The Blended
Contact Center: Myth Or Reality?
The Keys To Building A Unified
Inbound And Outbound Call Center Operation
By Larry Mark, SER Solutions, Inc. and
Paul Lang, Aspect Communications Corp.
For many years, there has been an ongoing industry discussion about the
costs and benefits of blended best-of-breed contact centers that, among
other things, leverage resources across inbound and outbound activities.
Industry leaders tout the wisdom that truly blended environments will
maximize productivity, enhance service levels and reduce expenses while
maintaining the reliability and scalability of the individual components.
Yet the successful and seamless integration of these core contact center
competencies remains an elusive goal. Many attempts at blended centers
have failed simply because the ACD, outbound dialer and call management
software were designed as separate technology silos ' often forcing
contact centers to operate inbound and outbound calling as distinct
business lines, each with separate reporting capabilities and agent
interfaces. This silo-based approach is more expensive by way of redundant
applications and systems, incomplete views of contact center activities
and disjointed service. The inadequacies of this approach are also very
apparent to the end customer.
To build a truly holistic customer service operation, today's
customer-centric businesses require an integrated system for balancing
calls across inbound and outbound activities; the ability to optimize
agent resources across different skill sets and abilities ' regardless
of type of interaction; and a reporting structure that provides a single,
unified view of the contact center from end-to-end. Following are five key
elements that are essential:
1) Centralized Decision Making
In outbound-centric blending, the decision to move an agent is usually
made by monitoring information available through the CTI link. Typically,
this will include data on inbound queues and agent skills. CTI links
provide call and agent state change events and allow for external call
control. However, they do not provide a complete view of the ACD to
external sources. Additionally, routing within the ACD has become more
complex, with multiskilled agents, calls queued to multiple skills and
multisite call routing capabilities. This makes it much more difficult for
an external system, such as an outbound call management system, to
estimate the true wait time of a call in queue. Likewise, an external
system must view each call within a queue as having the same value, while
the inbound system may have additional information about the caller and
his or her value to the enterprise. Essentially, an outbound system using
a CTI link to make blending decisions is analogous to peeking through one
window of a large house and trying to determine what's happening in
every room. There is a partial view and some information available, but
there are many blind spots that may hide important details. The key to
improvement lies in having the most comprehensive information available to
the system that is making the blending decision.
Today's contact centers are required to support open standards which
allow other systems, such as e-mail and chat, to provide data feeds and
define and invoke business rules ' thus enabling universal queuing and
call blending. By tightly integrating an outbound system and treating it
as just another channel, you end the data isolation of the outbound dialer
and give the call management software a more holistic view. The decision
to pull an agent from outbound to handle an important queued customer is
identical, regardless of whether the customer is queued on an inbound
voice call or a chat session. The contact center can now optimize every
customer interaction, improve customer satisfaction and provide
consistent, personalized service across all contact center channels.
Because the decision-making has been moved from the outbound dialer to a
centralized routing engine, blending decisions can be made across multiple
inbound and outbound telephony switches.
2) Consolidated Reporting
More informed blending decisions are not the only benefit of blended
information integration. Shared data provide the basis for achieving
consolidated real-time and historical reports. The lack of consolidated
reporting has proven to be a significant problem in call centers with
standalone inbound and outbound operations. While it is common for
multichannel contact management systems to provide reports on inbound
contacts across channels, in many cases, data related to outbound activity
are generated by a separate system using separate metrics. Without a
mechanism for combining inbound and outbound calling data, it becomes
difficult to derive complete business intelligence, taking into account
all customer transactions, regardless of what channel or direction of
contact. Through integration, contact centers no longer have to retrieve
report data from two systems and try to tie all the information together,
a necessity when agent duties can span inbound and outbound call handling
within a single shift.
The first step to producing consolidated reports is to store both the
inbound and outbound data in a common database so information can be
easily viewed and summarized. Over the last decade, reporting has become
more advanced and complex. Where simple printed reports were once the
standard, today's reports have evolved into complex data analysis,
complete with drill downs, 'what if' scenarios, trend analysis and
consolidation of data into key performance indicators. Having the data for
all channels in a single repository makes it possible to perform complex
analysis across all channels, enabling centers to measure and manage
agents in a more sophisticated manner.
With this in place, supervisors can easily classify their agents into
groups. One group of agents may have shorter-than-average handle times for
voice calls, but longer-than-average handle times for chat ' perhaps
indicating a need for typing skills training. On the other hand, there may
be groups of agents who have a high success rate on handling outbound
calls, but a low success rate on inbound calls. Perhaps these agents feel
more comfortable 'pitching' someone on the benefits of a product than
they do handling a distraught caller who needs assistance. As it becomes
easier to measure key performance indicators across channels, agent skills
can be defined and improved at a more granular level. For example, Agent
'X' is primarily outbound, but can do inbound in a pinch and should
only do chat as a last resort. Or, Agent 'Y' should be moved to
inbound as soon as service levels for sales contacts exceed a certain
threshold, requiring a person with the skills to handle voice or chat.
These more granular details can then drive decisions on blending,
staffing, training and routing.
3) Right Agent, Right Time
Sophisticated routing that takes into account agent skills, location and
contact channel is now a must for today's contact centers, driving more
responsive, focused and effective customer interactions, and efficient use
of resources. Integrating these routing capabilities across inbound and
outbound activities enables proactive customer service while also
providing improved agent utilization.
Consider for a moment the use of proactive customer service in the travel
and hospitality industry. Advanced routing provides the ability to ensure
the right agent is available at the right time to deliver the highest
quality customer service possible. For example, it enables outbound agents
to proactively alert your most valued customers about flight delays or
changes, promoting customer loyalty and alleviating inbound backups from
the inevitable increase in customer calls later in the day. In other
cases, scheduled callback functionality reduces customer frustration with
hold times during high call volumes by offering them the option of a
callback at another time. This concurrently enables outbound agents to
pick up the slack when call volumes are high, and offer greater
convenience to the customer.
When inbound and outbound routing is coordinated, agents can be more
effectively utilized based on real-time occurrences in the contact center.
This is not about blending agent skills, per se. Typically, very different
skill sets are required for either inbound or outbound customer
interactions. This is about blending the management of inbound and
outbound calls so that the most appropriate agents are being matched more
specifically to each customer need.
4) Holistic Workforce Management
Advanced agent management that carefully balances forecasted call volumes
with agent schedules is another function that needs to move out of inbound
and outbound silos. Holistic workforce management must take into account
both inbound and outbound staffing so that even greater efficiencies and
cost savings can be derived from the system.
Workforce performance analytics based on integrated data spanning
inbound and outbound activities is another way to drive new gains in agent
optimization. Most contact center managers must work very hard just to
manage day-to-day scheduling and agent troubleshooting. Without the time
and tools to analyze how they should modify operations to ensure there
will be less need to rearrange schedules or to deal with under- or
over-staffing in the future, it is extremely difficult to continually
improve performance. Should the routing scheme be changed? Should the
company invest more hours in agent training?
Forward-thinking workforce management should not only allow managers
the time to ask these questions by automating labor-intensive manual
tasks, it should also provide the tools to answer them.
Analytic solutions are available that are geared toward improving
performance across the entire contact center. Analytical applications are
designed to answer a pre-selected set of questions, not just aggregate
collections of raw data. With a unified contact center, the time-consuming
work of sorting through the data to search for what's relevant to both
inbound and outbound operational and business requirements has already
been done. These applications are capable of analyzing only what applies
directly to the pressing concerns of the contact center in direct support
of business objectives.
Workforce management solutions provide a detailed source of data
regarding forecasts, schedules and schedule compliance. All of the
advantages that analytics can offer, such as quick access to relevant
information, job-specific displays and tools to communicate and take
corrective action are directly applicable to the processes of managing and
motivating agents for maximum efficiency, whether inbound or outbound.
Backed with strong analytics and advanced workforce management
functionality, contact center managers can ensure that inbound service
levels are kept high while outbound campaign goals are met.
5) Consolidated Administration
Consolidated administration is the final piece to the blended contact
center puzzle. Even in an environment that has installed best-of-breed
components, contact center supervisors are forced to use separate
interfaces to administer and manage the inbound and outbound systems. This
creates unnecessary overhead because administrators must be trained on
multiple interfaces and duplicate agent information must be entered into
two distinct systems. There is also the ongoing maintenance nightmare of
keeping the two systems in sync as agents are hired, acquire new skills or
are promoted to new roles. By creating a single point of administration,
and more importantly, a single configuration repository shared by the
inbound and outbound systems, duplication of effort is eliminated. This
does not mean that all configuration items must or will be shared. In
fact, outbound-centric configuration information such as trunk group
definitions should be administered directly on the dialer and not be part
of the shared configuration. What is vitally important is that all the
configuration data that are used by more than one system either for
blending or for consolidating reports be stored in one location,
administered through one interface and available to all systems.
Implemented intelligently, a truly unified contact center
should allow companies to best utilize resources across inbound and
outbound operations, optimize every customer interaction, improve customer
satisfaction and provide consistent, personalized service across all
contact center channels. At the same time, it should provide scalability
and reliability to support the most demanding enterprises today and well
into the future.
A call center industry veteran, Paul Lang, VP of Product Line
Management for Aspect, is responsible for ensuring the successful
introduction of new Aspect products to market. Prior to this position, Mr.
Lang was VP of Call Center solutions with oversight over Aspect's suite
of ACD products. Aspect Communications
Corporation is a provider of contact center solutions and services
that enable businesses to manage and optimize customer communications.
Lawrence P. Mark, CTO of SER Solutions,
Inc., brings more than 20 years of technical development and
managerial experience to his position. As CTO, he leads the company's
strategic planning and technology direction initiatives. SER Solutions,
Inc. provides software solutions to help companies achieve efficiencies,
maximize workplace productivity and enhance customer service.
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