Unmatched Customer Service with Multi-Sourced Call Centers
1 Sep, 2008
By: Bruce DresserIt’s no surprise that sourcing agents from multiple call centers — a combination of remote, in-house and outsourced call center agents to create a distributed, virtual call center — would seem to promise cost savings and flexibility. However, upon a closer look, one will find several risks that can actually weaken a company’s objective of better and more flexible customer service.
Although agents from across town or across the globe can be quickly added to or subtracted from the call center agent pool to respond quickly to changing business needs, sourcing from a variety of centers can damage customer loyalty and brand as well as jeopardize cost savings. Call centers that lack a common hosted infrastructure are particularly at risk. Without a common hosted infrastructure:
• Cost per call is artificially high because of management’s inability to reconfigure and reallocate call distribution in real-time and when needed because they don’t have complete agent visibility
• Separate upgrades, maintenance and staffing of siloed sites on different platforms within the multi-site deployments is required, which drain savings sought by having multi-sourced agents
• Consistent customer service can’t be delivered by agents because they lack the same set of tools, often driving a company’s most valuable customers to take their business elsewhere.
• Companies (and their customers) face unpredictable, unmanageable response times.
How can banks, insurance companies and other financial services firms maximize the rewards of customer service and minimize the risks through multi-sourced call centers? With a common hosted call center platform.
Ability to Shift
One of the attractions of multi-sourcing is reduced risk of call center downtime, yet companies that engage in sourcing agents from multiple call centers without a common hosted platform still expose their call center operations to heightened risk. Disparate platforms cause each agent pool to be invisible to one another and, in most cases, to call center management, necessitating the blind distribution of calls. This lack of visibility reduces the company’s ability to view problems at outsourced locations and to respond to them with timely remedies.
Consider a bank with five major call centers in the United States and abroad. Together, the call centers handle several hundred thousand calls per month, with call volumes peaking to nearly triple that amount during the fourth quarter. Without a multi-site, multi-sourced hosted contact center in all its locations, the bank can’t shift excess capacity from one center to another because it doesn’t have visibility of all its agents, therefore, overstaffing in one call center while another center has call abandon rates of 30 percent.
With a common hosted platform, the bank can dynamically route calls to an available agent, based on the current status of all agent locations and queues. No matter what location, skills-based routing coupled with complete agent visibility guarantees calls are routed seamlessly and answered promptly. As the environment changes — as more agents become available at one location, for example and capacity drops at another — call distribution automatically adjusts to better balance all centers.
In addition, because call center managers with a common hosted platform have a real-time view into the entire agent pool at all locations as well as the entire call queues, they can implement load balancing and maximize asset utilization to deliver a higher level of service at a lower, more cost-efficient level of staffing.
Consistent Service
Companies operating disparate call centers risk delivering inconsistent customer service. Business intelligence obstacles, tool deployment delays and other differences among call center platforms mean service levels can fluctuate on a call-by-call basis, depending on which pool of agents a caller reaches.
When these systems are at variance with each other, the in-house, remote and outsourced agents risk giving callers conflicting or contradictory information. Similarly, an agent’s access to CRM information — or lack thereof — can mean the difference between a fast, efficient transaction and a call that gets bogged down as agents question callers for basic information.
With a common hosted call center platform, multi-sourced agents at all locations use the same systems and tools. They also all have access to the same data, scripting tools and the threaded business intelligence through the complete integration with the company’s enterprise systems and databases. As a result, customers receive prompt service and consistent answers no matter which agent pool they reach.
Finding Efficiency in Numbers
To meet service quality and agent availability goals, companies operating multi-sourced call centers often staff them beyond cost-effective levels. They end up shouldering additional costs — both direct and indirect — when they deploy service enhancements across heterogeneous multi-sourcing environments.
The standardized call center infrastructure and associated standardized workflows and methods dramatically reduce the cost and time required for agent training. Moreover, the common hosted multi-sourced environment uses shared tools, applications and services to generate ongoing savings in IT and outsourcing fees. Companies can even consolidate the monitoring, evaluating and coaching of all their agents.
As call centers move toward a distributed agent model, companies also need to consider how these dispersed resources can be most efficiently managed to maximize the cost savings without sacrificing service quality and availability. A common hosted call center platform is essential to fully realizing the benefits of call center multi-sourcing.
Companies that adopt this strategy will lead the way in delivering unmatched customer service with unmatched contact center efficiency. A system-wide view into the status of all agents; the ability to provide them with shared tools, data and business intelligence; and the capability to manage them in real-time with unified reporting and controls will enable these service leaders to deliver consistently excellent service regardless of where the agent resides.
