Most people can give you several reasons why they don’t like dealing with contact centres. Find out how you can overcome their reservations by improving customer service, as well as cost-efficiency

Delivering a slick, friendly contact centre experience isn’t easy. You’ve got a lot of variables to grapple with including:

• Peaks and troughs in customer call volumes: You don’t want to pay agents to sit there not taking calls, while customers dislike long call queues.
• Staff churn: As much as 25% of your staff may leave every year and have to be replaced with new agents that require costly training.
• Multiple channel choices: Customers now expect not only multi-channel communication options, but also the agents and systems in place to support them.
• Negative customer perception: Most callers don’t like dealing with contact centres and generally loathe IVR (Interactive Voice Response)!
• First-time resolution: How many customer calls fail to be resolved during the initial call?

Our call centre technologies can help you tackle many of these issues head-on.

‘I’m afraid we’re busy right now. Please call back later’

Driving up occupancy is largely about forecasting and scheduling. Good management information is key. Our network can help you by providing extensive data about calling patterns, including abandonment rates.

Another neat answer is managing agents across multiple contact centres as a single pool, with a single queue. It can also achieve significant economies of scale. And technologies like ‘call-back’ can help smooth out peaks and troughs, improving agent utilisation.

I'm sorry we've been unable to resolve your call this time'

First-time call resolution is about identifying the needs of the caller and putting them through to the agent best equipped to handle the issue – whether it’s solving a problem or selling the caller exactly what they want. Routing technology can help you identify the caller’s needs while they’re waiting in the queue.

Our options include:

• IVR and database integration: In other words, ‘We know who you are, so we know how to help you’.
• Skills-based routing: Route the call to the person best suited to handle it.
• Dynamic routing: Send the call to the next available agent – not to the back of the queue!

Other key resolution components you should consider include training and desktop systems.

‘One of our experts will be with you shortly’

The most direct way of reducing the cost of agents is to reduce their salary or take advantage of lower wage conditions elsewhere in the world. This may already be part of your strategy, in which case bear in mind that the ability to treat multiple contact centres as a single shared resource can also extend to centres in other countries. In other words, it’s possible to establish a single virtual contact centre for your whole organisation, and then control the flow of calls in real-time to each physical location, wherever in the world that may be. And while a competitive tariff for the minutes is not completely irrelevant, it doesn’t make that big a dent in your overall costs.
 
You can also reduce costs by skipping non-essential investments in capital equipment (switches and software). Otherwise, you take on all the risk and are stuck with whatever you’ve bought until it’s written off. You may find yourself more flexible, and financially better off, by buying managed services, where the capability is hosted within an operator’s network.

Here are more possible solutions for reducing costs:

• Buy technology on a pay-as-you-use basis: You can do this through network hosted applications
• Consider having agents offshore: Integrate contact centres in multiple countries
• Provide flexible working hours: Have agents at home taking IP calls over broadband, managing them as though they were in the call centre.

‘You are currently at position 106 in the queue…’

Handling time is a key area in which technology can help. A combination of IVR and CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) can save the 10-20 seconds it takes to identify, verify and authenticate the caller. Certain statutory announcements can also be automated. Many callers don’t mind if calls are entirely automated for very simple transactions (such as balance enquiries) and these often comprise the bulk of calls that a contact centre receives. Your lower cost channels can also be used to defer some calls altogether.

‘Your call may be recorded to improve the quality of our service’

Here are some solution technologies that can help improve customer service, which in turn can encourage new sales and customer retention:

• Customer Contact Solutions: Solutions include routing management, reporting, on-disk billing and inbound call analysis, self-service, interactive services, fully integrated hosting solutions and telemarketing numbers.
• Converged Solutions: IP technologies have set businesses buzzing over the chance to transform customer and employee communications, including IP Multimedia and IP PBX (Internet Protocol Private Branch eXchange).
• Business Phone Lines: From a single phone line to ISDN30 or an advanced IP Telephony system.