TMCnews Featured Article

April 25, 2012

The Decision Decade Starts with Contact Center Planning

By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor

The contact center serves a particular purpose within the organization, but if your contact center planning doesn’t have a specific goal in mind, the costs can quickly outpace the benefits. The same is true for the gathering of customer data – without a clear strategy, you’re really just filling up server space.

This was often the case in the 1990s. This data decade found companies collecting comprehensive data concerning their customers, transactions, purchasing attributes and more and plugged this information into CRM applications. They gathered information through the phone, websites and other various channels and expected this process to increase customer satisfaction, drive more sales and improve profits.

When these strategies were incorporated into the contact center planning process, some of the promised benefits were realized. When shopping online, for example, the online retailer knows what items were purchased in the past and has the opportunity to make suggestions based on previous behavior. With this information, agents in the contact center were also more productive in their cross-selling and up-selling activities.

This information also helped in contact center planning and the overall decision-making processes within the organization. Executive decision makers were provided with MIS reports, which generally consisted of a series of operational or financial books of reports, electronic or online reports, and dashboards.

These reports enabled managers to glean the necessary information to make those important decisions – or at least that was the assumption. Unfortunately, many organizations saw only moderate improvements. The same is true for contact center planning – the ultimate result was not the process improvement everyone expected, but rather just more data.

Efficient contact center planning really comes from engineered decision support systems. The next 10 years is sure to be known as the decision decade. There is the potential for improving the decision making process through the application of advanced analytic methodologies in the decision making process of the business.

This decision decade is likely to bring with it technologies that have the capacity to turn true insight into decision alternatives, while also quantifying the costs and benefits of each. With discrete-event simulation and optimization modeling, executives will be able to rely on real-world scenario analysis that focuses on both the operational and financial optimization of the organization.

With its early adoption of workforce management software, the contact center industry is already a leader in operational decision support. These tools allow for the right approach to contact center planning, allowing managers to improve operational efficiency by providing the best set of employee shifts given the operational constraints of the organization.

Ultimately, in contact center planning, the decision decade will embrace the idea of allowing managers to do more with less, meeting service goals with fewer employees, and actually hitting efficiency targets. With this level of success in the contact center, this approach to planning is sure to extend beyond this industry and enable success in other markets.

Edited by Jamie Epstein

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