on skills and occupancy levels. With campaign optimizer tools, one can get a view of the best time to call customers, with a central repository to set strategy and guide how the system is used. Proactive calls can be based on time of day and the best time to reach the customer, increasing the likelihood of success with fewer calls. Rather than downloading a calling list and each center processing a part of the list, calls can be centrally monitored, managed and optimized. 3. Evaluate performance according to business goals. There’s an old adage, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Nowhere is this more true than in medium and large contact centers. The biggest reporting challenge is how to meet service level requirements in what is typically a distributed environment. These requirements may be set by companies, their clients or outsourcers, and include such criteria as how fast agents can respond, volume of calls handled, how many sales are made, or number of problems solved on the first call. First call resolution is a major performance indicator. Mid to large centers have the resources to address the issue using advanced skills-based routing capabilities, ensuring that contacts are routed to the agent that is most likely to resolve the customer’s query the first time. Even incremental improvements in areas like these can produce dramatic results. Beyond measuring how many contacts were handled, how quickly or how well, some important performance measures are harder to define. At one leading healthcare organization, the contact center agents happen to be nurses, and the customers are patients. Measuring the time these agents spend on the phone is irrelevant. What’s important is the quality of the nurse-patient interactions. So, inbound callers can request a specific nurse while outbound calls can be made to specific patients. Different metrics apply here — it’s not talk time that counts, but having intimate customer or patient relationships. The right contact center solution will enable organizations to execute their strategies regardless of how unique their business or industry may be. Every interaction is part of a business process that must conform to established rules for maximizing revenues. Old performance measures like agent idle time or number of calls handled may not map to business and
revenue goals. In other words, an agent may be handling a large volume of contacts — but are these contacts bringing in more revenue? Is it important to know the number of calls completed, if the calls were not made to the right person or did not produce a positive outcome? Customer loyalty is an important metric. As stated previously, to retain customers and reward loyalty, customer segmentation can be leveraged to ensure top customers receive priority treatment. Companies can use performance reports to incentivize agents based on customer satisfaction scores, using real-time statistics and call monitoring to ensure best practices are implemented. Managers can use these statistics to reward agents for helping to achieve business goals — rather than basing rewards solely on number of calls logged or sign-in/sign-out statistics to corroborate hours. This focus on business objectives requires a shift in thinking. It is no longer just a matter of minimizing agent idle time, but measuring how well centers are meeting bottom-line goals. Questions like “How many calls?” need to be replaced with “How many contacts were resolved the first time?” or — more importantly — “How much product did you sell?” or “How did the customer rate their experience with our company?” This type of information can’t be mined from contact center data alone. Managers need access to business data combined with sophisticated analytics, built into the IT infrastructure. Increasing agent satisfaction and retention is another important business goal from the standpoint of cost containment. Historically, customer service representative (CSR) turnover has been an expensive and disruptive problem, with replacement costs ranging from $8,000 to $15,000 per agent, including recruitment and training expenses. A 200-seat contact center with a 33 percent annual turnover could cost an organization approximately $1 million a year. Common sense dictates that recognizing and rewarding top-performing agents is a key element in agent retention. The irony is that most companies don’t know how well their agents perform. Many midsize centers
have subsisted with PBX-based line hunting to route calls to agents. However, the fact that these calls are being answered does not mean that all agents are working to optimum levels. There might be 10 agents who are not very busy, while most of the calls are going to one or two people. It often comes as a “Eureka” moment when managers gain true visibility into performance indicators. To meet KPIs, analytical tools can measure how well agents and centers perform. One pool of resources may be inefficient while another group may be overstressed. Analysis tools let contact center managers drill down and mine data to see root causes. Such tools may also incorporate KPI libraries and performance scorecards, and enable managers to set performance goals according to individual skill level and training. Medium to large contact centers need analytical tools and centralized real-time reporting capabilities to ensure priorities map to business objectives. Supervisors can gain visibility into agent performance through reader boards that show how one group is performing vs. another. With more advanced analytical and reporting tools, managers can track not just the number of calls per day or number of successful contacts, but also see how effective a team is at promoting a new product line, and base compensation on generating revenue.
Key Solutions for Medium to Large Contact Centers
As noted earlier, managers of medium to large contact centers face three key challenges: 1.Managing the workforce 2.Managing technological complexity 3.Managing dispersed operations. The following are key solutions that have emerged to address these issues. Performance Optimization to Better Manage Workforces Medium to large centers are the ideal size to leverage some kind of performance optimization solution, partly to ensure that hundreds of agents 5
are on time and productive each day, vacation and time off requests are properly managed, and customer needs are met. More importantly, these solutions can also be used to forecast call patterns based on historical data, to ensure that the complex process of managing staff requirements is more efficient, flexible, and automated, with centralized real-time monitoring and reporting – anticipating and addressing what the business needs. The benefits of performance optimization go far beyond reducing agent downtime. More efficient operations also make it easier to schedule agent training time. With better training, agents are more skilled and equipped to provide a higher quality customer experience and resolve customer inquiries the first time. In this way, technology can be used to empower and motivate agents to deliver excellent service. The goal should not be limited to making agents less idle, but to make them more productive — resulting in true workforce optimization. While there is a mature market for staff management tools, most of these address scheduling and forecasting for voice traffic only, and typically this is limited to inbound calling. Newer performance optimization solutions can address both inbound and outbound customer contacts through a variety of channels – voice, email and chat — to give the consumer more choices and the contact center the greatest flexibility for managing agent resources. Unified Solutions to Reduce Complexity The market for contact center solutions is crowded with thousands of players, and it is no wonder that the industry is maturing and consolidating. Consolidation is one of the most important trends in the contact center industry, and their customers have everything to gain from this trend. By working with fewer solution vendors — or ideally, a single vendor — companies can reduce complexity and expand contact center capability. Converged solutions can be brought to bear as business needs dictate. A complete solution will unite inbound, outbound and blended multi-channel contact (voice, email, Web and fax), while delivering robust queuing, routing, reporting and agent empowerment capabilities in a single solution. Unified solutions provide the advantage of streamlined service and support, especially for companies with multinational operations. Complete 6
solution vendors also offer the advantage of greater research and development investment, to ensure the right balance of enhancing current products to protect and extend customers’ existing investments, while building new, more advanced products for the future. Companies need to seek out vendors that are committed to open connectivity with third-party technologies and products via standards-based interfaces. It is also important to look for solution providers with a successful history of integrating products with existing legacy infrastructures. Unified solution vendors typically offer broad experience and insight to ensure that products support a customercentric contact center strategy. In a true partnership with their customers, contact center solution companies can take a holistic approach to helping businesses gain competitive advantage through superior interactions with their customers. Centralization and VoIP to Unify Dispersed Centers There are tangible economies of scale to be achieved by centrally managing contact center workforces. Medium to large contact centers may have excess capacity if workloads are not equitably balanced. To better utilize agent bandwidth, contact centers can realize measurable savings by consolidating workloads across dispersed groups of agents. Contact center managers can combine smaller groups of agents, while crosstraining agents for different types of customer interactions and establishing skills-based routing queues that take advantage of agents’ multi-modal abilities. To treat multiple contact centers as if they were one virtual contact center, multi-site routing products with load balancing capability are important and need to scale to the size of the center, whether it has 200 or 1,000 seats, with no degradation of service or call handling. These tools help managers schedule agents and route calls and other customer contacts more efficiently, and need to be flexible to grow and scale to meet changing business needs. And real-time reporting and analytics can provide a single view of dispersed operations. IP telephony also plays well in this distributed contact center environment. Voice over IP (VoIP) relates to the transportation of voice over a wide-area IP network to connect multiple locations together. Such technology promises cost reductions not just in lower connectivity
and telephony fees between sites, but also lower management overheads. IT staff can look after a single network rather than separate networks from a central point. Moving to converged networks raises new requirements for security and network management, which means taking a holistic view of what needs to be in place for security and network integrity. It is necessary to ensure that firewalls are voice-aware and that corporate security policies are amended to cope with the new requirements.
About Concerto Software®
Concerto Software, the founder of the contact center industry, is 100 percent focused on providing proven, innovative products and services that enable key business processes including customer service, collections, and sales and telemarketing for in-house and outsourced contact centers. Each day, companies around the globe conduct more than 50 million customer interactions using Concerto's flexible, reliable solutions for automatic call distribution (ACD), predictive dialing, workforce management, analytics, interactive voice response (IVR) and multi-channel contact. Headquartered in Westford, Mass., Concerto has operations across the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific. For more information, visit www.concerto.com.
Conclusions
Contact centers are on the front lines of customercompany interactions. To maximize every customer relationship and seize every opportunity for customer acquisition, the right contact center solutions and best practices can help drive revenue predictability. Medium to large contact centers can be optimized to provide the highest levels of uptime and availability, and strategic segmentation can help focus resources on the customers who generate the lion’s share of profits. In addition, intelligent routing and queue optimization tools can provide capabilities that engender customer loyalty — by identifying customers and making it easy for them to reach the right person or resource to address whatever issue or opportunity is at hand. Unified solutions leveraging the new economies of VoIP can lower the cost and complexity of doing business, while enabling the company to deliver a consistent and high-quality customer experience. And, by leveraging real-time reporting and analytics, widely dispersed systems can be centrally managed as a single virtual contact center, supporting strategic initiatives to position the organization as the easiest company with which to do business.
7
© 2005 CIM, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. 7.05
Corporate Headquarters 6 Technology Park Drive Westford, MA 01886 USA
t +1 978.952.0200 f +1 978.952.0201
email info@concerto.com www.concerto.com