Call Center Management Featured Article
Contact Center Consolidation, a Trend in Government Services, May Be Headed for Private Sector
Throughout the history of contact center business, it was often seen as conventional wisdom that large companies with different products lines, services or divisions should maintain a variety of different contact centers, separated not only geographic region but also by function. It was felt that when workers could specialize in a certain product or service, they would become experts, and there would be no confusion or overlap. This, of course, was in the days when customers didn’t expect to be able to receive the kind of multichannel or omnichannel service they expect today. It also wasn’t very cost-efficient, since workers did a lot of parallel tasks that used resources unnecessarily.
In the case of new business offices or product lines, new contact centers were often established to handle the business, according to Monet Software (News - Alert) CEO Chuck Ciarlo in a recent blog post.
“New contact centers are sometimes established for one individual line of business or new venture, which does not have to fit efficiently into a larger enterprise. That can result in wasted resources and replicated technology platforms.”
This is often the case with public services contact centers that are intended to serve slightly different parts of a city or county. In the State of Connecticut, a recently completed study has indicated that lowering the number of emergency call centers from more than 100 to just eight could be achieved without impacting service. Following the recommendations of the report, the state plans to consolidate different municipal and district services in an effort to both lower costs and to offer these services in a more streamlined and consistent manner.
“The company that carried out the study, launched a program to achieve more efficient economies of scale based on resources, facilities, technology and processes,” wrote Ciarlo. “It was discovered that there were a number of opportunities for savings, including resource pooling, combining hiring profiles and skill requirements (10 to 20 percent savings); process simplification and workforce management efficiencies (10 to 15 percent savings); common critical monitoring and reporting metrics (10 to 15 percent savings); shared CRM applications and improved call routing efficiencies (5 to 10 percent savings); and optimized common agent desktop tools (5 to 10 percent savings).”
So what can private sector companies learn from this intelligence? Streamlining operations intelligently can help companies eliminate duplicate efforts and combine channels to offer customers a more customer-centric omnichannel approach to customer support. While the result may be cost savings from the streamlining of operations, the task should not be undertaken with the sole intention to save money by cutting back resources available to customers.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi