Boost Contact-Center Efficiency

CU360
June 17, 2009 | COMMENTS

Companies have traditionally thought of customer-service hubs as cost centers--a part of the organization that tried its best to soothe angry callers, answer their product questions, and keep customers from defecting. But in this environment, contact centers take on a whole new meaning, according to destinationCRM.com. Many organizations now realize the contact center is a primary touch point for consumers.

"Customer service is the sole differentiator in the marketplace," explains Zachary McGeary, associate analyst at Forrester Research. "Acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones is more important today."

But many contact centers simply don't have the same pre-recession budgets to invest in delivering this quality experience. It's becoming more difficult to invest in new technology or hire more customer-service reps. "This isn't the time to be experimenting with new technology," McGeary warns. This means revamping the people, processes, and technology your contact center already has.

One problem among contact centers is watching perfectly qualified customer-service reps walk out the door of their own volition. "The biggest area that any company can focus on right way is staff attrition," says Oscar Alban, consultant for contact center provider Verint Systems.

"We need to address staff attrition because that's more money that can be used for other initiatives," Alban says. Finding out what's aggravating customer-service reps can cost little but reap great benefits.

Making sure customer-service reps are informed will help retain them. Empowerment—giving staff the ability to take actions to solve problems—is another low-cost solution.

"Giving staff the power to make decisions and come up with creative solutions is important," McGeary says. "They then have the power to exceed the customer's expectations or make good on what could have been a bad or unfortunate experience."

Any investment in technology should help empower your most expensive asset—your contact-center employees. Enabling desktop technology to publish real-time information about callers is one solution.

McGeary recommends looking into proper workflow, call routing, queuing, and looking at transition points from the interactive voice response system to a live person. "If you fix those high-level processes, it can reap great rewards in terms of efficiency," he adds.

And, there's continued interest in first-call resolution due to its two-fold benefit of cost savings and customer satisfaction. Companies are revamping and fixing skills-based routing and CRM integration capabilities. This way, calls can get to the right person with the information needed to successfully complete the call at the representative's fingertips. Another approach is to work with the system vendor to deal with underutilized technology. "People buy technology but only use a portion of it," says Verint's Alban.

One question that remains—and probably can't be answered until the recession ends—is whether companies will keep the same mindset or revert to throwing money at technology and not properly using it. "One lesson that persisted after the last downturn was that companies demanded more justification from vendors on what they can expect in terms of ROI," says Alban.

"Companies are in different states of disarray, but there's an opportunity here for customer-service executives to refine how they're interacting with consumers," adds McGeary. "Instead of looking at how you can cut as many resources as possible, keep in mind that you don't need to spend more money to fix many of the broken processes in your contact center."