If your Contact Center is operating professionally you’re making significant capital investments in headsets for your agents. You’d like to take care of that investment properly.

And again, if you’re about normal, you have problems tracking and securing this investment, with many procedural gaps that can lead to sizeable inventory shrinkage.

“We estimate that for contact centers with more than 500 operators, inventory shrinkage can reach up to 15 percent a year -- and the cost of replacing that inventory is a direct hit to the bottom line,” says Neil Hooper, Senior Manager of Contact Center marketing for Plantronics (News - Alert).

Putting in place a few straightforward policies and introducing simple procedures can reduce shrinkage and increase efficiency by a substantial margin, Plantronics advises.

For instance, how’s your Contact Center headset inventory tracking? If you’re like most, it’s a, well, let’s say “haphazard” process: Broken Contact Center headsets waiting to be repaired, for example, are often kept in a variety of boxes tucked in closets or under desks. Rounding up those Contact Center headsets and getting them shipped back to the manufacturer becomes a time-consuming chore that often gets put off too long. Warranties quietly expire.

The Plantronics Headset Service Station might be what you need. It provides a central location for the storage, control and maintenance of a Contact Center’s headset investment. It’s designed specifically to organize and streamline administrative tasks such as inventory control and allocation and technical tasks such as testing and parts replacement.

Its benefits include:

--Centralized control: The service station provides a single location for inventory management that reduces lost and misplaced equipment. Central control also reduces out-of-warranty expenses.

--Advanced replacement center: The service station provides a central location for collection, boxing and shipping of headsets in need of service.

--Secured storage: Locking compartments hold more than 200 headsets and accessories, and help control inventory of headsets, accessories and parts.

--Dispensing station: Associates can quickly find and choose appropriate headsets and accessories, reducing downtime.

--Testing center: The service station is engineered to be rugged enough to support headset testing and modification.

--Consolidated administration: Having a central location for dispensing work directives regarding headsets improves communications.

--Usage monitoring: A single point of control means better measurement of usage, and better forecasting and budgeting for headsets.

“I think this a good example of how we try to look beyond merely satisfying equipment needs in order to maximize the benefit to customers of using us their supplier,” says Hooper.

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