The Next Generation Call Center: Will the Mission Continue?
1 Sep, 2007
By: John SansburyThose of us of a certain vintage can remember when banks and insurance companies offered highly tailored and personalized services, and went the extra mile to make their customers feel special. For a loan, you went to your bank’s local branch office – where you were likely greeted by tellers and managers – and met with a representative who was familiar with your financial situation and could quickly identify your best options. For insurance coverage, an agent visited your home, asked about your kids and outlined a policy package suited to your family’s needs and life stage.
While this business model might appear quaintly anachronistic by today’s bottom-line standards, it contained an important strategic element: by investing in knowledge on customer needs and by enabling skilled employees to use this knowledge to cross-sell and up-sell services, banks and insurers could deliver value to the customer and revenue to the business.
Today, the contact center is largely replacing the branch office and the insurance agent as a primary point of contact with the customer. This creates the potential for an evolving, value-added role for the contact center, whereby agents are assigned to high-revenue clients. In other words, if you’re an important customer, you call the contact center and ask for “your” agent, who has ready access to data on your priorities, assets, requirements and preferences, and who over time builds a relationship with you.
A contact center focused on adding value and enhancing the customer’s experience is an intriguing concept. But to realize this vision, senior business executives must undertake a fundamental rethink of the contact center’s role and priorities, and implement dramatic, top-to-bottom changes in how contact centers are structured, managed and staffed.
The Contact Center Today
Before describing the contact center of the future and its potential to build value, let’s start with today’s reality. For the most part it’s not a pretty picture. First, most contact centers are not involved in generating income; close to 70 percent of contact centers are not involved in sales or revenue generation, and although that proportion is declining, the telesales function is still commonly managed as a separate function. In addition, because of their size and the people-intensive nature of their function, contact centers are often in separate, dedicated facilities. Finally, contact centers usually report to executives in finance.
As a result of these factors, contact centers tend to be viewed as highly visible – and vulnerable – cost centers. Consider: lots of people work in a separate operation that costs lots of money. The first instinct of management is how to make the contact center less conspicuous. In other words, rather than viewing the contact center’s role as meeting customer needs and ensuring quality, the focus becomes cost reduction.
And how do you reduce cost in a contact center? If personnel costs account for 70 percent of a contact center’s costs, reducing personnel requirements – or increasing the productivity of each person – becomes the top priority.
Three factors drive personnel requirements in a contact center: the volume of calls; the duration of calls; and the frequency and timing of calls. For a manager concerned with personnel and cost reduction, the logical area to focus on is duration – if you can control and manage the length of calls, you can reduce personnel requirements and reduce costs. As such, the overriding objective within most contact centers is to take more calls and handle them as quickly as possible.
The problem is, the “quicker is better” philosophy is bad – bad for the customer, bad for the agent and bad for the business.
Consider this scenario: a contact center is inundated with calls from customers who can’t find information on the company’s Web site describing a hot new product. From a business standpoint, the right thing for the contact center to do would obviously be to report the problem to the Webmaster to update the site and make the information more easily accessible. But from the point of view of conventional contact center management, that would harm performance, because agents would get fewer calls and be less productive. If the contact center gets a high volume of calls that are easily resolved, then they’re seen as doing a great job. Their incentive is to process calls, rather than to solve the underlying customer problem and help the business.
Traditional contact center hiring practices represent another area of concern. First, contact center employees can be the lowest-paid, least-trained and least-committed people in the organization. Yet, these individuals represent the face of the business. Another disconnect is that contact centers typically seek out people who are articulate, empathetic and demonstrate good “people” skills. However, those skills aren’t well-suited to the fundamental imperative to process as many calls as quickly as possible. As a result, many agents get frustrated and are apathetic and unmotivated on the job or depart for other opportunities. Or, in a further irony, successful agents get “promoted” into sales – another area where their skills may not be a good fit.
The Future of the Contact Center
So how do we move away from this unhappy state of affairs? How can the contact center realize its potential role as a value-adding enterprise that enhances the customer experience and helps the business succeed?
Today’s contact centers require a fundamental solution – no less than a revolution in terms of management goals and priorities. While that sounds daunting, the solution is actually quite simple:
Rather than increasing the volume of calls handled, the contact center should focus on identifying, resolving and eliminating problems.
“Problem” calls can be defined as calls (or contacts) that don’t add value to either the customer or to the business. These can include questions about bills, questions about when to expect delivery of an item or about where on the Web site to find product information. Analyses of contact centers show that a high proportion (25 to 75 percent) of calls can be characterized as such.
A truly customer-facing organization develops the capabilities, metrics and incentives to identify customer problems, and a process to track, report, analyze and resolve problems encountered Under this strategy, processes are developed to ensure that problems are identified and resolved at their source in a way that prevents them from recurring.
A customer-centric approach by no means neglects efficiency. Part of this new approach involves more sophisticated measures and KPIs that calculate cost and productivity to incorporate different types of contacts – such as phone, e-mail, letter, self-service contacts, as well as the productivity of people engaged in multiple functions. By examining fluctuations in call volumes and how this impacts service levels, it’s possible to develop a deeper and more comprehensive view of cost and productivity than simply volume of calls handled.
A Personal Contact Center
A contact center focused on the customer experience and on solving problems is positioned to fulfil its potential as the 21st Century version of the neighborhood bank branch or insurance agent, with the capability to offer tailored services to suit individual customer needs.
In terms of providing ready access to customer data, CRM system profiles of customer assets, requirements, priorities and interests are certainly adequate. But such systems can’t provide the in-depth understanding that accompanies human relationships. This is where the concept of the “personal agent” comes in – the contact center staffer who has a list of client accounts and gets to “know” individual customers, builds relationships with them and leverages those relationships to both help the customer and benefit the business.
The personal agent model requires special skills and training, but the investment needed to develop those skills would be more than justified by the value added to the business. Moreover, the personal agent role could represent a career path within the contact center and be part of an effective recruitment and retention strategy.
As part of the fundamental reappraisal of the contact center, is revisiting recruitment strategies. The traditional labor pool of students, temps and part-timers should be expanded to include workers who represent a stable, motivated and experienced workforce. Such employees can be ideally suited to the personal agent role.
The personal agent model could be applied in a contact center where agents both respond to incoming calls as well as place outbound calls to generate business. This dual role approach could enhance efficiency and minimize down time, since agents could do work related to their individual client accounts when incoming volumes are low. Here again, training and effective screening of skills and personality traits are needed to ensure people of the appropriate temperament are placed in positions requiring a combination of listening, sales and communication abilities.
Businesses say customers are their top priority. If that’s the case, executives must realize that the contact center is the face and personality of the company to customers. It’s time to stop treating the contact center as a cost to be pared to the bone, but rather as a strategic enterprise deserving of investment and capable of delivering significant returns.
